Wednesday morning we actually slept in somewhat, and eventually got ourselves up and had lunch at our dining hall. Josh went out to explore with Mark, while I hung around in camp. Eventually I decided to go out and meet up with Anjanette at Pink Heart, where she was volunteering to serve vegan chocolate ice cream. Josh and Mark came back because Josh had a work shift as a Temple Guardian, so Mark joined me and we biked over to Pink Heart. We had ourselves some ice cream (which makes me happy any time but was especially awesome to have in the middle of the dusty desert) and I got to meet Halcyon (the founder of Pink Heart and someone whose videos about Burning Man and his own Hug Nation project I'd enjoyed for months before getting to the playa) and give him a thank you hug for being so inspirational to me and for supporting my FYFFH Kickstarter project. Then Mark and Anjanette and I seized the opportunity to swing on the big Pink Heart swing we'd seen on our first trip to the Esplanade, and while we did so another dust storm kicked up, but we really didn't care. It was fun swinging in the dust. We took turns pushing each other and swinging, and taking pictures.

Then, despite the dust coming and going, we decided to keep going to go see another of the giant art projects that wasn't far away from where we were: Burn Wall Street. This was an incredibly powerful art piece, inspired by the past year's Occupy Wall Street movement. It consisted of 5 enormous (several stories tall in some cases) buildings that looked vaguely like banks and government buildings from the outside, but were hollow on the inside. The buildings were labeled things like "Bank of UnAmerica" and "Goldman Sucks". Inside, some of the buildings were painted with amazing murals, and some were left blank so that participants could nail up foreclosure notices, repossession notices, etc or write their own stories of their encounters with banks and other institutions directly on the wooden walls. There was one building in the middle with a balcony with giant greek columns backed by a huge American flag that you could climb up into/onto, which we did. There was also a tribalized version of a "trading bell" behind the flag that you could ring with a big hooked hammer.

As we wandered into one of the final buildings, we came upon a body paint artist who was painting a beautiful female angel with spread wings on a man's bare back, and stood around waiting to see if we could get some body paint too, but after standing around for awhile the dust kicked up again and we gave up on waiting for the painter and just sat around in a corner of one of the buildings waiting for it to clear. The dust blowing through the open building windows into the room where we were sitting had a beautiful, ethereal quality to it, because the dust glittered in the sunlight as it poured into the room. We chatted with a veteran burner who entertained us with stories of her various serendipitous up-and-down love affairs from previous burns, and then when the dust finally cleared we bid her adieu and set off back to SSV, because there was another kitchen shift coming up for Mark and Anjanette. Mark was actually taking my kitchen shift, so I could turn around and go to the Artists' Party at the Artery.

When we got back to camp I hooked up with Eileen, who wanted to come to the "Artery Partery" with me while everyone else went off to do their kitchen shift. I made a loose plan with Josh to meet him (and whoever else wanted to come) out at the Man after we were done, and then Eileen and I took off. We rode our bikes out to the Artery (which we found somewhat more easily this time) and spent a couple of hours mingling with other folks who had brought art installations to Burning Man. There was booze and snacks and they gave us all "official" stickers that said "I Brought My Art to Burning Man and All I Got Was This Lousy Sticker". I had a great time chatting with other artists and learning about their projects, and telling them about mine. I met a really cool guy named Wax who turned out to have a lot of random stuff in common with me and we talked for close to an hour. By then it was getting late and I wanted to go put the new batteries in my flags, which Eileen did with me, and then we parted ways--she went back to SSV and I headed out to the Man to hopefully meet up with Josh. It was later than I'd thought it was going to be, but I was hoping that Josh would still be there.

I looked around the Man base, but didn't see anyone I knew, so I parked myself in a side alcove and waited for awhile, enjoying the full moon peeking through the open windows and watching the endless parade of interesting people going by. Eventually I spotted Anjanette walking around, and she joined me, but although we waited for another hour or so, we never did see Josh or anyone else. We did, however, have some good conversation and we saw someone who had made themselves an amazing puppet suit of the Man wandering around outside the building and bending down to give people hugs. I wrote on one of the banisters some advice to myself (and others) that I wanted to burn into being:

STOP MAKING EXCUSES.
BE WHO YOU ARE.
YOU ARE AMAZING,
JUST AS YOU ARE.
SHINE.
BURN.
BE.

Eventually we got tired of waiting and decided to give up and go out and look at some of the large "regional" art pieces (sculpture installations put together by regional Burning Man groups, including our very own North Bay Regional). As often happens at Burning Man, though, we got a bit distracted from our original goal by other shiny, flaming things, and we never did get to see the regional pieces, but we saw plenty of other cool stuff. It's really hard to explain most of the art pieces, so I'll just let a few pictures speak their thousand words for me.

One memory of note, though, was when we were playing around with one of the art pieces, which had an intricate central cone tower in which you could hear random noises being projected by participants outside in little wooden basket cages, who were talking into tin cans attached to wires that ran to the central cone tower. We were trying out the tin cans in various cages when we became aware of a group of people in another one of the cages rocking the cage and pushing on it so hard that it was starting to crack and break. Immediately we and a bunch of other participants started yelling “hey, stop, you’re breaking the art!” and similar sentiments until the behavior stopped. It was instantaneous community policing. Sadly, it looked like these were not the only people who had (intentionally or not) damaged the cages, because many of them looked like they had broken slats. It made us sad. I hope the artist learned something about anticipating for and engineering around the carelessness of (some) Burning Man participants.

Eventually we found ourselves passing by the infamous flaming octopus art car (El Pulpo Mecanico), which we'd seen at a distance on previous evenings, but now it was stopped in one place doing a whole crazy mobile dance party, with huge rhythmic gouts of flame accompanying the music. It drew us in like moths; we stopped and danced there for awhile, which was really fun. At one point I turned to Anjanette and said "for the record, I just want to state that we are currently here in the middle of a blasted desert with hundreds of other people, dancing our asses off to a giant, flaming octopus. How often do you get to say that?" and we laughed and loved it in all its surreal and awesome absurdity. We finally rolled back in to camp sometime around 2 or so in the morning, and Josh wasn't there, though he'd left me a little note saying he'd tried to hook up with me and missed me, but had gone out again. So I went to bed, wafted off to sleep by the sounds of the ever-present thumping bass coming from the neighboring sound camps and prowling art cars.

[To Be Continued in Part 4...]

[To see more or full sized pictures, click here for the full set on Flickr]