squid gets pukey
Date Thursday, March 28, 2024 - 11:40 PM PST
Topic Experiences


This year's theme for Burning Man as far as this squid is concerned was not "Beyond Belief" but the value of friendship, of both the waking world and online varieties.


The story begins with KatB, my online friend turned friend in the flesh thanks to this vary website.  Last November, she went above and beyond a friend's obligations by introducing mee to the nightlife of two European cities in a very VIP way!  She even treated mee to round trip tickets to London!  In return I paid for her ticket to the event this year as well as provided her with a tent, some basic supplies and round-trip transportation from the Bay area.  It was this last feature went horribly horribly wrong.

I replied to an ad by  <­A HREF="The'>mailto:burningbus@yahoo.com">The Burning Bus<­/a> who agreed to pick both Kat (who they understood came all the way from Norway to attend the festival) and myself up from our place as well as return us there for the unreasonable price of $300 because of the details which prevented mee from shopping around.

I wrote Elinor Dye a cheque and delivered it to her house at 869 Hayes Street San Francisco, CA 94131 (which is a very nice house in Lower Haight at the corner of Hayes and Fillmore) at about 1 AM so I slipped the envolope containing the cheque, mapquest directions on how to get to my place, and 2 phone #s and an email address in the event of any possible dillemmas into the mail slot.

We did not her from "Nora" or the Burning Bus again (at least not until AFTER Burning Man, but that's another story).  I called her at (415)724-1268 and got only her voicemail with no rings, meaning her phone had been turned-off!  I spent all of Monday online trying to figure out how the hell to get to the festival as quickly as possible.

While online I spoke to several Shmenglings (I'm not naming names, yoo know who yoo are, and there are an awful lot of yoo) each of which recognised that I was not at the festival like I was supposed to be and an overwhelming amount of yoo offered us some kind of help, one of yoo even offered us a ride to the event if we could get out to Reno!

Thanks to <­a href="craigslist</a'>http://sf.craigslist.org/">craigslist<­/a> I finally arranged a ride that got us to the event at about 9 AM Wednesday morning (for much cheaper I might add).  My friends, thankfully always camp at the same spot every year and I quickly found their camp.  They had been expecting us to arrive Sunday night and of course they couldn't check the messages I left on their phones in the middle of the desert so they had gotten quite worried about us.  It seems on the way to the festival, they watched a couple of bodies get airlifted off the highway and after us not showing for three nights they began to wonder...

When I arrived at camp I was greeted with some of the warmest and tightest hugs, some of my friends with tears in their eyes.  I dont believe I've ever felt as loved by my friends as I did that day.  All of my best friends were present that day, one of whom I spent the Night of the Burn with and of course the level we connected on was a new level of profound for us both.

So this big squishy squid just wants to thank all my friends, especially all yoo online friends, for being there for mee!  I loves ya!  Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeewwwwwwwwww, grody!  I'm gonna go puke now!

-IamSquid



This article comes from Shmeng
http://www.shmeng.com/

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