Amazingly little, really.

As time allows, I'll be switching the font from cursive to
comic sans ms. I think it makes for a nicer look.

The Fred Cherry Story is complete, aside from a few font
changes and maybe a very small amount of decoration. "Small"
most likely will translate as "none", as I'm thoroughly tired
of the subject.

A small amount of Burning Man narrative will go up in the
near future, finishing the story. And the story is finished.
I'm tired of being the chronicler of the deeds of morons.
The only online forums I participate in are the ones run
by me, my family or friends, and those forums, by and large
are moderated ones, insuring that there will be very few
flamewars in the future that I'll need to tell my side of.
But the Burning Man one is a classic, with one of the
guilty parties actually having the nerve to complain
about my having counteracted his lies by documenting the
truth. It's the perfect note to close this story on.



But, what's next? Something better than this crap, to be
sure. African recipes, most likely, but mainly because I've
promised them and keeping my promises is a point of pride.
It ties in to the (now defunct) Café Satan theme camp concept.
Come to think of it, let me take that back a little bit. The
Café isn't defunct, it has merely been greatly rethought.
It's not going to be a Burning Man camp. Politics, obviously,
has been a problem, but it's more than that.

I guess (for me) the breaking point came at the last Burning
Man party I went to. The people were nice and they did some
creative stuff. Some. But a very telling moment came as somebody
laid out the haunted Labyrinth, putting some real effort into
it. Reasonably enough, he wanted some Halloween appropriate
music to go along with it, not a great shocker because this
was, after all, Halloween. The DJs refused, playing the
same exact material they would have played on any other day.

The designer was more than a little upset. This spoiled the
mood he was trying to create. The general reaction was the
he should chill out. Prudently, I kept quiet, and was able
to enjoy a good chunk of the evening. At least until I
conked out, because those people do party LATE.

The djs were nice people. The people backing them up were
nice people too. But, what ended up happening wasn't nice
at all. That's just how the Burning Man subculture works -
everybody running in his own prearranged direction, until
somebody clearly higher in the pecking order says "stop",
with the thought that they might do differently occurting
to very few of those involved. From the standpoint of
doing improvisational theatre, such a culture of aggressive
noncooperation is a disaster. People won't be able to work
together without being directed, and the piece will always
die before the audience's eyes.

I said that the Café wasn't quite defunct. Indeed, it isn't.
Burning Man didn't invent the arts, nor did it invent camping.
There's nothing keeping us, here in Chicago, from getting a
group of friends together, carpooling it out to the Dunes,
and making our own little minifest. It's not like being in
the middle of Nevada, but with something like 40 miles of
beach available, it's isolated enough for a group to be able
to be largely left alone. Nudity, fire and drugs will be
out of the question, but maybe that's a good thing. There's
an element which won't come because those things will be
missing, and it's an element we probably shouldn't want.

Group camping in the Dunes being the local tradition that
it is, getting something like that going shouldn't be hard.
Being left along won't be hard either, because when I do
get something like that going, I'll have enough sense to
not announce it online. "Then how do you plan on getting
it going, if you aren't going to let people know about
it" has been a common response to that remark in some
circles, and I have to laugh. How do these people imagine
that people met each other before the Internet was invented?
Chicago's a big place, with a lot of people, a lot going on,
and a wealth of offline publications to post anouncements
and articles in. The computer, if anything, gets in the
way, because it gets us used to staying at home, immobile
in front of the computer, instead of being out and meeting
people face to face.

Time to turn it off.



The recipes should start appearing in Midwinter. I hope
you'll enjoy them.