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Universe,

I've just spent a momentous time in the heart of the Black Rock Playa.

Not only did I run naked under the sky, I danced upon the playa with the

wind, and my spirit. I bounced, I cried, I laughed, I ran about madly.

I saw strange and wondrous things of both pure beauty, cruelty, stupidity,

madness, and despair. I saw the human heart played like a fiddle beneath the

whited sky. I kid you not, brother and sister....the human mind can create

some wondrous events, and I saw some originals.

My shade structure was superior and well done. My acting was both comedic

and incendiary.

There is nothing to describe the playa. You can label it, but you can't

recreate it.

The playa wants to kill you. It wants to eat your heart. Not out of cruelty,

mind you, but out of vastness. Like the emptiness of space, the flatness and

dryness of the playa reaches into your soul to draw out your water. And, in

so doing, sparks acts of inspired lunacy.

Why does the world cry out against this frenzied parade? Why is it so

strange that people should comport so? Is it the idiocy of everyday life

made even more insane, but the presence of the dance on the playa?

This is all bullshit by the way.

Pulsing, strange music, a cacophony of the night. Banging of metal, the

screams and shouts of men and women, the hellacious pounding of flame or

machinery all contribute a soupcon of finesse, a tangy richness that drives

the mind forward.

All mankind is represented in some fashion by color of skin, or attitude of

the spirit. It's a multi-colored billowing of creativity, a mass streamer of

chaos controlled by desire to see something new and uncontrollable.

The desperate lives here as well. The tired, the hungry, the predator. They

all pass before the eyes in this strange place. Not only is the dark side

well represented on the playa, it plays here as well. We all dance to its

fiddle, only in the real world, we deny its existence. On the playa, the

dark side is not only my friend and ally, it's my taunter, and the source of

my hunger.

In the act of creation, we become like gods, the very purpose and beingness

of our souls confirmed by noise, and thunder, and the limitless horizon.

This is all bullshit by the way.....you should know that by now

Walk on the playa night and look around you in an arc far larger than your

mind is readily prepared to admit can exist. Along this glowing path are

myriad colors and lights bent into strange and unfamiliar shapes. It's a

lunar parade, a meeting of the stellar gnome squad, a flight of prehistoric

troglodytes....

Walking along the playa by the light of the Man, you are an existential ant,

a figment of your own imagination. Around you on this euclidian curve lies

the most fantastic assemblage of the bizarre allowed to take form anywhere

on the planet.

Small lights burst around you, building into shapes, machines and people.

The night air is alive with the sound and talk of the fantastic, the rude,

the sexual, the bold or impossible.

See men and women batter themselves to the brink of insensibility with foam

bats.....feel the anger, the sweat, the explosiveness of their attack, or

the suddeness of capitulation.

It's high drama, only you forgot to set your alarm clock and you're about to

wake up...

No MacDonalds on the playa, no one to protect you from your own acts of

heroic stupidity.

Women and men abound in all shapes, sizes and colors wearing an infinite

preponderance of clothes and fantastic shapes.

Of course, the mundane creeps in...the minutiae of living, the blowing scrap

of paper, the fart in the wind, the beggar who seeks drugs, or the SUV

driving asshole....they are all here, along with your own asshole and its

needs and wants...

Better take care of it, it's the only one you've got.

Dust storms can sweep up in a second, blinding you and filling your lungs

with heaviness.

The rain can pelt you while winds blow particles in your face.

The dust invades every nook and cranny of your body...while you party, your

essence leaches out to the playa, a being so enormous that your small drop

of water is nothing to it.

With each and every breath you take, you partake of the playa in your hair,

your groin, your hands, your mouth. The desert invades and takes you,

probing and testing for weakness. And on and on and on you play on the playa

There's time for madness, for comedy, for small particles of wisdom or gems

of friendship. There's time to look deeply into another's soul for such a

brief moment your life is illuminated.

There's time for men and women to run their acts like puppets on a stage of

mirrors.

You can find a safe space on the playa. There are plenty of people living

lives of normalcy veiled in madcap clothes, or strange hair pieces. Lots of

goggling eyes, and dropped mouths. Yet, in the openeness of the playa,

there's room to dance alone, to soar, to spin and jump.

Play and find your soul once again while the desert leeches away your acid.

Then watch the Man burn and be renewed.

Wretched excess is best....

Diode Tensegrity

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