There are some memories that are so close and dear, memories of a night with distant but familiar neon beckoning like a candle under the stars, a fire to light the way home and a pile of t.p. in front of my TP. Memories of the way a temporary space becomes a home with associations and meanings. For instance, the front door of my TP had the top cut in a funny pattern because it matched the view I had of the mountains from inside. I liked the way it looked. I liked the frame.
The morning after the storm and feeling restless. Missing our wives even more, Chris and me, I had an inspirational thought. See, I'd brought plenty of water in the back of my truck, two 50 gallon containers even, but the big problem I was having with washing dishes, bathing and such was that this year BLM decreed you couldn't dump your greywater on the lake bed anymore, and thus a restriction to how much water you could use by how fast it evaporates from a holding pan. I'd come prepared with a drill pump and a spare barrell and thus didn't really mind, but there had arisen an issue about the portapotties, which was this: because greywater disposal had become a problem, many used wet-wipes to clean themselves and then dropped the wet wipes in the porta potties. This excessive dry matter caused an imbalance in the composition of the slurry which the pumpers were not designed for and the previous day, a hose had burst. At burning man, the radio is the main communication throughout the camp and since I'm addicted to radio anyway, and since I had a solar power radio running constantly, I heard all about it, just like I'd known all about the coming storm before it hit. The story was that the septic pumper had been injured by the bursting hose, with shrapnel from the exploding connection wounding him, breaking the skin and RAW SEWAGE PUMPED AT PRESSURE jet-injected into his very BODY. Shudder. The radio had been bleating this information about every half hour for a while, with warnings to stop putting wet wipes in the porta potties. "People! There is a man barely clinging to life right now at Washoe County General Hospital! Stop putting wet wipes in the porta potties!" Needless to say, this caught my attention and my disdain. Damn hippies screwin' up the system (as usual) and causing pain to the working man. Furthermore, while the technical issues were being analyzed and discussed on high, the porta potties were not getting serviced. From my front porch, I'd watch person after person approach a plastic door, glance inside, and then look in the next, and the next, and the next, then stand in line for one of the few remaining toilets that were halfway decent and still had toilet paper. Suddenly the view from my TP became centered around the human issue of t.p. This dilemma held a peculiar poignancy to me because when I initially proposed the Iconoclastic TP to the Burning man art committee, I made the self-sufficiency of the structure it's chief purpose. I'd included a composting toilet - which the reply back to me expressed a certain revulsive reaction that you get when you talk the infrastructure of life with people. And here it was, the issue I'd debated displayed before me in all its richness and odeur. So I came up with a solution. I'd come to the rescue of those poor working class shlubs, forced to drive three hours from Reno just to pump the shit of uncaring hippies. I'd add some greywater to the dry mounds of wetwipes and darkmatter, piling up to the seat inexorably because it just couldn't be pumped. duh. Any idiot with half a brain informed by the physics of fluid dynamics could see what the problem was, and all this greywater sloshing around in evaporative pans could find a more useful purpose in life. To my thinking, it made as much sense as picking up roadside litter and using it to fix the handlebars on your motorcycle. A two-fer. A slam dunk to a guy with his thinking in the Quality clouds, but somehow missing from the society at large. But wait. I thought THIS society was supposed to be different? I mean the whole shtick of the BM purpose was Iconoclastic Creativity. Finding solutions for ourselves apart from socially imposed patterns from above, laissez-faire about caring. If you don't bring your shoes, your feet melt. Its up to us individually. So I broke the rules. It is moral to break rules when you are following DQ. I did it surreptitiously enough. Just took a gallon drinking water container in with me full, and out with me empty. Doubtful anybody'd notice. Well... evidently somebody did. Or maybe it was just happenstance or perhaps the result of cosmic forces beyond knowing. Who cares. The empirical fact is that about half an hour after my solution to my own AND society's problems a beat-up station wagon with rolls of toilet paper in the back, huge hulking bullhorns on top and a mean-sounding middle-aged harridan at the wheel pulled up right in front of MY TP and started blaring, very, very loudly, the recited shwill I'd been hearing on the radio for the last couple days AND from afar and near from this very crap wagon right before me. I was actually quite amused by the intensity of the ugliness on display before me. I mean, is that actually an AMC Rambler wagon? Looks like a '70 or maybe '74. I don't know. There was a period there where American auto makers seemed intent upon producing the ugliest design conceivable by the mind of man and the '74 Rambler Wagon was definitely the apothesis of that effort. And this one was real dirty and banged up besides. And the woman driving it... well, her fashion sense was consistent with her role, I guess. She was of a piece - haranguing schoolteacher baglady with NO sense of humor in evidence. I sat on my porch and smugly observed her haranguing the populace and waited for a pause in her schpiel so I could perhaps enlighten her to a better way of doing things. I asked, stating all my credentials as a General Contractor Licensed to do business in the state of Californ-I-A, a pointed enquiry about the usefullness of using greywater to dilute the heaped up dry matter, etc. Her mean eyes narrowed as she considered my idea for about .37 of a second and she barked. "NO! What we need is a volunteer to get these signs posted on these shitters and I guess I just found my volunteer." egad. This was not my plan. It was hot in the sun outside my well-insulated dwelling. This was a big job and I had a feeling she would not be a pleasant taskmaster. Events proved me right in this assessment. She was very, very picky. Truth is, she had a point. Desert winds, desert sun make normal sign-posting an irrelevant activity but still, she really went to extremes. First, she explained the process from beginning to end. I mean from beginning... How to find the beginning part on a roll of duct tape, how to pull the duct tape, how to figure out how much duct tape to pull, how to tear it off, how to apply it so that there are NO I mean not ONE wrinkle because the sun works hard on the wrinkles and the wind catches at them... I mean, if I suggest the idea that perhaps this woman seemed a tad anal, would that be a redundant observation? While I'm standing there in the hot sun, being told how to do the most elementary things in life as if *I* was a stupid trust-fund, pot-growing hippy who had never actually performed a single task in my life, I maintained a pleasant demeanor. The thing is, the BM people do have the authority to assign community service at the risk of banishment at any time. I was paying for my sin - I got caught. I was trying to take it well. She hooked other volunteers out of the crowds and started handing out signs to be posted on EVERY single crapper. Furthermore, it had to be centered - EXACTLY. This was seeming more and more like the kind of busywork that teachers hand out as punishment. But ok, I'll buy. She had about 10 differing signs to be distributed amongst the 30 green boxes and the one she plunked in my hands, without looking at it, said DO NOT DUMP GREYWATER IN PORTA-POTTIES. Well that was an intriguing coincidence, but an even more intriguing one was when she led me straight to the exact cubicle I'd used and told me to put my sign on THAT one, sort of as a first demonstration she could critique. Now I was convinced she must have had some spy report to her or something, but if so, it was an amazingly thought-out system to be so surreptitious and yet accurate. Whichever it was, the powers-that-be now had my attention. I became more task focussed than normal and truth is, I really do know how to set something centered and square and I've been doing stuff like this far longer than it seems to an outsider. I did a good job. She looked at it and me and she said to the whole group, "This is the first time I've ever seen anybody do that exactly right. And so fast too! Good job." So now we had a system and an assembly line going and we got the whole thing done very quickly, with good feelings. I felt sorry for her for the normal interaction with idiots that she obviously suffered. And I saw, near the end of our task, the peeking of a mischevious sense of humour that came out when we got to the third from the end - it already had a sign on it. An "out of order" sign. A sign that puzzled her for a second as she jerked the door open and there was note taped to the wall inside that said: "I know what you are doing asshole! It's pigs like you that consider the world's resources a personal gift." Suddenly it occured to me that here was a superbly crafted bit of social engineering. Put an out of order sign on a crapper and you don't have unclean conditions or lack of toilet paper in the night. Our harridan forewoman cracked a smile and said sincerely, "I'm tempted to leave it on." It was truly a piece of art. We actually debated it as such. In fact, I remember now that we had an interesting debate about the meaning of art. A debate she triggered with her observation to us that these green plastic cubicles were actually the most interesting sculptures on the Playa. She must have read ZAMM to think of shitters as sculptures. I liked this woman. But though she wavered, she took it down. Duty to service comes before our individual whims. Even at gatherings of anarchistic iconoclasms. After we were done, I invited her to inspect my TP. She introduced herself for the first time as RobbyDobb. I made a connection then with the one person responsible for the sanitation needs of our whole city. I'd been hearing her and her name on the radio constantly... it was always Robby Dobb says this, Robby Dobb says that. She was more than a flunky, the woman was monumental, institutional. I had her in my dwelling, admiring it and me. What a pleasant feeling. She asked if it had been nice to have in the dust storms and I said yes and she said she could imagine it being a very good place to be. Then she asked if Chris and I would be willing to take on the task of making sure that there was enough toilet paper for the night of the burn. We were pleased to have a useful task to perform and toilet paper had at that time an aura of value that comes from scarcity. So it felt like great wealth to have piles of t.p. to last us through the burning of the man, to hand out to "our" charges. Feeling an accepted part of the whirling stream, with our own task in the great outer circles far away from the center of attention. We looked forward to the next day when the man would burn. I wasn't looking forward to the day after when I had to take everything down and load up. I was looking forward to seeing my wife again. 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