Sick of the Burning Man talk? Give me another week and it’ll have died back down to our usual discussion of silliness around these parts. For now, read this article: One More Vital Pagan Orgy / Sex, drugs and glow sticks: Our columnist survives yet another Burning Man, perspective intact

And you’d think this lack of rules, this lawless inebriant-fueled glitter bomb of an event, would result in this teeming screaming free-for-all, this haphazard mess, nothing but violence and mayhem and rape and sodomy and hey you jerk quit grabbing my ass.

When in fact you might be amazed at how civilized and generous and open and friendly most people can be in such circumstances, how relaxed and smiling and accessible, with the notable exception of the camp that played very loud and very mediocre techno 24 hours a day, nonstop, right next door to my camp, and we nicknamed you Annoying Music Camp and you were unfathomably obnoxious and I wish you ill.

I agree with almost every word, including these:

And it was my third year at the famed alt-everything festival, and despite the same old hot pants on thousands of semi-naked women, the same old random dust-choked large-scale mega-art, the same old countless REI tents and parachute domes and odd playa mobiles and mutated trucks and funky signs and clever camp names and huge thumping sound systems and what must be a million bucks’ worth of glow sticks, it just didn’t quite have the magical zing, the flavor, the electric transformational punch it once did.

But of course, that’s just me. It happens. Because Burning Man is just exactly as much or as little as you need it to be. It is exactly the experience you make it, and as any seeker of intense transformational pops will tell you, if you aren’t craving a step outside your normal reality, or if you aren’t really needing a sticky injection of semi-radical, liminal vision questing at that particular moment in your life, Burning Man might not yank you the right way.