I spent most of last week on my bike. Unfortunately, I did not cover the bike seat with any sort of soft or fuzzy or extra padded comfort layer, and so my butt got very sore. And after days of biking around in my underwear, my butt (like Chafer’s testicles) got totally rubbed raw. It was ugly. It looked like I’d paid a visit to Anal Rape Camp and taken home a lovely rash as a parting gift. Luckily, that look was very common at Burning Man, so I guess visits to ARC (and subsequent rashes) were quite in fashion.

Speaking of fashion, part of the grief of riding around Black Rock City on a bike is that your quite fabulous playa couture can be quite unfabulous when combined with moving metal parts. The butt cape I’m wearing in the photo to the right had a nasty run in with my bike chain, and the only way to get the cape out of the chain was to grab the part attached to my ass and yank. Hard. Naturally, this left a large frayed gash edged in bike lube and playa gunk, but realistically “frayed gash” is practically a Burning Man couture requirement, so nobody noticed or cared, least of all me.

I had a slightly more comical collision between fashion and function on the night of the burn, the same night that I defiled the DANCING QUEEN. Being inebriated as I was, I probably should not have been on a bike, but better that than toddling around on platform boots (or, heaven forbid, an art car), so a bike it was. I was wearing these ridiculous leg warmers, which were actually just Target pajamas cut off at the thigh, flipped upside down, and held up with sparkly garters (see photo at left for illustration of both the leg warmers and just how incredibly sloppily fucked up I got on Saturday night). These hijacked pajamas were a little loose around the ankle, and so as I wobbly pedaled to a “blue room” (ie porta potty), one of the leg warmers became quite intimately entangled with my bike pedal.

Luckily, I noticed this before it became so twisted that it caused me to fall off my bike, and so I stopped, held my bike between my thighs, and bent over to desperately try to untangle the leg warmer from the pedal. I say “desperately” because there was the added urgency of urine involved, and having already had one, er, situation that night, I didn’t need another.

It took some serious doing. The edge of the ‘warmer was wrapped thrice around the base of the pedal, and as I grunted and mumbled over the situation, my bike handlebars (weighed down by my leaking Camelbak) slipped to the left. I managed to keep the bike upright, but once I’d untangled my ‘warmer from the pedal, I realized that I was trapped, bent over, by my twisted handlebars. I couldn’t reach up to move them, because my arms don’t bend backwards. I couldn’t sit up to shift the weight, because the handlebars were where I would go if I were to be vertical. It was a logistical nightmare, and one my addled brain was absolutely unequipped to cope with.

Some people in a golf cart nearby marvelled at the situation, and all I could say was, “Oh goodness. So this is what happens when you try to look too fabulous while needing to be so functional.”

In reality, looking at the photos and recounting the stories, I’m not sure how fabulous OR functional I was, but hey: I had a fucking blast, so who cares.