Did any of my other California bunnies go to Lightning In A Bottle? →[More:]
Lightning in a Bottle is an unofficial SoCal regional Burn, held just outside Santa Barbara on the Live Oak Campground. (LAist did a nice wrap-up here.) Being a newly-minted Californian, I'd never been to LiB before, and my only prior experience with the regional Burns was at Firefly, my sorely-missed New England Burn (now coming up fast around July 4).

There's been a long-running conversation in the BM community about the role of the regional Burns vis-à-vis Burning Man itself. I've always felt that the regional Burns were nice micro-gatherings which offered a more intimate corollary to the main event without detracting from the importance of making the pilgrimage to BRC itself.

California, though, has changed everything. It's just as Burner-saturated as I was previously warned, but rather than undermine the intimacy and sense of community I felt in Boston, it's felt instead like an endless banquet of social options. Not a weekend goes by when a Burner-related event isn't taking place somewhere, whether public or private, close-knit or sprawling. And rather than feeling lost, exhausted, or disconnected by the scale of things here, instead I've felt buoyant and loved and secure. LiB is only the latest in a long string of events which have swallowed my social calendar wholesale, but it's also the one which convinced me that the regional Burns really are the future of the community.

Burning Man itself is like a giant, garish wedding cake: obscenely large, propped up with vast amounts of infrastructure, huge and imposing but nonetheless susceptible to the appetites of its attendants. It is also impossibly rigorous: the physical challenges are crucial to the event's philosophy, but they detract from the experience at the same time. Yes, it's admirable to live on protein bars and water and swim in six inches of fossil dust in 110-degree heat for over a week. It's also miserable to subject your car, clothes, costumes, instruments, and auxiliary possessions to the highly deleterious effects of the climate. There's nothing more incredible than staying up until sunrise amidst a playground of lasers, art cars, fire, costumes, sense-blunting music, and really fucking good drugs, but there's also nothing worse than waking up in the dry, skin-cracking desert heat like an LSD-blotted slab of beef jerky, feeling like you've been hit by every bus from Bakersfield to Reno.

Don't get me wrong. I love it. Virtually every second. (Except the bleeding feet. Which is agony.)

But LiB gave me every last thing I loved about Burning Man, plus trees and water and landscape and greenery and moist ground and fair temperatures. I met and played with beautiful people of every gender. Danced my tail off to some head-levitating music. Ran into beloved friends, attended workshops, ate grilled cheese sandwiches at life-saving hours, marvelled at art, performance, and human ingenuity, sat in a steambath with a raft of happy, slippery people, and (less fun) helped a campmate through a terrible "mystery-drug" experience.

Crucially, it also spat me back out into the Default World wanting more for myself and everyone I love. It made me get serious about implementing some dietary changes and recommitting myself to the physical arts. It connected me to people in nearby communities, expanding this beautiful sustaining circle of love and empathy to new people and new points along the Pacific Coast. I feel radiant, rooted, expansive, in thrall. I feel whole.

Will I go to Burning Man this year? Sure. (See the BM meetup thread on MeTa.) I've got my ticket in hand and my AutoSub dues outstanding. If I stayed home, I'd have an entire two weeks where my landscape would be as barren as the Playa itself, and I'd want to be out playing with my fellows under the Evil Day Star. Despite the magnificence of LiB, Black Rock is still a major staging ground for expression and connection. And although the ultimate idea is to live that expression every day of your life, it's still nice to have the Family Reunion once a year. Think of it as our Thanksgiving, without all the guilt and the suppressed cultural imperialism. But LiB really turned the tables for me from viewing the Regionals as mere accessories, to feeling that they're where all the real connection happens. It's your neck of the woods, surrounded by your true neighbors, generating energy and ideas and action that will affect your real, physical communities: the place to which you return after the remote madness of the Playa and say - for real - "Welcome home."