I meant to write about it last week, but I never got to it. I saw something then, unexpectedly, that filed me with a bittersweet joy. A harbinger from a summer long ago, never to return perhaps. A lone bear cub found after the forest fire has passed.

And what the hell am I talking about in such hyper-dramatic terms?

A dusty truck.

The other day while driving home from my work in Beaverton, as I sat in the same traffic I'd been sitting in all hour, all week; as I made the same left turn on to Sandy blvd., I saw a truck covered in fine gray dust, bicycles, equipment and tarps strapped in cacophonic stoichiometry to it's roof and back door, floating serenely down the opposing lane, a ship of Jodes expelled from a dusty moon. Returning Participants from the Burning Man.

The Burning Man festival, though it has been years now since I have been, always marks for me the end of the year. Participation in it's revelries, fraternities and ceremonies was a time of gathering for my friends and myself, and also a time of reckoning, forgiving, and even forgetting. A time of death and renewal. Don't make fun of me, I'm serious. I've stood and watched there entire histories burned to make way for the new, and I've thrown a few into the dancing, maddening fire myself. All this and giant, three-story high rubber duck casinos, pirate ships and beer laden rhinoceros patrols as well. That sentence doesn't even make sense, but it was there.

So right now, in the spirit of reunion, I want to make sure I give a shout out to all my fellow burners, all my kith who walk at my side, who have passed out free beer with me from the back of a rocket, who have seen the dawn rise from the center of a maze of twisty passages, all alike, who have witnessed lightning strike a man a hundred times, eaten cheese sandwiches with me served in a kaleidoscopic porn den, waited in long lines with me for our daily ice, danced with me as giant insects and their overlords roamed through our camp at the end of a blinding dust storm, when our DJ was the last man standing and the first man back up, when we saluted the Space Cowboys, when we danced in leering shadows around the giant, burning try-works of the man. Savages all, humans all, brothers all!

As they narrated to each other their unholy adventures, their tales of terror told in words of mirth; as their uncivilized laughter forked upwards out of them, like the flames from the furnace... the rushing Pequod, freighted with savages, and laden with fire, and burning a corpse, and plunging into that blackness of darkness, seemed the material counterpart of her monomaniac commander's soul.