A Celebration of Flames

There's a book, an essay, that's come my way. It was purchased for me so I feel obligated to read it. The translation is terrible, full of spelling errors and typos. Some passages are so poorly translated that they are unreadable. To overcome this I constantly have to reinvent the text as I read it, adding or removing words, trying to imagine what the author meant in his native language without the appropriate historical or cultural contextual clues. It is a challenge. Still, it's an interesting read. Citing the absurdity of life and of living, it tries to interrogate the question of suicide. We all know we are to die, right, a truth as clear as water, so why do we endure the anguish, uncertainty and waiting? Because I'm only at the beginning of the piece I am still unsure whether this is a literal suicide or a philosophical one. All will be revealed I suppose. In the meantime I'll have to endure these dense pages full of sticky sentences and amorphous references.

Tomorrow a friend arrives from Canada. I will need to pick her up at the airport at midnight, after I've turned into a pumpkin. We'll need to run last minute errands on Saturday, get the gang back together and make our way to Black Rock City. It's that time again. Tens of thousands of us will descend upon the desert like swarming scarabs, to debase ourselves for a week. Dancing, drinking, drugging, hugging; searching, finding, losing, loving; burning. The profound symbolism of the flame needn't be remarked upon by me. Everything I could say about the thing has already been said, and by men more learned and more eloquent than I am. It is fun though, to travel to that place and stand at the crossroads between eternity and ephemerality, where the distinction between the sacred and the profane dissolves and we are all absolved by fire. Flames don't discriminate. To fire, everything is fuel just waiting to be burned.