Today in vacation photos you didn't ask for:

Huh? What? Yes I'm still here. Sorry, I was gone for a week, but I'm back now. Well, I'm not sorry I was gone, but-wait, no, actually I am kind of sorry because it was brutal.

Turns out that an arid desert isn't maybe the best vacation spot?

Above: Baaahs. It's an art car designed
to look like a sheep for reasons we're
not allowed to know. 

Where? Uh, fine, but don't judge me, ok? Burning Man. Yes. Again. I know. But everyone's got their thing. Some people play sports, other people, I don't know, raise children. I and a few friends go hang out with people on drugs in an inhospitable environment, unable to sleep because every four minutes or so, a bus made up to look like a pirate ship or a polygonal sheep drives by thumping base at a frequency so low that it's still reverberating in my molars hours later. And the heat. Sweet mother of Willian Thompson, 1st Baron Kelvin, the heat.

Anywhere else it would be weird to spray
strangers in the street, but here we are.

I know that we knew what we were getting ourselves into by going to a dry lake bed in Nevada in the worst part of the summer during a climate crisis centuries in the making, but hot. So hot. I've been nearly a dozen times now, and it's certainly been hotter on one or two days, but this was a constant, unyielding heat that hung on until well after dark. Days were useless and I spent most of them in a folding camp chair, misting myself with a hardware store garden sprayer and remarking on how death might be preferable. It kind of helped, but not much.

Pictured: most of what we
were looking at all week. 

The sprayer I mean, although the complaining was therapeutic as well. The downside though was that the water mixed with the alkaline dust to form an ever-present, desiccating layer of mud on all exposed surfaces. And this dust was everywhere. The winds were something of a mixed blessing as while the breeze was nice, it usually carried with it the dust which, in particularly dense moments reduced visibility so that you only could only navigate by electronic house music. 

"You people understand that we serve
coffee, right? Hot coffee? Ok..."

-us

It wasn't all bad. I mean, I got to see some friends I only see once a year. We have a theme camp, which is a kind of camp where you offer something to attendees. In our case coffee. Piping hot coffee. In the middle of a dry desert in unseasonably warm weather. That part didn't go too well. It's a good thing Burning Man rejects commerce and monetization because this would have been a disastrous business if we'd had to charge people. I mean, some people showed up. We made some new friends. We mostly sat around commiserating about how it was too hot to do anything, but still, new friends. 

As I write this, I'm home and recovering. The heat was--huh? I know, I'm talking about it a lot, but you did keep reading after I said I was going to talk about my vacation so this is on you--anyway, the heat takes a lot out of you so since I've been back I've been sleeping, eating, and showering the dust off. And I know there are plenty of good reasons to actively try and course correct our species' carbon impact. Rising seas, extinctions, not leaving our children a dry-burnt out husk of a planet. But if you needed one more, it's really screwing up my yearly excursion to go be weird in the desert for a week. 

If you won't do it for the children, then do
it for the weirdos who act like children.