Graffiti the Ghost

Internal combustion

Last night a friend of mine dropped some majorly intense-type shit on me, and I had to share it. Intense in a good way. We were enjoying a baseball game and talking about Burning Man, when my friend mentioned that this had been his most expensive Burning Man ever. Since I knew he had gone low-pro and low-budget this year, I axed why.

Let me back up for a second and say that said friend has recently gone through a really tough break-up. Six years with the same person, and then BAM (in a yucky way, not in a yummy Emeril way), right before Burning Man, everything suddenly goes sour and he's left with nada.

Back to the story at hand. This friend of mine had proposed to his (now-ex) girlfriend at the temple at Burning Man last year. This year, in the midst of the relationshit hitting the fan, he brought a little something along with him to the Temple. Something in a blue Tiffany's box, tied up with a white ribbon. He buried it in the playa dust inside the temple, and watched silently as the temple went up in flames.

That's why this was his most expensive Burning Man ever. Because he needed to burn a $3500 ring, for whatever feelings were burning inside him.

I told this story to my friend Pablo this morning and he said "that's stupid!" I disagree. I just can't help but admire the intensity of feeling and commitment to one's passion that would drive someone to follow through with something like that. Probably because I totally lack that intensity and passion most of the time. I'm just too practical, as I'm guessing a lot of us are. We might think of something like that, but then we think twice - "but it's so expensive, I could just return it." Sure you could. And that would be infinitely more practical. But love isn't practical. And the human heart, when it has lost a great love, is pretty much the polar opposite of practical. If that's what you're feeling inside, then sometimes the only way to express it and to even begin to work it out of your system is to do something completely impulsive and irrational.

I haven't done anything like that in a long, long time. I guess it's good to be even-keeled. But every once in a while, life demands that extremity of feeling, that intense burning. Maybe that's why we keep going back to Burning Man, to drum up some internal fire? But this post isn't about Burning Man per se. It's about internal combustion. If you compare the human heart with an internal combustion engine, it makes sense to light your problems on fire. You got pain? You got hurt? Pack it all in and heat it up. Shit starts moving around, pressure builds, things expand, and soon, propulsion. You're moving forward. Moving on. Living again.


P.S. If you're like me, right now you're thinking "shit, so somewhere out on the open playa, there's a Tiffany's engagement ring just sitting there?!" Probably not. The burning temperature of gold is about 1945 degrees (F), diamond is about 6900 degrees. An approximate temperature of the inside of a burning house is 1200 degrees. Practically speaking, once the box & ribbon burned, even if the ring managed to escape un-damaged by the heat, it would have been swept up with the rest of the ashes. But impractically speaking, the ring obviously burst into flame and escaped into the atmosphere as a dust angel.

posted by stefbot @ 12:12 PM