[For the casual or random reader, this is a series of journal entries from this year's Burning Man event in the Black Rock desert in Nevada. Prior entries can be found at their permanent home right here.]

It's Friday already. Only one day left until the man burns!

I get up before everybody else in camp and stroll over to my neighbors Gryff and Toddler's tent. They suggest to go get coffee and ice at Center Camp, and I'm grateful for the distraction from the inevitable drama that will unfold later - the search for the missing key.

Gryff has his mind set on doing a little drawing today, but he doesn't have any pencils. When I ask him how he is going to draw without pencils, he waves his hands in the air and says to me: "The playa will provide, darling. And so while slurping our super-hot coffees at the bustling Center Camp, we meet Ted, a teacher from San Francisco. We chat amicably for a bit, and upon leaving, Ted reaches into his backpack and gifts us - with pencils. Gryff turns to me, beaming. "See?" he says.

I'm thinking that this kind of magical and willful manifestation sure would be useful with the van key - but it is not to be. When I get back to camp, Aaron and I first tear the van, then the entire camp, completely apart. No key. A trip into Gerlach, the nearest town to Burning Man, to organize a locksmith seems inevitable. Sarah is stark-raving mad, and makes no attempt to hide her feelings. Luckily, there are several scheduled bus trips every day to Gerlach. Sarah and Aaron leave to first check the Lost and Found, then catch the bus, while I'm left back at camp with the task of putting everything back together.



It takes a while to organize things into their place again, but mounting winds and thickening dust make me not want to roam the city right now anyway. Bobalicious tells me that Monday, Thursday, and Friday are usually the worst days for dust, because that's when most people arrive with their vehicles in Black Rock City - the dedicated Burners on Monday, the weekenders on Thursday, the Frat-Boy-partiers on Friday. And since the city is down-wind from the entrance, all the dust that gets kicked up by the arriving vehicles blankets the city with dense, merciless white-outs.



I kick back with Sham, my perpetually drunken, but oh so awesome Canadian neighbor. He makes me a Rum-Coke and we hang out until the dust settles a bit, since there's nothing else much you can do in a dust storm but hunker down and chill. I remember now why I'm not in favor of any kind of alcohol or stimulants at Burning Man - the impact of everything you ingest here is roughly 10-fold of that in the Real World, and that Rum-Coke feels more like a half bottle of pure alcohol than an innocent little drink.

Gryff comes over to hang out, only a sheer leopard-print sarong slung around his waist. He's pretty wasted, proceeds to tell me that I need to drink more, and asks me if I want to go to some party with him and Toddler tonight. I gratefully decline - and he storms off, throwing his hands up in the air, yelling: "Oh, alrighty then. No fun on the playa for you!" I laugh. I'm so glad I met him. He cracks me up endlessly.



Little known fact about Burning Man: It has a vocabulary all its own. For example - it's a big no-no to drop *anything* (anything at all!) on the playa. Trash of any kind is considered "MOOP" or "Matter Out Of Place". You pick it up, even if it's not yours. "Glam" is the definition for all the fun stuff people decorate their camp, their wheels and themselves with. And "Glam MOOP" - we'll that's the stuff you find floating around on the playa that got "redistributed" by the wind. Since there is no way to find its rightful owner, it automatically becomes yours. Today, I find a ring that blinks in three colors. My first Glam MOOP!



After a while the wind dies down a bit, and I decide to venture out. A few blocks down the road is the Barbie Death Camp - a bizarre collection of hundreds of mostly naked Barbies, staged in a variety of morbid accident and death scenes. Actually, it's only morbid at first glance - clearly, this little art installation has been originated with a bit of tongue-in-cheek humor. I ask the creator - a guy in his mid-40s who could easily bear the label "aging hippie" and not be offended - why he chose to mastermind this little venture. He grins. "You want the truth - or the version I tell the media?" The truth, of course. "I ripped the idea off some TV show I once saw", he whispers. So what does he tell the media? "I tell them the same thing Larry (Harvey) tells them when they ask him why he started Burning Man - to get laid, man, to get laid," he grins. "I've been doing the Death Camp since 1997, but it's grown and gotten more elaborate every year ...now I just wish people would fucking stop sending me Barbies", he confesses. "I don't know where to go with them anymore."



As darkness falls on the city for a last night of frantic partying before Burn-Night, I venture out onto the playa with my camera. A large crowd has gathered around a gigantic wooden art piece called "The Machine". A random spectator tells me the builders were supposed to burn it, but someone "forgot" to put the burn-pad under the installation (fire damages the delicate playa surface - therefore all fire installations have to have burn-pads underneath them), and so they resolved to tear it down instead. But there seems to be a big problem - it doesn't want to come down.



Over the span of roughly one hour, and to the soundtrack of a howling, dust-laden wind that makes my eyes and lungs sting, I watch how a huge crane with ropes attached to the Machine tries to pull the structure down. A young kid is lingering around, seemingly looking for something. It turns out, he's lost his backpack, but he doesn't seem too terribly distressed about it. Instead, he decides to hang out and chat with me. He introduces himself as Rocky, a 4th-year Burner, and nut salesman from Livermoore, CA. We swap stories about the Burning Man experience, the nut business, and he tells me to look for "Nature Kissed" nuts on store shelves. After a while, as he leaves again, he warmly hugs me and invites me over to his camp for a drink later on.

So that, right there, is what I LOVE about Burning Man. Those random encounters. Always friendly. And always allowing an uncensored glimpse into someone's life. However short they may be, I rarely come away from a conversation not having gained
some sort of insight or morsel of knowledge I didn't have before. Everybody seems to be willing to share a small part of themselves and pass it along, be it sad, funny, serious, or just matter-of-factual, consciously or unconsciously.

The crowd is finally getting impatient, and eventually, cries bubble up. "Burn it! Burn it! Burn it!" chants the mob. A girl with a mega phone yells: "Burn the fucking machine down already! Burn it to the ground!" Approving laughter, clapping and hollering all around, but still, The Machine stays up. The stoic part of the crowd hangs around for the finale - and alas, after a few more approaches by the crane and more snapped ropes, the monumental structure suddenly comes crashing down with a thunderous roar. The audience erupts into cheer - and then quickly disburses into the neon night. After all - so much to do, so much to see, so little time ...



Day 6