So on the 2nd of July my odometer ticked over to 40.

I celebrated this elegantly divisible year with my dad and a revolving group of friends at the Forbidden Island Tiki bar in Alameda. FI is not nearly the place I fell in love with a few years ago, the atmosphere, quality, and clientele have shifted a bit away from what it once was. But such is life and it is still a place I enjoy going and spending some occasional time getting pleasantly inebriated with cool people. Fun was had as well as large drinks with umbrellas and fruit, and thanks to some conspiracy between a certain sweet someone, her mother, and my friends and family there was probably as much cake mass as there was people mass! Including, it is important to note, a Princess Cake which has always been a favorite of mine… because I am a pretty princess… wanna fight?

Sometime after midnight, possibly closer to 1 am, we loaded up and drove up to the black rock desert arriving shortly after sunrise. Passing by the now defunct town of Empire was rather weird and I was a little sad the store wasn’t open yet as I would have liked to have bought a couple sodas and a can of baked beans for old times sake. They are meant to stay open through this next burning man so there is an offhand chance I might be able to.

Man I am nostalgia’s bitch sometimes…

The drive out to the playa itself was beautiful with the sun rising and painting the mountains a gorgeous orange. It was very odd to see the terrain so green… and to see so much wet still on the playa. It was also quite odd to see how much insect life the place has just a month earlier (including some little bastard that bit my hand). It makes me want to visit a few other times in the year to see what the place is like.

So Duane set up a quick improvised shelter (that as usual proved to be more or less invulnerable to the elements) and we settled into the pure suckiness that is daytime in the desert.  Hot, windy, dust, all the fun that Burning Man had to offer… but without anything interesting going on and the addition of bugs!

4th of Juplaya is less of a cohesive event as it is a bunch of crazy people spread over a really quite startling amount of desert. The vibe (with some exceptions evident) is very much “this is our party here, have fun with yours.” which I was half expecting but did make daytime boring as hell. I would not want to go again with as small a group, but it could be fun with 10 or 20 people. We had a good time doing some wandering on the night of the 3d, there were some fireworks, a really quite impressive display of laser, a few art cars in the distance, then sleep.

The 4th was very strange in that about 80% of the place packed up and left. We hung around till nightfall, packed up, watched some of the remaining camps set off fireworks and set off our own… then packed up and headed home that night, arriving again just as the sun was rising. An odd experience but well worth the time and effort.

so 40…

Feels a lot like 39…

I keep thinking I should get around to having a midlife crisis. I have a young girlfriend, that’s a good start. Sadly I can’t afford a red sports-car, and if I could I would rather it were a nice deep blue… but then as I plan to live to 100 I guess I have a decade to get around to it. We can check back in 2021.