After the weekend and the long goodbyes and the rain that promised to wash everything away but never showed up, Frank and I decided we were both going to write about the party. Practicality and a sublime sense of laziness dictated that neither of us could report on everything that happened. Here’s his; this is mine. And it will be sad and woefully inadequate, and through no small sense of false modesty — let’s face it, I am pretty awesome — but of necessity:

You can’t interview the thunderstorm, and you don’t blog about madness — you lock it up in a cave in the mountains or bash its skull against a rock canvas and call the mess beauty and truth, truth and beauty.

Which is cliché as balls, but also tenable, and made defensible by its own sheer enormity.

And all this, of course, is a pretentious way of saying I have no idea what the fuck happened this weekend, and neither do you, so to hell with it. But I do have a deadline to meet and several more projects to take care of, and Frank had already refused my first draft of this article earlier today, which was simply the words FUCKING FLAMETHROWER typed eleven-hundred times.

Because that was my weekend, or at least the memories of it that were bright and shiny enough to survive the purges of Laphroaig and bourbon; ultimately, there’s no amount of alcohol that’s going to make you forget firing an upright eight-foot long steel cock surrounded by a spiral of jagged rust, powered by propane and car batteries, and singularly designed to fuck the sky with fire.

And hopefully I’m not diminishing everything else that was going on in East Jesus, however non-phallic and not-on-fire they may have been. I’m sure it was fun … doing whatever the hell everyone else was doing. Playing music? Fondue? Sex pile? I honestly have no clue. Just keep in mind that this horseshit is written by someone whose first thought on seeing that inaugural pillar of fire was, I have been waiting all my life to die EXACTLY like this, and whose first words soon after were, “TAKE ME! I AM READY!” There was just too much going on everywhere for me to be anywhere else but that one spot in the middle of the art garden, and in those few button-presses’ worth of moments where I was surrounded by flame and walls of grace, I felt more at peace than I would have ever thought I deserved.

(EDIT — In retrospect, the raising of the twenty-five-foot long ship’s mast and crow’s nest, the fire twirlers by the Medicine Wagon, the mounting of a new installation atop the Tower of Barbarella, and the pinatas stuffed with fireworks and flares exploding in the wash delightfully and decidedly prove me wrong, viz. my above paragraph’s implication that the flamethrower stood alone this weekend in its fiery, phallic imagery. I can only hope that this explains those recurring dreams of giant, burning penises I’ve been having.)

If, for what is ostensibly a write-up of a party involving scores of people at the end of the season, this sounds overly personal, well I apologize but that’s kind of the bloody point, or at least one of the big selling points Frank tries to push on every poor soul he sees passing through the garden on slower days: the personal, if sacrilegious-sounding, relationship each dumb bastard cultivates with this OSHA-forsaken chunk of desert, with its barbed wire teeth and hair-trigger temper hotter than two rats fucking in a wool sock, in whatever time they have here. And time here moves strangely, ebbing around any attempt to keep track of it. But it passes still, whether or not we are aware of it in our tiniest slice of the end of the world, and the months and asymmetrical seasons rotate around each other in graceful acceptance of their own temporary mortality. It is nominally spring, but my god it’s a weak one, and will fall like a lamb to the summer long before we fully recover from the booze, the bands, the gypsies, the circus, the weasels, the pirates, the guns, the explosions in the sky and the goddamn flamethrower.

It was a hell of party, is what I’m saying.

And, hey, if we survive the summer, maybe we’ll have another one.

And then you try to fucking write about it.