Sent Home

Sent Home

I’ve always been intrigued by Burning Man. I have never gone nor do I ever expect to go, but I am nonetheless fascinated by the annual gathering. I’m not sure I ever really bothered to understand what Burning Man is all about, other than walking around the desert naked and getting a sunburn. So I looked it up and it seems there are ten guiding principles:

• Radical inclusion – all are welcome

• Gifting – unconditional giving

• Decommodification – think Bernie Sanders and pumped up entitlements

• Radical Self-reliance – who me?

• Radical self-expression – who you?

• Communal effort – creative cooperation

• Civic responsibility – gather responsibly – very COVID-19 friendly

• Leave no trace – who was that masked man? High’O Silver!

• Participation – being through doing. Doing to do. Being to be.

• Immediacy – I want it now. Not tomorrow….NOW!

I am trying to make sense of all this and I feel like I can relate to a lot of these founding principles even though I can just barely figure out how they relate to one another. Imagine a naked and unknown Swede walking up to you in the desert introducing himself with eloquence, offering to help you build your art exhibit and giving you a great suggestion and then after making it happen, slipping away unnoticed, leaving you to finish and bask in your installation’s enhanced beauty. That was Burning Man himself.

At this time, while Burning Man is fully acknowledging and respecting the Coronavirus and its right to exist, it does not anticipate any disruption of its Labor Day week event. They seem convinced that time and seasonality will put an end to the bug and the bug will not darken Burning Man’s ass.

Meanwhile, at dinner last night, my son Roger, who is a serious events guy, expressed the view that the event to watch on the Coronavirus front is Coachella. I had actually heard of Coachella like I’ve heard of Firefly (a live concert gathering my sons go to most years). He had the view that as goes Coachella, so goes the psyche of Millennials. He feels it will drive home the care of this crisis to the young influencers of his generation. So, guess what happened today? Yep, Coachella got postponed for six months, so-called it a half-cancellation. Even though the organizers made it sound like they were doing the right thing for the safety of their attendees, the truth seemed to be that the Riverside County health commissioner put the Kibosh on large event gatherings for the immediate future. I’m sure SXSW cancelling yesterday set the tone. Next up on the hit parade are Lollapalooza, Governor’s Ball, Pitchfork, Summerfest and Firefly.

The cancellation of festivals, conventions, sporting events (my daughter’s Half Marathon this weekend was cancelled) and all manner of gathering that causes people to get together and share germs is becoming an every day event. The world is trying very hard to take Coronavirus seriously, almost like a contrarian reaction to the Trump Administration’s casual, mismanaged and incompetent handling of the epidemiological crisis. I noticed my inbox was full of emails from each and every travel and event purveyor that has me in their mailing list. They are mostly showing their clients that they are taking this all very seriously and putting the health and welfare of their clientele above their thirst for revenue and profits. I took note of the email from the CEO of National Geographic. I bought one trip from them about 6-7 years ago and while I had to cancel for work, my wife, her sister her brother and his wife all went on safari to South Africa and had a fantastic trip. I am also a subscriber to their yellow-bordered monthly adventure/ecological/world culture/scientific magazine.

National Geographic is as trusted a brand as I can imagine. Whatever National Geographic tells me, I inherently believe,. I also believe they sent that email for my peace of mind and not to sell me my next trip. But let’s be honest, even National Geographic needs to make a buck and they hope we will think more fondly of them the next time I venture into the scarier world of global adventure travel. I’m not sure I will draw a direct cause/effect relationship to that email if and when I book a trip with them, but I understand what they are doing. Their scientific background alone says that they should be one of the voices we hear from at a time like this.

So, as I ponder the event and travel future from a commercial and personal perspective, I went into my big meeting today just when I got an email and a call notifying me that my trip to London planned for tomorrow has suddenly been cancelled. Boom! Here I am, staged in New York and ready to fly out, but the opposing expert I am supposed to meet with has decided that taking a commuter train into London from his suburb is too dangerous. We weren’t even planning a keg-stand for Pete’s sake. But either he (he is Ph. D. Physicist and mathematician who undoubtedly has done the epidemiological math of the exponential spread of this nasty virus) is wary of the London crowds or having studied my 130-page rebuttal report, has decided that I am far too scary to go up against in person. So, he has requested a change to a videoconference call and I no longer have to fly seven hours, take the Heathrow Express after a quick shower at the Delta Arrivals Lounge, meet in the City of London for seven hours and then sleep three nights at the Leonardo St. Paul’s Hotel in central London, only to fly eight hours back to New York, overnight at the TWA Flight Wing One Hotel at JFK and get on the Jet Blue flight to SanDiego for five hours. Instead, I will just fly home and sit in my study in front of my computer camera for seven hours on Thursday.

All of this is so this other expert and I can argue about whether a Monaco Hedge Fund was prudent in managing a pile of money for an Asian Billionaire’s risk-prone son in an ill-fated investment program for 58 days where 0.9% of the funds were lost in one bad trade. I think when I put it that way, it’s probably wise to let COVID-19 scare us off. So, this microscopic virus has sent me home and given the foregone wear and tear to my body, I’m not too upset about it all. I wonder if Burning Man will feel the same if he gets cancelled out? I just hope a Westward jet lag will leave me fresher for the fight than the Eastward jet lag would have.