geekster wrote:What the hell do you all want, bleachers so you can all perform your spectating ritual in perfect safety? If you are telling someone to sit down, you are asking someone to facillitate your being a spectator. Instead of telling someone to sit down, I have a different suggestion ... move back.
Nobody said anything about bleachers. I agree with regard to sitting down or yelling at people to sit down. (I find some cranky, washed-up hippie screeching "down in front" as annoying as the people standing in front.) I'm talking about why there's at least five rows of people who DO sit down, and why it's the rational thing to do.
I'm launching preemptive disagreement about the candy-eyed raver notion of "just letting people do what they do" because first-time burners might not know any better about a lot of things. Like, say, getting hurt or burned up or falling off the back of a moving art car because apparently they haven't figured out that there really -are- no safety belts; like, if you get too close to the fire some arrogant, selfish fucktards might accidentally push you in because they're too wrapped up in their own experience to consider anybody but themselves.
I should be able to bring all my guns to blast clay pigeons or propane tanks or speeding art cars on the esplanade. Pilots should be allowed to buzz Black Rock City but, they don't because 30,000 people are too goddam clueless to stay out of their way...
I should be able to dump my trash in the shitter, 'cause I paid my ticket, right? Who the fuck are these other burners to tell other people what to do?
Gee whiz. All these rules... people should stop trying to facilitate my specatorship, maaaan.
Speaking of spectatorship, my friends and I hauled a truckload of lumber and construction supplies, several hundred gallons of water and a PA system just to build an interactive viewing structure and root beer saloon in the middle of a fucking dust storm, and then spent many afternoons making and serving sixteen kegs of rootbeer to anybody who wandered in. We also built a walled shower for public use and, all the while, maintained Earth Guardian camp standards through all of it because we were on the LNT theme camp tours. One guy in our camp then played piano for another camp until his fingers literally bled.
Most of our camp were playa virgins. It would not be appropriate to refer to me or anybody in the Zaphod camp as "spectators."
-c
