I Was Really There

Behold! It is I - & I am It. I am there (well, I was there) & look! I'm on the other side of the monitor now! It's that guy, & he's at Burning Man™ out there on that playa thing with his silly bike. Silly bikes don't get stolen, according to my theory. That's a kid's BMX bike I bought for Zerek in Santa Rosa California when he was like 10 years old. It came to Roswell with us. Zerek rode it here once maybe twice, had a dramatic encounter with a strand of barbed wire & a lot of goatheads/puncture weeds near the mall. Then it sat out in our 5 acre yard northeast of town for 10 years or so, through rain, snow, dust, wind & high levels of ultraviolet radiation.
The extended seat post is a chromed clothes pole for a store, that happened to fit into the right orifices. It hasn't failed yet, but it will, it's already starting to go, I'm still in denial.
The seat is from an old 3-speed from Bakersfield in the 50s. Really. It was my brother's bike that ended up being mine. The seat is still here & functioning, a little frayed around the edges but unbelievably still retaining its basic structural integrity. Weird. I mean, it's not as if plastics were better back then. Or were they? I don't think so.
That's my brand new Tilley™ hemp hat; my Toon Glasses - my own creation (I got the idea from Greg Duncan years ago); my necklace made from the stubs of Dixon Ticonderoga™ Number 2 pencils that I killed drawing Cherry Comics; & my cop swat team boots that I got online from Galls™.
Notice the fresh gash in the leg from a rebar tent stake that I had just pounded in.
This was probably not too long after I had returned from the Summer Of Love Camp & decided to dismount while the bike was still rolling & did so quite gracelessly in an awkward pirouette that concluded with my going right over into the dust on my left side, scuffing up my elbows & knees some & doing something to something in my upper chest which I took to be a pulled muscle. A week later, after returning home I realized that it was actually a cracked rib. A few days after that I figured out that it was the rib that I had already cracked while trying unsuccessfully the 1st time to install that big Signs Of Life sign at this location.

This is where I ended up, in Stag Camp.

Here's some but not all of the Stag Camp campers.







This was my gift. Well, one of them, anyway. It's a cut vinyl sticker about an inch & a half or 2 inches across. It's the Green Man, I say. It's the Corporate Green Man. It's ironic, 'cause it's vinyl & vinyl ain't green. Everybody who received one or more liked it/them, or seemed to at any rate.