Commercially available What’s_six_times_four? was distilled under reduced pressure at 175 oC, affording a light yellow oil.

To a magnetically stirred solution of 24-rightyo aldehyde (1 mmol) and you_lie methyl ketone (1 mmol) in DCM (10 mL) was added input alcohol (1 mmol) and two drops of concentrated sulfuric acid. The resulting mixture was heated under refluxing conditions for 0.5 h, concentrated under reduced pressure, and the residue thus obtained was subjected to flash chromatography (silica, ethyl acetate). Concentration of the fraction eluting at Rf = 0.9 resulted in a pale-yellow oil.

You can follow the design (currently a disorganised smattering of thoughts) over at the RBF github repository.

Relaxedness with appearance

At Burning Man, as the week progressed, I began to care less about my appearance. Actually, that’s not quite right. I cared less about what others thought of my appearance. Normally I’m very self-conscious about this, so this was a big change for me.

At Burning Man, there is always someone crazier, more naked (can you be more naked than naked?), more out there than you are. It’s implicitly okay to experiment. It’s fine to wander around in your PJs in the morning (or at any other time, for that matter). More than just being okay, I would have felt out of place if I hadn’t pushed my boundaries a bit. The norm, the average is much further out along the do-crazy-stuff continuum than the default world, and living in that environment was quietly liberating.

By the end of the week, I wanted to get rid of most of my default world wardrobe (it’s so grey and boring!). As I travelled back to San Francisco, even dressed in default world clothes, I gradually began to feel more and more out of place. We stopped at a rest stop, and I was reminded by the mirror that my hair was full of playa dust and that I hadn’t shaved in a week. I felt out of place amongst the other people there. I’m trying to pin down what it was about those people at the rest-stop that made me feel out of place. It wasn’t that they were clean; there were clean people on the playa (fresh from a shower), and I didn’t feel unclean for their cleanliness. It wasn’t that they were well-presented; there were plenty of people in amazing outfits and I didn’t feel inadequate (perhaps inspired). Maybe it was something like conformity, an implicitly agreed-upon set of boundaries for what was okay to wear, do, look like. An implicit agreement to not stand out too much, to blend in and not attract attention. This is the sea we swim in normally, and don’t notice because we can’t see it until it’s gone.

Nudity

It’s no secret that there’s lots of nudity at burning man. What was new for me, not having spent much (or indeed any) time on nudist beaches, was being in an environment where nudity is not a big deal. In comparison, regular society is comically uptight about this stuff.

As well as physical nudity, I found the environment at Burning Man very authentic. I only noticed this when I returned home and found several things in my life feeling artificial and fake.

Community

At Burning Man, I felt like I always had something in common with the people around me. I’m learning to be more open to starting conversations with strangers, and I could have used a good three months in an environment like that to really sink into it and open up more. Friendliness was the default, but it was more open-hearted than regular everyday friendliness. Hugs, compliments, gifts, hugs, cooking meals for people, conversations about important stuff, hugs. In essence, I found the people there to be very openly loving. There are people and whole groups of friends in my regular life who are like this, and I’d love to expand their part in my life. Being surrounded by so many awesome people for a solid week was pretty special.

Beauty

Constantly seeing little things that made me go “Hell yeah” provided continual doses of awesome (Cars with flamethrowers! Glowy bikes! Fishing for hippies with glowsticks! A random oasis in the desert with a cushion pile!). More than any one particular thing, the city as a whole, especially at night, was beautiful. I felt like the city was constantly inviting me to go out and have an adventure.

Go fourth and Burn!

Like reading about a city you’ve never visited, all of this writing can’t convey what it’s like to live in Black Rock City. It’s merely an invitation and an encouragement to check it out for yourself, if you feel so inclined. See you in the dust!

But I think it’s something a little subtler. And it comes not from something that’s present, but from something that’s absent. There’s hardly anyone here wearing suits.

The presence of big business and government is nearly non-existent. Well, not quite. There’s plenty of police (SFPD) and fire trucks around. And you know about it; their sirens are pretty attention-grabbing. But not the public service sort of government. Instead of the government being this massive nannying entity (hello, Canberra), it seems like it’s just one force here (and not the dominant one), doing its best to hold things together in a mostly orderly fashion.

And big business? There’s lots of Starbucks chains. Surprisingly few McDonalds. Barely any supermarkets, at least in the areas I’ve seen. Lots of independently run grocery stores. Plenty of advertising, a few slightly-larger-than-Canberra-scale skyscrapers, but not a bunch of people running around in suits.

So if government and big business aren’t the major forces, what are? This seems much more up to the individual. There’s a sense that without so much protection from the government, everyone has to fend for themselves. It seems like there’s more space for people to make what they want of it, which leads to more extremes. There seem to be more homeless people and beggars, but also a lot of character to the place. And although I haven’t knowingly met the rich, the success stories are pretty well known (Twitter for starters).

This might be premature; I’ve only been here a few days, and there’s plenty of areas that I haven’t visited yet. But it’s certainly been fascinating to be able to diff cities.

If this isn’t a dream, what is it? What is it really? How does it work? I think I know what’s going on, but maybe I’m blundering through it half asleep?

The point of this question is not to determine whether you are in the middle of a lucid dream or not (though it’s awesome if it can do that for you). The deeper purpose is to look more closely at reality and question it. Not in a philosophical way, but in a concrete, right-here-and-now kind of way. What is this that I’m experiencing right now and how does it all work?

Anything is one of a million paths. Therefore you must always keep in mind that a path is only a path; if you feel you should not follow it, you must not stay with it under any conditions. To have such clarity you must lead a disciplined life. Only then will you know that any path is only a path, and there is not affront, to oneself or to others, in dropping it if that is what your heart tells you to do. But your decision to keep on the path or to leave it must be free of fear or ambition.

I warn you. Look at every path closely and deliberately. Try it as many times as you think necessary. Then ask yourself, and yourself alone, one question. This question is one that only a very old person asks. My benefactor told me about it once when I was young, and my blood was too vigorous for me to understand it. Now I do understand it.

I will tell you what it is: Does this path have a heart?

All paths are the same, they lead nowhere. They are paths going through the bush, or into the bush. In my own life I could say I have traversed long, long paths, but I am not anywhere. My benefactor’s question has meaning now. “Does this path have a heart?” One makes you strong; the other weakens you.

The trouble is nobody asks the question: and when a person finally realizes that they have taken a path without heart, the path is ready to kill them. At that point very few people stop to deliberate and leave the path.

A path without a heart is never enjoyable. You have to work hard even to take it. On the other hand, a path with heart is easy; it does not make you work at liking it.

For my part there is only the traveling on paths that have heart, on any path that may have heart. There I travel, and the only worthwhile challenge is to traverse its full length.

And there I travel looking, looking, breathlessly.

- Don Juan
Apprentice to a Yaqui Sorcerer
Sourced from http://www.whale.to/a/path_with_a_heart.html

Ingredients:

• One avocado
• Two tomatoes
• Juice of one orange
• Two tablespoons flaxseed oil (or olive oil. Flaxseed oil contains omega 3 for those of us who don’t eat fish.)
• Four tablespoons sultanas (try more or less if it’s too sweet or not sweet enough)
• A dash of tamari OR soy sauce OR a pinch of salt (just a little bit!)
• Some red or green capsicum, finely sliced

Directions:

1. Place everything except the capsicum in a blender.
2. Blend to a smooth consistency.
3. Pour into a soup bowl, garnish with capsicum. This adds a bit of texture to the soup.
4. Serve with crunchy toast for dipping, or flax crackers if you’d like to keep the meal entirely raw.

Serves one. Enjoy!

There’s a press release about the project over here.

This is a little different to my normal way of writing. Usually I write an outline, try to write a section, get annoyed at not being able to write anything, then invoke the “terrible first draft is okay” rule and give myself permission to write whatever I can come up with. Once I’ve got something down, I’m set. I still spend about half my time fiddling with wording, reordering, restructuring, rewriting, but once I have something down the hard part is over. I know that if I just keep fiddling for a bit, I’ll get a post I’m happy with.

Writing with a pen is different. I usually use this method when I’m journaling, AKA dumping my brain onto paper. There’s no pressure to make grammatical (or logical) sense. I just write my thoughts straight onto paper. Pose questions and explore what comes up. Usually get lost down twisty passages of thought that lead nowhere in particular, but at least I usually see interesting things along the way.

Writing this post is different again. I’m intending it to be read by others, so I’m taking a little more care to make sense and explain things. Compared to how I usually write posts I’m getting a lot written very quickly. Only: I don’t know quite where I’m going.

I like the spontaneous way this post formed itself. It feels funny calling it a post when it’s still pen on paper, but it seems the best way to refer to it. I hope to write again like this in the future and maybe even have something useful come out in the process.

Thanks for reading this little experiment, and enjoy the rest of your long weekend.

Blogs

• IttyBiz – home business marketing advice. In particular, check out the marketing school category.
• Thirty Day Challenge – great video course on niche website creation
• Finance Your Freedom – market testing and lifestyle design
• 7 Business Ideas – more market testing
• 7 Business Ideas Intro to Market Testing – figuring out if an idea is likely to work before you implement it
• The Fluent Self – dealing with the inner stuff along the way

Stuff worth buying

• Online Business School from IttyBiz – Kinda like my talk but with much more detail. Walks you through the main points to consider when starting one of the business types I mentioned. Great for a high-level view of this stuff. If you’ve had a read of all the free stuff and you’re keen to get started, this is for you.
• Procrastination Dissolve-o-Matic from The Fluent Self – EBook I mentioned in the talk. Spend a bit of time on Havi’s blog, and if what she talks about resonates with you, I’d highly recommend checking out this book.

People I mentioned

• GoBuro
• IttyBiz
• Productive Flourishing
• The Fluent Self
• WordPrezzie
• Etsy
• Men With Pens

Update: Here are my slides from my presentation at BarCamp.