Well, I’ll preach to the choir here, but while there are a bunch of voyeur frat boyz at Burning Man who just want to see titties, I’d say that Burning Dood attendees contribute much more to society than most people.

Take a look at what first glance would be the biggest set of losers, misfits, drunks and tattooed freaks: the DPW. These people work hard doing a bunch of work that your average Caltrans worker or construction working won’t or can’t do. Hell, DPW even crawls around on their hands and knees picking up other people’s trash. Almost all of them do it for food and shelter. DPW certainly does not get the respect they deserve, but DPW still consistently contributes and, in my mind, contributes way more than your average person.

My favorite art car story is that one year I was driving back from Burning Man and there was this bus that was covered with art and it was broken down by the side of 447. The car obviously took a huge amount of time and it was impossible to really start to take it all in in anything under an hour. We stopped to see if they needed anything. There, towards the front, in about the only place that was not covered in art was a sign that said “I made this while you were watching TV”. I laughed and laughed. I’ve been thinking of making stickers that say “I made this while you were using Facebook” or “I made this while you were F@#$ing with Farmville”. BTW – don’t every criticize Facebook or Farmeville. I did it on slashdot (http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1701310&cid=32723734) and got slammed for it.