Signs & portents

As I may have mentioned, I am a burner, which means that although I've never gotten my act together enough to go to the actual Thing In The Desert, I do attend the two regional burns in Georgia, Euphoria in the spring and Alchemy in the fall. (No, don't ask me why we have two separate websites; killing that off is on my to-do list.)

Bill Shakespeare tells us that some have greatness thrust upon 'em, and so it was that I woke up one morning two years ago to find that I was Placement Lead for the burns, which meant that I was in charge of all the theme camps and where they went on the map.  I immediately wrote a manifesto and set about designing my first burn, as one does.

As I say in the book, the Lyles Theorem of Process Development says that it takes three cycles to learn any process, and that's where I am now. That's if you don't change the process, of course, and good luck with that.  This time, it was decided that rather than the "neighborhood" concept we'd been using for a decade, each camp should have an actual numbered street address.  This would make it easier to locate camps for emergency personnel and the random hippie.

Also, since we were on new property and the roads that I created out of nothing were not always clear, we needed road signs. Exactly why it fell to Placement to make these signs and not Traffic or Public Works the world may never know, but I did it.

Oilcloth, 48" wide:

Cut into 1' strips:

I have 77 signs to make.  Each corner of each intersection gets two signs. It's a lot of signs.

Creating stencils for each road:

This includes cutting the extra letters I need, of course.

Spray-painting the first ABORTIVE ATTEMPT:

Et voilà:

The red arrows are meant to indicate one-way streets. We'll see if it works.

Interlude, while I go to New Mexico for a week.  Then, the mass production:

Are they elegant? Heavens no. They're messy and ugly and just about right for the hurly-burly world of a burn. The important thing is that they're legible and foldable.  They will be stapled to 48" stakes, and heaven knows if they will last the weekend. (My eventual plan is to have the organization fund sturdy lamp-post-style signs, maybe with individual artists decorating standard designs.)

Today is Wednesday.  Today I pack for the burn.  Tomorrow I load it all onto our trailer. Friday I leave for build weekend, to lay out the burn.  Next week I will be camping/burning, and so the next few blog posts you read will be automatically posted via the magic of the intertubes.

Behave yourselves while I am away.