Coincidences and Burning Man with Jay

Jahan and I hadn’t seen each other in six years, since right when the pandemic started, back when I was renting his mom’s pool house. We drifted, the way people do. And then, this year, his mom sent a text meant for his girlfriend, who is also named Laura, to me, accidentally. When the world shut down, Jahan — living alone, watching every friend he had in Burbank pack up and move back to wherever they’d come from — did the thing a lot of us didn’t: he got in a Subaru Outback he wasn’t even sure he liked, and circumnavigated half the western United States for an entire summer. He traces the restlessness back further than the pandemic, actually — to 2015, a serious breakup, and a decision that if the people in his plans weren’t there anymore, the plans still were. He stopped waiting for someone to come explore the world with him and just went. That’s how he found the festival and rave scene — generators towed into the desert, DJ equipment hooked up in the middle of nowhere, and what he calls one of the best nights of his life. He’s about to turn 47, still chasing new music instead of romanticizing old music, which he says is the thing that separates him from a lot of people his age: the ones who show up to a party still playing what was popular thirty-five years ago and call it the good stuff. He wants the new stuff. He still goes looking for it. Then there’s the story about the Burning Man ticket he turned down in 2004. A friend — an actual original burner from the early scene — tried to sell him on it with a slideshow at a work lunch meeting, and somehow made the pitch almost entirely about the porta-potties overflowing by day three. Jahan said no. Twenty-some years later, he still hasn’t gone, and he counts it as a real regret, not just because he missed the party, but because he missed the version of it that existed before it became what it is now. Which took us somewhere I keep landing on this show no matter who’s sitting across from me: money, access, and the human factor. Jahan’s take was more generous than mine: he doesn’t think a tech millionaire showing up to Burning Man ruins anything, he thinks closing the door on anyone, including people you disagree with, is how nothing ever changes. Fair. But I pushed back anyway, because a ticket that costs thousands of dollars isn’t really an open door, it’s a very polite “you can’t afford to be here.” He didn’t disagree with that part either. He just pointed out there’s another layer most people never see: the crew, the vendors, the people who live entirely outside the festival circuit and travel from one to the next just to build the thing for everyone else. That’s where he thinks the real counterculture still survives. Not in the ticket line. In the people who never bought one. We never even got to how we originally met until the end: his cousin, who was my colleague at the time, told us we should be friends cuz I just moved to Los Angeles and didn’t know anybody, and so, we started talking thanks to his family. Fitting, honestly, because always through family, that’s how we reconnected recalling the good old days pre-pandemic. Thank you, Jahan. And thank you Josephine, Jay’s mom! Miss you both. Good night. — L.