Ounced Now with no hands!

Shame on you San Francisco

Today you all gathered your trees so you could burn them.

How fucking stupid.

The combustion process releases large amounts of carbon dioxide, other gases, and solid substances directly into the air for people to breathe. And, of course, disposal of materials is never as good for the environment as using them again in a different form. Natural debris can be chipped or composted into landscaping material. Quoted from here.

I thought you all were hippies. Tree hugging, pot smoking, barnacles at each hipster-emo coffee house hippies. But then you load up your live christmas tree, drive it down to the beach, set fire it to it and get shit faced. Okay, okay some of you might drag it with you on to MUNI (do they charge you extra fare for that?)….drag it from your single gear bike….wait…. no…. no

And then you call it art. FUCKING ART!! Next thing I know you’ll send dancers to the Amazon forrest, light it all ablaze while you pacify yourselves on your hookahs and pipes, and then sleep pass out peacefully at night because it was a fucking art project.

Don’t even get me started on Burning Man.

I’m no environmentalist, hell I sat in my idle car for an hour last night (mind you talking to a friend and helping him out, I’ll call that my carbon offset), but I needed to keep my snarky ass warm so that I wake up today and bitch out you hypocritical asses.

What’s next?

Hey, man, you’re the one who wants to move here. I’m just sayin’.

More importantly, the assumption that Danger Ranger, the guy who runs the pyre (which has been happening longer than Burning Man, for the record), or the majority of the people who founded Burning Man, were tree-hugging hippies, is for the most part fallacious. They’re mostly just weirdos. And they (as well as most of the people that attended the pyre, myself excluded of course) are too old to qualify as either hipsters or emo.

I mean, you have a right to have a problem with the event, but if the only reason why you feel that way is because you think hippies, the Burning Man founders, hipsters, emo kids, and apparently San Francisco as a whole, are one and the same, then….maybe your real problem is with your own stereotyping.

My family carried on a tradition of burning heaps of Christmas trees on the Sacramento River since long before I was born. We did it because it was fun, because it’s a ritual to herald in the new year, because it’s free and it’s fuckin’ FIRE, dude. We did it for something like 20 years, with our record being a burn of 198 trees. We finally got shut down when a new assface sherriff took power, but it was awesome while it lasted.

As to the art thing…I’ve never heard the Pyre referred to as art, certainly not by the guy who started it. It’s not referred to as art in the link you provided. It’s not supposed to be art, it’s not supposed to have a message…it’s supposed to be fun.

Oh, thanks for the link; I forgot to mark myself as attending the Upcoming.org event so I could get my street cred.

Anyways… I ain’t no Burner. I’m a man who found parking last Thursday by moving a heap of tree refuse that was left on the curb into the back of his truck, and then nabbing the parking spot I freed in the process. It was awesome, and you know it.

I am also a man who got to that same event last year on MUNI, the hour-long L-Taraval, and no… they don’t charge for the trees (although you and the other guy who happened to get on the same train WILL get looked at funny). And last year I couldn’t take a whole tree, cause I got there and the cops had decided there’d been enough fun and cut off the bonfire’s tree supply starting with mine. Last year I only got to put in a suitcase-ful of wreath material scavenged from the streets of North Beach. Of course, last year it didn’t rain.

This year it f*cking rained. And me and the little lady didn’t bring umbrellas, hoodies, waterproof shoes, or nothing. Last year the tide was normal, as opposed to absurd. Last year I didn’t have someone tell me that it was “aaart” although I’m happy someone can now. I had no idea; now I can also make fun of it in the future. I thought it was just fun.

Incidentally, I don’t care about my “carbon offset” as (confidentially) my “methane offset” is far more worrisome. Next year I think I’ll bring rain shoes and maybe a frigging flashlight. Perhaps a friend or two, or one, named you.

Don’t be jealous, Oakland. You’re invited too.