Wearing horns, fur and a tail in the middle of the Nevada desert may sound embarrassing. But wearing horns and fur and getting your tail stuck in your bike chain… now that’s truly embarrassing. And I was thoroughly stuck, unable to even turn around because my tail was wrapped too tightly around the gears. Over my shoulder loomed the words “THE END,” written in plywood letters stacked twenty feet high, and I could scarcely dispute their literal implication; my wanderings had effectively ended unless I found a way to extricate myself from the machinery.

The Burning Man Festival tends to throw its participants into one surreal situation after another, I’ve noticed. Inviting 50,000 artists, nudists and hippies onto a lifeless plain in the Black Rock Desert and perpetually dehydrating them produces strange and uneven results. Yet somehow each year they manage to build a city from scratch, constructing million-dollar sculptures, circuses, dance clubs on wheels and everything from thirty-foot bottles of ketchup to mechanical spiders that belch flame.