Burning Man Brony: Fear and Loathing of Equestria

by Bad Horse

Rating: teen
Tags: My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Tragedy, Discord, Human, Main 6
Length: 9251

One brony finds himself with the help of a bag of mushrooms and some ponies. He doesn't like what he finds.

Sometimes, you really can go out into the desert and find yourself with the help of a bag of mushrooms and some ponies. Sometimes, you're better off not knowing.

Recommended by Seattle's Angels, The Royal Guard, Titanium Dragon, & Paul Asaran. Includes drug use and cussing.

Published 2012-09-02 12:54:01 UTC
Last updated 2012-09-03 03:55:53 UTC

Tripping

Oh let the sun beat down upon my face,
I am a traveler of both time and space,
To sit with elders of the gentle race,
Talk and song from tongues of lilting grace,
But not a word I heard could I relate.

–- Led Zeppelin, "Kashmir"

I sniffed enviously at the aroma of oatmeal still in the air under the kitchen's big shade tarp, and took another bite out of my granola bar. I'd come late to lunch, because the next meal happened any time whoever's name was next on the duty roster was sober enough to work a Coleman stove without burning his fingers off. Almost everybody else had already eaten and either wandered off towards Esplanade, or retreated into the cool but hazy and fetid air of the yurt to get high.

Marco was sitting in a camping chair, off to the side, being very quiet. I walked over and said hi. He looked up at me, slurred something unrecognizable, and his face twitched. I looked closer. His body sat still, nearly unmoving, while his eyes flitted back and forth in terror as if he were imprisoned somewhere deep within.

"Hey!" I said, slapping Gary's shoulder as he was scavenging marginally-edible pieces from a plate of melon rapidly rotting in the heat. "How long's Marco been sitting there?"

He shrugged. "He was there when I got here."

"What's he on?"

"E."

"The hell he is. Look at him."

I had been awake—I added it up—34 hours straight. 10 hours flying into Reno, 1 hour working out the screw-up with the rental car, 2 hours hooking up with other burners who needed a ride and loading up with supplies at Wal-Mart (I know, but it was full of burners, so shut up), 4 hours driving to the Playa. Then 4 hours driving down the gravel road in the line for the gate—that's less than one mile per hour—choking from the dust and getting a migraine from the exhaust. Thank God it was at night or the heat would've killed me. Two hours wandering around F and 4:15, looking for my camp, which I only found because I recognized Jim's voice, screaming into the night that he was God and that he loved us all.

Jim had decided sometime earlier that evening that it would be a good idea to take 9 tabs of acid at once. Federico and Gary had been babysitting him for hours already. Terrence was there too, but he was almost as flipped as Jim. Of course I immediately volunteered to watch them both so Federico and Gary could get some sleep, because it was fucking Burning Man and that's what burners do. So I listened to Jim and Terrence rave at each other about God and love and destiny, and pulled them apart when God told one of them to hit the other one, until about 5 in the morning, when Terrence had come down enough that I told him it was his turn with Jim, and went to set up my tent.

Just then the camp next door had decided to start their party. I don't know which was worse, the thumping bass of techno-pop, or the exhaust and the grinding roar of the 5000-watt generator they started up to power the speakers. So I had gone into the yurt and smoked some weed with my campers until the ravers gave it up a couple of hours past sunrise. By then it was about 130 degrees in my tent, and the Nevada sun was so bright I would have gotten a sunburn right through the nylon fly if I'd managed to fall asleep in it.

I was too tired to go wandering over the playa. So I'd kicked off the first stage of my own experiment with altered states, chewing up about a dozen dry, crumbly mushrooms from one of Nigel's plastic baggies. I had some issues I'd brought to the desert to work out on my own, and this was one way of doing it that being exhausted and unable to sleep wouldn't interfere with.

Now Marco was dangerously strung-out on something that was definitely not ecstasy, while I was just getting over the nausea and could feel the shrooms starting to pick off the sentries on the outskirts of my attentional system. I estimated I would still be the most sober and responsible person there for another ten minutes, so it was up to me to do something.

Gary and I stood over Marco, trying to communicate with him. He knew we were there; he desperately wanted to tell us something; but he was swimming through some very troubled waters trying to reach us.

"Marco," I said. "What did you take?"

"Was it E?" Gary asked. Marco nodded, slowly, his head sloshing up and down.

"Anything else?" I asked. "Alcohol?" Marco shook his head, and twitched again.

"Twitching is bad," I said.

"Twitching is bad," Gary agreed.

Marco made a gargling noise. I bent closer—not too close—and waited for him to try again. I kept being distracted by the way his hair would start to writhe unless I looked straight at it. He snorted air through his nose suddenly, like a diver coming up for a breath, and looked at me.

"Gotta ... piss," he said.

"Oh, fuck," I said.

Gary and I lifted him up between us and dragged him out into the dirt street, and towards the porta-potties a quarter mile away. I tried not to think about what we would do when we got there. He could walk, with guidance. By the time we got there, he had stopped twitching and recovered the power of speech. "I'm good," he said. We aimed him at an open porta-potty and crossed our fingers. He came out a short time later, without any obvious new stains, and said again that he was good.

I told Gary I wasn't going back to camp. Screw that. When I'd left, Nigel was lying spread-eagled on his back in the center of the yurt, naked, with his head propped up, high on God knew what, staring into the eyes of everyone around with an intense high-priest gaze, alternately spouting bullshit about love and working out some grand scheme for saving the world from itself with Jim and Terrence. I was not up for another marijuana-fueled bleeding-heart gang-banging of reality and common sense.

Gary took Marco back to camp. I put my goggles on and headed in the other direction, looking for someplace shady with a place to sit and trip in peace. I had a bag, a book, most of a canteen full of water, WalMart's biggest camouflage cowboy hat, and a cavernous white Lawrence of Arabia robe already stained with sweat and the chalky tan alkaline dust of the playa.

* * * * *

I am not part of the "drug culture". I don't go in for anything more addictive than coffee. I don't touch LSD since this time at my house I was in the process of undressing a beautiful and horny young woman who was visiting from California and had used a lot of it there back in the day, and something triggered a flashback and she was suddenly convinced I was hiding a knife behind my back and ended up sleeping on my couch. Weed and alcohol are mildly amusing, and both eventually make you stupid. Or maybe the potheads I knew had started that way? I wasn't going to run that experiment.

To name psilocybin in the same breath as those things is a sin. Shrooms show you things. See, inside your head is O'Hare International Airport, with planes flying in from all directions or lining up to take off, and there's a little man saying, "You line up over there, you two start your approach now on parallel runways, you hold and follow that other plane five minutes behind."

Psilocybin puts that little man to sleep. You start seeing, hearing, feeling, and thinking things unfiltered, uncorrelated. One moment, you're intensely aware of the pull of gravity. The next, the scent of baked stone from the gravel underfoot. The next, the whisper of a couple walking by on the other side of the streets pours into your ear, painfully loud. You see the patterns your tidy little air traffic controller thinks you're better off not seeing.

If you focus on something, you'll see it just as you normally would. You have to deliberately unfocus, let yourself drift, until things start creeping in around the edges. You have to work at it, with a Zen kind of un-work.

Shrooms don't lie, but they don't tell the truth. They just show you what you already believe. I wouldn't call them dangerous. But I wouldn't call them safe.

Burning Man is the worst possible place on the surface of the Earth to experiment with drugs, short of the slopes of Everest. Nobody wants to sit with you for hours and supervise your trip, unless they're already so stoned that somebody should be keeping them away from you. Just finding a shady place to sit can be a challenge. If you take off your hat, or forget to drink water, or fall asleep—all easy even for a sober person to do—it's heatstroke and a severe sunburn. If you need to vomit, good luck reaching the porta-potty a quarter of a mile away and cleaning up afterwards with no water. If you wander off into the desert, you may die.

On the other hand, you can walk down the street wearing dark goggles to hide the bugged-out look in your eye, and no one will think it's strange. Or at least that's what I was hoping. I sat on a sofa in the shade at the Lost Penguin, God bless them. I would have loved a drink, but I'd run out of gift trinkets. I knew the bartender would give me a drink for free if I asked. He had to. It was Burning Man. He might ask me to do some kind of sexual pantomime, or he might give me a dirty look. Or he might just smile. But I couldn't bring myself to ask. I couldn't get my head into the universal friendship bullshit that was supposed to make everything work by gifting. Like that was some kind of social experiment. Like the people in Reno and Dallas and Kansas City would look at us and suddenly say, "Hey, we don't need money! We can give everything away for free!" and dance in the streets around bonfires of burning dollar bills hugging and kissing each other. Maybe in San Francisco and Austin. I was starting to appreciate how Hoover had felt about communists.

Not for the first time, I wished they would just take my fucking money. All this counter-consumerism was giving me an appreciation for what great stuff money was.

I sat on the sofa and stared at the old carpet laid out on the desert floor. It was covered in a rich paisley pattern, perfect for the shrooms to grasp onto. One of the first things I learned from psilocybin is that the universe is in everything. That's how a shaman would say it. It sounds all wise and shit. All it means is that anything big enough to see has more complexity in it than we can comprehend. I think it was Tom Brown Jr. who told me to mark out one square meter of ground in a field and watch it for four hours. You'd think you'd run out of things to discover, in one square meter, after four hours, but you don't. The man's a smug-eyed asshole, but he knows things. When you're on shrooms, you can look at an art masterpiece, or a bare concrete wall, and they're both beautiful, they'll both talk to you. I let myself drift. I could see the carpet start to ripple, and softly rise and fall in three dimensions. The patterns began to circulate around it like multi-colored rivers.

An older, overweight man stood against a wall, nursing a drink. Shifting colors pulsed around the sleeves and hem of his Hawaiian shirt. Blue, orange, red, yellow, red, orange, blue. Was the orange chasing the red, or running from the blue?

He was staring at me. Had been staring at me all along, while the flowers on his shirt had rippled in the current of colors. I pulled yesterday's Black Rock Gazette out of my bag and held it up as if I were reading it. I let my eyes unfocus. The letters in the periphery of my vision morphed, danced, and re-assembled into the baroquely-serifed symbols of some forgotten script. They vanished if I looked straight at them. Deciphering them was going to be difficult.

The man came over and sat beside me on the sofa. I turned the page, pretending to read. The flowers waved their pistils lewdly at me. He laid his big meaty hand on the cushion between us, blotchy moist mottled pink-red-white, meat wrapped in wrinkled salmon shag an inch from my leg, and asked, "So how's your burn?"

Orange. Orange was missing. Blue had gotten it.

Maybe I was paranoid. All I knew for sure was that I was too far gone to know how far gone I was. A voice in the back of my head said I was safe at the Lost Penguin, but the meat lying between me and the man sweated and shook in anticipation of some pagan ecstasy. I was afraid to stay and afraid to try to stand up. So many muscles to contract, all in the right order. I wished I'd taken notes on how it was done. I lurched to my feet, just like a human, I thought—success!—and slipped back into the street before big-hands could follow, my feet pulled along in the ghost river that rippled over the dust and snaked north towards the Man.

Just after crossing Bottom there was a dance pavilion pumping out electro-trash, with kids covered in paint and tattoos and earrings anyplace other than ears and not much else flailing around like the strobe lights were giving them seizures. Every time I sidled up to the edge of the floor to look, some sweaty burner with a fake sparkly smile would grab my arm and try to get me to dance. I couldn't dance. I could never dance. They could see that from the way I moved, the way I stood. They wanted to make me look like a fool.

I shook them off and went back down F, drawn toward the glaring, white-hot sun shining out over the middle of the playa. The goggles protected me from having to meet the gazes of the burners passing by. I'd come here for the community, the openness, and now it creeped me out. It had taken me years to figure out when to make eye contact with someone (at 12 feet away), how much to smile (10 to 20 degrees, depending on familiarity and formality), and how close to get before breaking off eye contact (6 feet). I never did it well but I was usually able to get through the day without making a fool of myself. Now all the rules had changed.

Before I knew it, I'd reached Esplanade. The fact that I crossed it without getting run down by a mutant vehicle proves you can still perceive the real world on shrooms. Also, that I'm an idiot.

It was almost redundant to be on shrooms at Burning Man. Trucks disguised as yachts, pirate ships, sharks, and tentacled creatures from the nightmares of H. R. Giger drove to and fro, each obeying the traffic laws of their home planet. Sparkle ponies (they're not what you think, brothers) writhed to the electronic dance music that they blared as they went by. Mad, metallic sculptures lined the street. Further out, giant wooden structures—a Ferris wheel, a Trojan horse—stood waiting to burn. Out across the sands, in the middle of the playa, in a haze of wind-swept dust, I could see the Man raising his arms into the sky. It didn't look that far away. I kept walking.

Photo from Burning Man 2011 by Scott London. Used with permission.

* * * * *

I stopped a man at random as he passed by in the other direction. "Which pony are you?" I asked, just to see if he knew what the hell I was talking about. I had a hunch that a lot of people here would.

"I'm a cross between Twilight and Pinkie," he said with a smile.

"That's impossible. Your head would explode."

He put a finger to his forehead. "It already has, my friend," he said before walking on.

The scene before me, I reflected, was what you would get if you crossed Twilight with Pinkie—long, hard, technically-brilliant engineering work, harnessed to the purposes of a manic party-animal. Or maybe Twilight with Rainbow. Burning Man was where the cool smart kids went to play. Maybe if I kept my goggles on, they wouldn't notice that I was only smart. I took another drink from my canteen, and headed out towards the Man.

Ponies were one of the things I'd come to the desert to work out. Enough people I respected—two, but I don't respect many people—were into this kid's show, My Little Pony, that I'd watched a few episodes. Within a few weeks, I'd watched the entire first season. That was more TV than I'd watched in all the years since the end of Buffy. Something about it resonated with something in me, and this irritated me more than the alkaline dust crawling down my socks and burning my legs and feet red. It was a kid's show: Simple, naïve, and just well thought-out enough to drive you crazy with the glaring inconsistencies.

Psilocybin was a way to look inside my psyche and see what those pastel ponies were doing in there. Shrooms will work on thoughts as well as pictures. Anything that can hold a pattern. Right then, I was noticing how similar all the artwork at Burning Man was to the things that I saw on shrooms. The big picture, the realism, the structure, was nothing. The tiny filigrees, the repetition of a simple pattern, layer after layer, was everything. The music at Burning Man was the same—simple patterns, repeated endlessly. All art, I saw, had two aspects—the baroque, recursive, physically-resonant, psychedelic; and the refined, organized, purposeful, intellectual, which was completely absent here. Burners worshipped Dionysus, not Apollo. Bright colors, celtic knots, wild vine-like growths with bulbous protuberances, steel sculpted into irregular crystals, all spread across the desert to a soundtrack with the pounding rhythm of sex. The laughing burners walking by seemed to feel right at home with it. It made me ill. Every mysterious, unattainable joy that tortured me, every natural impulse that my strict Christian upbringing had forever associated with revulsion and shame, was flaunted, raw and exposed except for a millimeter-thick skin of fake granfalloon friendship that was more annoying than a friendship report by Twilight Sparkle. Try that in the real world, burners. See how far the magic of friendship takes you. But they wouldn't. Half the burners here would dump their trash on the side of the highway and piss in the river before they got back to Reno. They had to be fake. Something in me couldn't stand for them to be happy and smart and good, all at the same time.

I was wasting the trip by walking. Shrooms need patience. They can't work their magic while you're focused on getting from here to there. But I had a sense that if I were going to get some revelation, it would be at the Man. Surely that was some kind of psychic nexus.

Of course, nothing happened. I climbed up him, and came back down, and that was all. The Man was just foma. Or maybe it was me. The spirits would talk to assholes like Tom Brown Jr., but never to me. The spirits were probably assholes too.

Farther off in the desert, I saw the temple. My canteen was empty, but I figured it couldn't be more than one or two football fields away. I ought to see it while I was out here. I started walking. If I collapsed, somebody would see me and help.

Brothers, don't get high and wander out onto the playa alone.

Photo from Burning Man 2011 by Scott London. Used with permission.

If they let people sell things at Burning Man, somebody would be out here on the playa selling overpriced bottled water and ice cream, and I'd pony up gladly. If there were a booth that charged $30 for a shower, I'd get that too. If I'd had any enlightenment so far, it was to really appreciate capitalism.

The temple didn't seem to be getting any closer. I turned around and saw the Man had dwindled behind me, and I realized: The temple was enormous. It dwarfed the Man in size. Those little things I could just barely make out crawling around and across it were people. It was not one or two football fields away. It was a long goddamn way away, and I had come a long goddamn way out into the middle of the playa, alone, with no water, tripped out of my mind. If I turned around now, I could probably get back to Esplanade before I passed out.

Then the dust storm came.

I held my handkerchief over my mouth and waited to find out whether I'd get run over by a mutant vehicle before the winds abated. It wasn't that bad. The wind wasn't cool, since it was hotter than I was, but it evaporated my sweat. The sky full of dust finally provided shade from the relentless sun that had been beating down on me all day. The downside was that no one would see me collapse, and dust storms sometimes lasted for hours. That would be—too long. I tried to sit, but the clay was too hot.

I had paid $2000 in airfare, car rental, hotels, tickets, camp fees, and supplies to get where I was, standing by myself in the middle of the desert in the middle of a dust storm that might kill me, hot, sweaty, exhausted, thirsty, pissed off at my friends and at burners in general, so I could find myself. Well, I had found myself: I was bitter, cynical, and too old for this shit.

It's moments like this that I save up episodes of My Little Pony for. I don't watch them when they come out. I download them and save them until I feel like killing myself, and then I think, "Well, I've still got those episodes of My Little Pony that I haven't seen. I'd like to see them before I die." Then I watch them until either I feel better, or I run out of episodes. So far, it's always been the former.

I looked into the dust swirling around me. There were patterns in the dust. It was fast, but maybe I could work with it. I tried to call up images of ponies.

You can ask the shrooms to show you things. But you should never force the shrooms. It's wrong, very wrong. Don't ask me how I know. But it's wrong.

But I didn't give a shit anymore. I wanted to see ponies.

Ponies hate me

The first pattern was always the hardest to trap. I saw a swirl of dust on the edge of my vision, and I unfocused on it. I didn't look directly at it, but I became very aware of it, drew yellow highlighter across it in my mind, so that it glowed and pulsed. It drifted and tried to slither out of view, but I opened my awareness to all the dust and light around it that wanted to get there, wanted to be a part of this bright pulsing thing. I was looking almost directly at it now—on the background of almost-unbearably bright sky, it was an even brighter patch glowing white—watching patterns come and go, waiting for one particular kind of pattern.... There—first, a body and a head. I held that pattern there and waited until something like four legs and a tail came into view, quickly pinning them down to the canvas in my mind before they could escape. The wind still whistled and the dust still stung my skin, but they receded in importance as I let these other things float to the surface of my mind.

The mouth—that was the first thing to appear on the head—opened in a surprised "O". Then two big, dark-blue eyes appeared and cast about warily. Four hooves appeared, being shaken off each in turn.

What in Celestia's name is this horrible place, and where did this awful dust come from?

Not that she spoke out loud. I knew what she was thinking. She was in my mind, after all. Now that I knew whom I was looking at, my mind pulled up the pattern and started painting her with details: a ribbon of indigo mane; a white horn; three sparkling diamonds.

She shook herself, and her eyebrows converged in an expression of physical pain at the resulting cloud of dust. Even in this distorted image, even when glaring, even shaking herself like a dog, every movement was as precise and graceful as a violin bow played largo by a master. I'm not a clopper, and I wouldn't say it was physical attraction, but I was—moved.

I hadn't planned out any questions. You can't question a vision logically, like it was a demon in a pentagram. That kind of focus would dispel it. And you can't control it. If you could, it would be worthless puppet. You mostly follow its lead. I tried to let her know that I was there.

She turned her eyes toward me, as much as she could in that state. She blinked rapidly on seeing me, and jumped back in shock.

Good gracious. You're absolutely filthy.

Well, yeah, I thought. Desert does that.

How appalling. I should leave it immediately.

I thought at her about why I'd come here, what I'd seen and done here, and why I hated it.

I see, she said, apparently taking it all in. That's a little complex for moi. But, I do believe that you can't address the problems of your mind while ignoring the problems of your body. Clear thought starts with a clean body and a full stomach. You know, our Princess starts every really difficult task with a fresh cup of herbal tea.

We have pretty much the opposite tradition here, I thought. You're supposed to go without sleep, starve yourself, and suffer to attain spiritual enlightenment.

Really? Are the people there very enlightened?

I let the question pass.

Well, when you get home, the first thing to do after you have a nice bath and a fresh change of clothes is to do something about that unruly mane of yours. Really, darling.

I rolled my eyes. Why on earth had I thought I might possibly receive any kind of useful insight from Rarity?

She stiffened. Not useful? Not useful to whom?

To me, of course.

She clicked her tongue. Ah. I see.

See what?

She looked slightly off to one side of me, as if embarrassed to speak so bluntly. Fashion and grooming isn't just something you do for yourself, dear. It's also for the sake of the people around you. Going about town with a bad haircut is like leaving trash on your front porch. It's unpleasant for everypony else.

Look, sister. No amount of ... hair gel is going to make people enjoy looking at me. Especially people like you. I smirked. Who wants that, anyway? I want people to like me for who I am.

Hmph. Yet, you seem to appreciate looking at me. So you appreciate beauty in others, but you won't take a few minutes to make yourself more presentable. Because you don't have to look at yourself. Doesn't that strike you as just a bit selfish?

Oh, right, she was supposed to be the element of generosity. I'd always wondered what she did that was supposed to be generous. Apparently it was allowing people to gaze at her beauty. You know what's selfish? The fact that if you were my species, you wouldn't even be talking to me. You'd just make another tally mark under "men I shot down," and compare it to yesterday's score.

She lifted her nose indignantly into the air and turned slightly away, as I knew she would eventually. I was talking to you. But I'm beginning to see it was a mistake.

I let the vision dissipate, and she blew apart into dust, and I was standing alone on the playa again. Screw Rarity. I never liked her anyway. I'd spent the entire day surrounded by people who were stoned out of their minds, and that stuff about being fashionable for the sake of others was still the dumbest thing I'd heard all day. Thank God I was above that shallow crap.

Why was she even on the show? What were kids supposed to learn from her? To be a slave to fashion and peer pressure. To be born beautiful.

I tried to calm down and let my eyes unfocus. I watched the dust pulsate, the way dust doesn't. Colors strobed on and off, and I waited for them to settle on one, like waiting for the reels to stop on the the one-armed bandits at Reno. It took me a few moments to realize they had stopped, but not on one. Rainbow.

Yeah, that's me!She looked around the dust-darkened playa curiously. Weird. She jumped into the air and flew over to take a closer look at me, hovering like a hummingbird. So, are you a magician? Do something cool!

I, um, write database software.

She scrunched up her eyebrows, perplexed. You what?

Why even explain this to a pony? It's ... like, people write a bunch of things down, and I make a machine that stores them so they can find them again later.

Wow. Kind of like a librarian.

Kind of.

But even more boring.

Sorry I'm not cool enough for you.

She cocked her head at me inquisitively. So why do you do it?

Look, pony. I live in the real world. Nobody here gets paid to push clouds around. I have bills to pay. This is what I do.

Don't they have fun jobs in your world?

They pay shit.

But this database thing pays a lot?

I get by.

She shrugged, looking unimpressed. As long as you're doing what you want.

Doing what I want? Were you even listening?

Rainbow scratched her nose with one hoof. What? You want bits, you get bits.

It isn't that simple, you feathered kaleidoscope. You think you're so cool because you spend your days doing flashy fun stuff. But you can't just do what you want in the real world.

She backed off a little. Didn't mean to step on your tail, mister. But I kinda think it is that simple. Everypony does what they want to do. Twilight sits and reads all day, and if you ask her she's got some big long reason why it's important, but really she just wants to. Fluttershy spends her time with chickens because that's what she wants to do. If you're not doing something you think is cool, whose fault is it?

What the hell do you mean by that? Almost nobody does what they want to do. I want to play shortstop for the Yankees, but that doesn't make it happen.

She crossed her forelegs and glared at me. Don't play dumb. Pinkie works all day, and she kinda likes it, but mostly she does it so she has the bits to throw parties for other ponies. Applejack kicks trees all day, 'coz she has a family and a farm, and she wants to take care of them. If you want to prove to me how awesome you are, don't tell me how much you hate your library thing. Tell me what you do with all the bits you're saving that's awesome! Capiche?

I thought about that for a few seconds.

Does flying across the country to walk out into the desert to talk with ponies count?

She flew from side to side, inspecting me. She frowned. Gotta tell the truth, you look a little less than completely awesome right now.

Well ... Mostly I save the money.

Yeah? What are you saving up for?

That's what you do with money.

She stared at me unbelievingly. That's it?

I didn't know what to say, so we stared at each other awkwardly for a few moments.

I'll ... let you get back to your library thing. Seeya.And she was off. Reality pressed itself back onto my awareness. The wind was still wailing; the sky was still dark. I blew dust out of one nostril, and adjusted my handkerchief where it had slipped while I was talking with Rainbow.

I'd seen two ponies, and I felt worse than when I began. I'd try one more. Third time was the charm. One more spin of the reel. Another patch of light, another figure slowly resolving into something solid. The figure bobbed its head in alarm, and some swirls and lines in the head resolved into big, frightened eyes that cast about for a way of escape.

Where am I? Why's it so dusty?

A long, tapered pink mane and wavy tail; watery blue eyes. She saw me, and drew her head back in alarm, blinking rapidly.

I don't know why everyone says Fluttershy is so cute. At the moment she mostly seemed pathetic—confused and frightened by a little dust.

Oh, I know. I am pathetic.

Oh ... sorry.

No, it's true. I can't imagine why you wanted to talk to me. I should probably just be going.

I didn't know how to stop her anyway. But she didn't disappear. She stayed there, blinking at me.

It's just that, I couldn't help but notice, you seem so angry,she eventually said. Maybe you could ... not be angry?

I laughed out loud. Like that was a thing you could just decide.

It isn't?

No.

Are you sure?

Yes.

Maybe you could pretend you weren't angry?

What the hell good did pretending ever do? Pretending is what losers who've given up do. Like my friends with their bookshelves lined with fantasy novels about great warriors and noble kings. Like bronies writing Human in Equestria stories. Pathetic.

But, you think you have a problem. So, maybe, you could try doing something different. Maybe if you acted like you weren't angry, after awhile, you wouldn't be so angry.

Yeah, and maybe I should clap my hands and say "I do believe in fairies!" Oh, wait. I did that. For twenty years, at church. Didn't work.

I'm okay with anger. I'd rather be angry than frightened.

She sighed, and looked down at the cracked clay of the playa. I'm sorry. I don't think I can help you.

Maybe because I'm not an eight-year old girl who needs friendship lessons.

So where are your friends?

I looked away. I couldn't bear to look into those big blue eyes any longer, frightened and disappointed at the same time. When I looked back, she was gone.

The ponies had been a bad idea. Coming onto the playa had been a bad idea. Shrooms had been a bad idea. Hell, leaving my house yesterday had been a bad idea.

The dust still swirled about me, so that I couldn't see more than a dozen steps in any direction. But I'd been walking towards the temple. if I turned around, and carefully walked in a straight line, I'd probably run into Esplanade eventually. I'd have to get pretty badly turned-around to miss the encampment entirely and wander off into the desert beyond.

I lifted my right foot, and stepped back behind me, planting it on a line with my left foot, but turned to point the other way, back where I came from. I lifted my left foot—and a sudden gust knocked me over. I inhaled and my goggles came off when I hit the ground, and everything was dust, in my eyes, in my mouth, in my nose. A smooth, overly-friendly, familiar voice trickled into both my ears, smothering me in sarcasm and bitterness.

Oh, I don't think so. What happened to your sense of adventure? You still have three more ponies to meet! I'd HATE for you to have gone to all this trouble, and not get their valuable opinions as well!

He didn't really sound like John de Lancie. More like James Earl Jones, on a bad day, if you piped his voice directly into your bones.

You left your mind open, so I let myself in. Now don't be a spoilsport. Everypony has to play with me, sooner or later.

I wiped the goggles with my sleeve, pushed them back onto my face, and blinked the dust away. I held the handkerchief over my mouth again and coughed sand into it until I could breathe again without pain. I crawled, slowly, looking and feeling for footprints, any indication of which direction I'd come from. There was nothing. I stood up again. The wind kept howling.

It seemed I had to do this his way. Three down, three to go. I looked into the swirling dust. I spy with my little eye, something ... purple.

More precisely, lavender.

It was a relief to see the friendly, perplexed face of Twilight Sparkle. Now here was a pony who would understand me.

She pricked up her ears. You think I ... understand you? To be honest, I don't even know what you are.

I laughed through my handkerchief. That honesty, Twilight, is why you might understand.

Really? It's merely stating an obvious relevant fact. So. Getting down to business. You seem to have cast some kind of astral projection spell that will make you appear to me for a short time. I assume you have a message for me?

What? No! I want to know why I can't get you out of my head.

That's ... a really bad pickup line.

No! I mean ... oh, heck. It probably has something to do with friendship.

Really? I should be able to help with that! She pulled a pencil and notepad out from somewhere I couldn't see.Let's see: What would you say is your greatest friendship challenge?

Friendship challenge? Sounds like a bad high-school spirit-week event.

Well, what kind of friendship problem are you having?

I sighed, and thought, It's the getting friends in the first place. Give me a task, put me in a work group, and I'm fine! But anything where people are just there to meet other people – it's weird! It isn't fun. It's creepy and competitive. You know what I'm talking about.

She nodded sympathetically. So what have you done about this problem?

Well, I came out here into the desert to mingle with people.

She looked past me to the empty desert behind. She raised one hoof to her eyes and looked again. Then she looked around at the desert, empty in all directions.

I think I see your first problem.

"I know I'm alone out here now!" I said out loud. "But I was with people. I did come out here to be with people. I just had to get away from them."

Like I said. I think I see your first problem.

"Come on, Twilight. Going off by myself sometimes isn't my problem. I already know about that."

Why would already knowing about it make it not be the problem?

"Because I'm a rational being, okay? I can analyze this rationally. I've had friends. Good friends. Lots of them. But they don't last. They move away, or I move away, or we change—It's a rate problem. The first derivative of the cardinality of my friends is less than zero. I need to optimize my friend pipeline."

She squinted at me dubiously. That sounds too nerdy even to me.

Ow. "Et tu, Twilight?"

I just think using an operations research metaphor might be the wrong approach. Friends aren't fungible goods.

I scowled at her. "Easy for you to say. You live in this fantasy world where friends are faithful forever, no matter what. It isn't like that. Friendship is quid pro quo, what have you done for me lately."

And...?

"What do you mean, and?"

Did you think I didn't know that? That's basic evolutionary psychology. Why would that be a problem? Don't you do things for your friends?

"Of course I do."

Great! So, tell me about some things you do for your friends.

"That's ... not the point! You shouldn't have to."

She blinked at me. So, they should still be your friends, even if you don't do anything for them.

"Of course."

And so you should still be their friend, even if they don't do anything for you.

"I guess so."

So, what's the difference between friends and strangers?

This conversation was going nowhere. I summoned up a mental image of some particularly choice Twilestia.

Picture by sbshouseofpancakes

What?! That's ... where did you get that picture? I ... what are those rings?She went on that way in staccato sentence fragments until she sputtered out like a snuffed candle.

There was only one pony left other than the dreaded pink one: The element of honesty. Maybe she'd give me some straight talk instead of judgemental bullshit. I reached for the colors orange and yellow.

This one was harder. I got an orange blob, but the figure jerked and thrashed, trying to evaporate back into the eddies. I didn't let it. I waited it out until it tired, then reeled it in like a recalcitrant deepwater bass, and gradually it coalesced into a long yellow mane and tail, both tied off at their ends with a bit of red; also, a brown wide-brimmed hat. Two green eyes blinked open, then darted about in alarm. She (now recognizably Applejack) stamped one rear hoof. What the hay? What's this awful dead-lookin' place?

She caught sight of me, and glowered at me. Sweet Celestia! Not another one-a you hippie idjits. Jest look at yourself. Got yourself good 'n messed-up, dintcha? An' ya been botherin' my friends.

Oh, for fuck's sake. I'm trying to get enlightened here.

The hay you are. All you been doing is wasting ponies' time. My friends gave you good advice and you ignored each an' every one a' them.

I laughed curtly. Maybe that advice works in Ponyville.

She took a step forward and leaned in angrily. What you're doing don't work anywhere! Everything anypony says to try to help makes you mad, because you don't want help. You want to keep on pretendin' everypony happier 'n you is stupid and shallow. You'd rather be miserable than lose that excuse.

We glared at each other, and I became aware again of the wind whipping around me, somehow not disturbing Applejack's Stetson. You don't understand a damn thing. You think I haven't tried everything already? I know what happens. I know what happens if I try.

Oh, you're the world-wise one, ain'tcha? It's a mighty convenient sorta wisdom, though, that always tells you to do nothing.

And now ponies were five out of five for pissing me off. I lost my temper a bit. You got anything else to add? Let's hear it. Lay some more of that homespun country wisdom on me, cowgirl. Show me what you've learned from kicking trees all day.

She glared at me and snorted. I got just one thing to contribute. But it's the one thing you need the most.

Her hindquarters flowed across my vision, lining up below her head while she kept one eye looking over her shoulder and trained on me, and I just had time to think, Maybe I shouldn't have said that, before she bucked me.

I was knocked sprawling onto my back. The sand burned me as I lay there helpless, rolling from side to side, inhaling dust as I gasped in short, shallow breaths between shocks of pain. That wasn't supposed to be possible. I rolled to one side and dry-heaved at the sand, over and over again.

Goddamn redneck bitch.

His pony

A sudden storm of dust blew towards me and coalesced into Discord's face. I could see the blood-red dust-eclipsed sun shining through him as he hovered above me, grinning gleefully. That's right, he said. You hate her. You hate all of them. Not because they're beautiful and scorn you, or privileged intellectual snobs, or idiotic party animals, or narcissistic fools, or stupid idealistic do-gooders, or small-minded rednecks. Not that those aren't good reasons. But that's not why, is it?

I struggled to my feet and shook my fist at him. "You're worse than any of them!" I shouted, then broke into a coughing fit from the dust.

Oh, I don't mind if you hate me. But you don't.

It was true. I could shake my fists at him, but I didn't know how to hate him. Hate needs something more than a reason. I fell to my hands and knees. The sand still burned, but I was too tired to stand. I closed my eyes, willing the vision to disappear. But I could still feel his thoughts boring into my brain.

Because I'm just like you. I hate them too. They're so damnably happy. Not a false, painted-on happy. Not a shallow, glittery happy like the sparkle ponies. A deep-down, full-body, self-assured happy. You'll never know happiness like that. You'll never have friends like that.He raised the insides of both eyebrows and pouted. And it isn't fair, is it?

I opened my eyes and looked up, straight at Discord, willing myself to see reality, focusing on him in a way that I knew would force him to vanish.

He didn't.

He raised one impossibly-long eyebrow impossibly high. Poor little brony. You thought you could be like them, just by watching their show? Thought you could become likeable? Thought a bunch of phony names on websites could be your friends? Thought you could become good? After what you've done? That's so pathetically stupid, I think I feel tears coming to my eyes. Any moment now. Oh, wait; dragons can't cry. Thank goodness; that would have been embarrassing.

But look at me, going on and on when you still have one more pony to see. You've saved the worst for last!

Dammit.

Oh yes. Toodaloo! But don't worry. I've got a feeling we'll meet again. He faded back into the everpresent blowing dust.

Why do I hate Pinkie Pie so much?

Think back to your first years of college. At night, at the bars, there's always a group of girls, 18, 19, maybe early 20s, staying together in a bunch, dancing, shouting, smiling at each other, cutting down any boys who approach them, not out of meanness, just for fun. Picture one of them now, slamming back a $12 sex on the beach bought for her by some nerd she'll never speak to again. If she wants male company, she lets her eyes roam around the room, and picks one out (not you), and sometime after midnight she'll touch his chest and smile at him and let him know he's the lucky one tonight. If she doesn't want that tonight, there's always tomorrow night. She giggles and raves about shoes and screams and whines if the DJ doesn't play her very bad bubblegum-pop loud enough that she doesn't have to hear herself think. She never thinks about anything, because she never has to. There will always be another party, she'll always be invited, and there will always be a hand reaching out to fill her glass.

That's the real-world Pinkie Pie.

So I looked at the dust swirling in front of me, again, and—

"SURPRISE!" A pink face jumped up from—out of frame? I don't even know. I screamed and stumbled back.

"Well I guess it's not really much of a surprise since you knew I was coming, but we can try again if you come to Ponyville and we throw you a surprise party!"

I stood and stared open-mouthed at the pony grinning back at me from two feet away, very real except for being a Burning-Man-bright pink. This trip had gotten way out of hand.

"Out of hand? Oh, I get it! Like out of hoof! That's funny! See, you're not just a boring McBoring pants. You can be fun if you try! But you just walked by about a gazillion different really good parties to come out here and be by yourself in the desert and you don't even like it here and that's just silly!"

I backed off another step. "Pinkie," I said, "I hate parties. I hate parties more than I hate standing alone in the desert."

Pinkie stopped hopping up and down and peered at me. "Are we in bizarro world? Do you hate ice cream and sunsets and love paper-cuts and the sound of a hoof scraping on a chalkboard?"

"No, Pinkie. I just hate parties. They're fun for you because you're fun. A party is just a competition to see who's the most fun according to the universal funness and coolness standards set by a panel of cheerleaders, frat boys, and stoned high-school students. And, guess what, I always lose, so I don't want to play anymore."

Pinkie frowned and cocked her head to one side, trying to take this in. She smiled again almost immediately. "I'll throw you a practice party! It won't be a competition, because it's just a practice!"

"Pinkie," I said, "I don't sing, I don't dance, and I don't party. Just leave me alone. You wouldn't like me."

She leaned forward with a challenging glare. "Bet I would!"

"Pinkie, I don't like you."

She drew her head back sharply and froze. Her mane went a little bit flatter, and so did her eyes. Then her mane bounced back, and she smiled yet again. "Ohh! So that's your problem!"

"What do you mean, my problem?"

"I'm sorry you don't like me. But if you'll come to Ponyville with me, I'm sure we'll find somepony you like! Maybe even two or three! That will make everything different. It always does!"

I was about to object that I couldn't possibly go to Ponyville, when I saw something behind her—a little bubble of Equestria, with a refracted view of fields and forests and shingled chalets, shimmering in the desert before me like a snow-globe.

Equestria.

Pinkie turned and galloped toward it, and the bubble wrapped around her somehow and I could see her just inside, her outline wavering a little, like I was looking down into clear waters being stirred by the wind. I followed her, slowly, and reached out to touch the border in the air before me.

Pinkie hopped up and down between her front and back hooves, and her voice came through, a little warbly but still clear. "Fluttershy will introduce you to her animals and Twilight will find a book to help you and Rainbow Dash will fly circles around you and I'll throw you a party and it'll be like the first book and the first flight and the first party ever because you've never ever been there before!"

I tore off the goggles, felt a cool, moist wind blow on my face, fell to my knees, reached out, and touched grass.

"Come on!" Pinkie said, her voice turning more urgent. "Hurry!"

I drew my hand back. "I can't," I said. I tried to wipe the tears from my eye with the least-dusty part of my handkerchief, but the desert had dried me past being able to cry, and my face was dry. "I can't do it, Pinkie. I'm not fun. They won't like me."

Pinkie shouted something at me, but I couldn't hear it over the wind, and as the scene faded and the bubble shrank I saw she was crying, and I wondered, for a moment, whether maybe she had really meant everything she said after all.

I put the goggles back on and licked my lips. I felt Discord's presence returning. I was sure I was going to die. I just wanted to be away from that face when it happened. I turned away and started walking, but it was too late. I tried to stand, but collapsed back to my knees. I turned and saw Discord's face close behind me, leering. It was a terrible face, just skin and scales stretched taut over seething hatred. I would rather be alone for the rest of my life than have to look at that face.

He placed one claw under his chin and looked up at the sky thoughtfully. Given the circumstances, that could easily be arranged.... But you're not dying yet, my little pony. You failed all my tests with flying colors. I have plans for you.

There was a roaring in my ears, and an enormous black shape loomed up suddenly through the dark spinning dust cloud in front of me, charging at me like a buffalo, like a train. It came to a stop inches from me, and I fell over backward. Only when I started laughing did I realize I was wearing the same mad grin as Discord.

Because you're my pony now.

"Hey, man," somebody called out very far away. "You better get on board."

I don't know whether I stood and climbed on, or whether someone carried me. I remember guzzling down an entire bottle of water. I was riding inside the giant mutant vehicle that had nearly run me down, sitting next to the driver. Enormous loudspeakers above us blared Led Zeppelin's Kashmir into the desert, the first real music I'd heard in the continual synth-pop assault I'd endured since coming here. The sun beat down on us as mercilessly as if the dust storm had never been.

All I see turns to brown, as the sun burns the ground

And my eyes fill with sand, as I scan this wasted land

He dropped me off at Esplanade and 3:30. I made a beeline for the nearest bar, asked for some water in my canteen, and guzzled that too. A couple of the patrons looked at me sideways, so I dug around in my robe's pockets until I miraculously found an unused glowstick and dropped it in the gift jar. One of them smiled and gave me the thumbs-up. Fuck them.

Then I walked back to camp, took down my tent and threw everything into the rental car and drove back to Reno, where I took a room at the Circus Circus and crashed for twelve hours. I had no business being with the burners. All I could do was poison them with my bitterness. I have no business being here, either. I just can't quit it.

Shrooms don't lie, and they don't tell the truth. They just show you what you already believe.

Was my poison sweet?