For the Bee
Ultra-Progressive DJ Gets Legs Run Over By Cybetruck At Burning Man
It’s that time of year when the air goes thin and sharp and the sun slants through the last yellow leaves like it’s trying to signal we should stop whatever it is we’re doing and begin the business of winterizing.
So I drained the hoses. Wrapped them and stored them for hibernation. Cleaned the gutters. Wrestled the mower out (a fight I’ve been losing steadily since July). Cut back the Little Bluestem, the Big Bluestem, and every other prairie grass that has been impersonating a five-star stay for the bee(s). Felt very agrarian.
My daughter and I had just begun a lunch break, after having reorganized the garage into zones like we were preparing the space for a visit from Marie Kondo, when my neighbor wandered over.
We stood there a while, comparing notes on dwindling leaf coverage and the annual kindergarten congestion, both of which hit around the same week as the first frost warning. He’s a good neighbor— soft-spoken in a way that can lean into melancholy. He lives in that permanent state of being braced for the next inconvenience. Parenting, back pain, the current cost of ice. Naturally, after weather and joint complaints, we migrated to music.
As it turns out, he and I have a mutual friend: A DJ. The kind of DJ who corrects you if you say “DJ.” “Producer,” he will say gently, as though clarifying your choice of LaCroix flavor.
Anyway—I mentioned I might start to dabble this winter. And my neighbor said:
“Oh, don’t reach out to him yet. He’s not back to ship shape.”
I thought that meant sinus infection. Or possibly a breakup. You know — normal levels of unraveling. But he leaned in and whispered, in the manner of someone delivering the plot twist in a true crime podcast:
“You haven’t heard?!
Ultra-progressive DJ got his legs run over by a cybertruck at Burning Man.”
Apparently, between sets, our friend set off on foot across the Playa at night, and a Cybertruck glided by like a ghost and drove right over his legs.
He never heard it coming.
They’re too quiet.
I stood there in my work gloves, hose water still inside my shoes from draining the lines, struck by spiritual vertigo:
How do we live in a world where a man can survive the auditory assault in a Nevada desert, armed only with Watermelon Liquid I.V. and his artistic ambition, only to be felled by an electric pickup that looks like a geometry homework dare?
I never know, in these postmodern moments, whether I should laugh or pray.
The world can be tragic and ridiculous in equal measure. The trick, maybe, is to winterize the things we can and then try to smile kindly at the absurdity that keeps rolling over us in the dark.