As we know from Jefe, this is what people say to you when you get to Burning Man. It’s also what the guayabera-clad staff of luxury hotels seem to have taken to saying to arriving guests, even when it’s just me driving up in my lub-lub-lubbing little blue Bug, with big sweat stains under the arms of my sink-washed shirt. It’s gracious of them to go through the motions, and it’s nice of me not to say something like, ‘Last time someone said that to me, they were naked and covered in glitter body paint!’

So right now I’m ‘home’ in what happens to be an extremely nice hotel. And I’m not just saying that because it’s free. I’m saying that because I’m blissed out from having done a cheesy faux-Mayan-ritual sweat lodge. This kind of thing obviously I generally resist. Especially in this setting, where the clientele is, at the moment, all employees of Ernst & Young, and this is just another piece of random exotica that has really nothing to do with Mayans today. Oh, but I’m forgetting Jose, the assistant to the woman who ran the show. He is Mayan, probably, but he’s just the glorified coal-boy (coal-boy being the kid, or sometimes the really old man, at the Egyptian shisha joint who brings you fresh coals for your pipe). Jose did the heavy lifting of the insanely hot lava rocks, and also rewound the tape of noodly Indian flute music.

Meanwhile, Nancy, a mysterious woman with a very thick Spanish accent, presided. She was a dead ringer for Jackie, a mysterious woman I know in Amsterdam, who also has a very thick accent, wears leopard-skin heels to paint the floor of her houseboat, and chalks up her mood swings to her gypsy blood. In other words, a familiar, likable kook.

This Nancy has been living on the premises of the hotel for at least seven years–she’s friends with the original builders/owners, who have since sold the place to Orient-Express, and also still live on the grounds. This seems kind of spooky to me, in a Scooby-Doo way: “Don’t go to _that_ part of the hotel, kids!” But this also means that Nancy has been doing a temazcal (the word for this sweat-lodge ritual) pretty much every day for seven years (and five years before that in Cancun, she mentioned). So she’s pretty mellow. And has dewy skin.

She also reminded me of another resort I visited on my last trip, a kind of high-end camping place with no electricity, where the manager had worked since he was a kid. I visited on the last day of the season, and he was getting a little wistful, like, where should he go from here? I kind of imagined him to be this strange delicate flower that flourished only within the bounds of this magical and special resort (and it is a fairly special resort–more so than the one I’m in now). But I ran into him in Playa on this trip, and he didn’t recognize me, nor did he seem to have any trouble dealing with the outside world.

But where is this story going? Only to me sweating a lot, breathing some herbs, and shaking some maracas and being reminded of weird chanting and cheering things we had to do at the start of every student council meeting in high school. Which is kind of the same ritual: something to clear your head and get you to focus on the present and the people around you. And then vote on what the senior class gift should be. In our temazcal, there was no voting–we just sat there in the dark and thought about ourselves–which wasn’t so much of a change of pace because I’ve been driving around in a car by myself with no radio for several days. But at least this time I could zone out without fear of driving into a ditch full of monkeys.

I also had this weird moment when I put my head down on the grass mat, to get some cooler air, and the mat smelled wonderfully sweet. And that brief moment of pure sensation, of the surprise…and also of knowing that during the next hour, I could always put my head down and smell that smell, if things got too hot and sweaty otherwise…it was just like being on drugs. Specifically, e. Which then triggered this regret at not having done more of that in those first couple of years, when my body could still bounce back and I had a good crew to do it with. Which I don’t think is exactly the emotion you’re supposed feel in a sweat lodge, as you’re supposed to be working out your toxins, not hankering for more of them.

….[an interlude]…

Hmm, funny I should say that…because into this very room comes a dude from the sweat-lodge asking me ‘do I party.’ Hilarious. It’s like an hour and a half past my bedtime, and no, I have no drugs to give him, and I doubt I can even muster the energy to have a drink with him because I know he’ll rap till dawn, while his tax-lawyer wife sleeps in the room upstairs from mine.

This whole story was going to wrap around to something about rich people needing rituals too, maybe because they’re not so into the drugs. But I guess I’m wrong.