Everybody I know is either in Black Rock City today, on their way to Black Rock City today, or packing to leave for Black Rock City today. OK, everybody but Rufus and Fredo “Two Fingers” Caronia.

Burning Man builds Black Rock City, Nevada, this week.

Liz Arden left Friday to get assure she would arrive exactly when The Gate opened yesterday at 6 p.m. Brockley Mann, South Puffin’s police chief, won a ticket from his radio station and is a “Burgin”; he arrives Tuesday. Ms. gekko left many hours before sunrise yesterday and should be setting up by the time you read this.

“I counted a dozen vehicles that clearly had Burners,” she said of her trip through northern Arizona and southern Nevada. “I also counted a half dozen dead javelina. Untold numbers of bits of unidentifiable critters.”

Here in Vermont, the state Highway Department scoops fresh killed deer off the highway, cleans out (most of) the glass and other bits, and gives them to the Department of Corrections. I’m thinking the inmates get more venison than the licensed hunters.

And mmmm, javelina. The other white meat. Clean up on Route 95, please!

Burning Man has ten core principles from Radical Inclusion and Radical Self-reliance to Leaving No Trace.

Anyone may be a part of Burning Man; an individual should “discover, exercise, and rely on his or her inner resources.” Perhaps most important is the commitment to leave no trace behind. They clean up after themselves and try to leave the playa in shape than before.

They have a word for that: MOOP (noun) — Matter Out Of Place.

MOOP especially applies to Black Rock City and its citizens. It can be anything: cigarette butts, bottle caps, glowsticks, fireworks, upside down art cars, excess laws. The Burning Man survival guide shows trash and recycling options for Leaving No Trace. Everything that came in gets packed out.

A lot comes in.

Americans in general have a lot of stuff and we are jealous of it. We have junk mail and catalogues and newspapers. Everyone keeps a couple of objets from d’art to d’trash that we could use to fix the furnace or make a collage. Closets overflow with really nice clothes that might be worn again. And who can resist a freebie? To have and to hold, baby.

Since the No Puffin Perspective™ often covers news and politics, here’s the part that makes this piece tax deductible: Today, scholars don’t even know how many federal criminal laws exist, let alone how many civil and tax and trade and regulatory mandates do. One of my clients, a Vermont attorney, has a law library of state statutes alone that fills a room.

This computer has 337,252 files listed in 45,071 folders. Of course 164,484 (in almost 34,000 of those folders) of them are for Windows 7, but still. Oh, and Rufus has more than that in his AOL inbox alone.

Burning Man is the most successful cleanup and restoration of any United States event monitored by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management although no trash disposal is provided or available on site. It is contained in one, solitary, remote, dry lake bed about 110 miles north of Reno, Nevada. We can’t all move our stuff to Nevada.

But. A little spread of radical self-reliance and MOOP cleanup wouldn’t hurt us.

337,252 files. That might be a good place to start. Right after I figure out what’s up with these shorts stacked on the living room window fan.