Ornithorhynchus Anatinus

(First, remember my opening paragraph from last night? My sweet story about the kissy baby goodness? Yeah. Guess who has a runny nose and a bad case of the Pissies? So, I give myself about 48 hours before I also succumb to both.)

I so heart Elly. I mean, just generally on principle, as should you all. But especially because, rather than berate me for my absentia here and my even less frequent appearance on her blog, she continues to graciously provide me with writing prompts for NaBloPoMo. Platypus, she says! Tell us about the platypus! And I live to oblige...

OK, this is the first thing I thought of (make sure you watch to the song!). Does anyone else remember this movie? We watched it over and over again at our babysitter's house. Looking back, I'm flabbergasted at the weirdness of this movie. Also, I still find the Bunyip song creeeepy.

I actually have two contact entries in my phone labeled "Ben Platypus" and "Steve Platypus." And, as disappointing as this may be to hear, I'm not actually friends with a couple of Platypi Brothers. A couple of years ago, at Burning Man, we had the luck to camp across the street from these two wonderful guys from the Southwest. By the end of the week, we were all like old friends. They sat out dust storms in our dome, we enjoyed the rarer gentler breezes in their shade structure.

MOTH had built a solar oven for the trip that year. We'd used to to great effect on a recent camping trip; it actually worked so well that we over-cooked our pasta. MOTH had made a yummy cornbread for our 4th of July BBQ, and we had visions of yummy, fresh-baked food in the middle of the desert. Most of our experiments panned out. However, on an impulse, we'd also bought a tube of cookie dough (wow, just writing it like that makes me realize just how wrong that clearly is...dough in a tube. And yet, mmmmm....). We thought, how cool would it be if we could make fresh-baked cookies out on the playa. Imagine, if you will, a long week of dust and heat and freezing nights and constant techno and all your meals come from either the cooler or the camp stove...and then? Warm, fresh-baked chocolate chip cookies. (To be fair, to me, you could put anything in that first sentence and follow it with "warm, fresh-baked chocolate chip cookies" and I'd be sold.) We set out the cookie dough blobs, set up the oven, and waited. And while we waited, we giddily hyped up our sweet snack to our new friends across the way.

We waited. And waited.

The dough got flatter, spread out, but failed to...solidify. After about 45 minutes, we gave up and gathered around the tinfoil contraption. A collective silent regarding, each of us looking at the dough, then at each other, wondering just how judgmental the other people might be. Finally, someone who might or might not have been me, said, "Screw it. I'm eating it." And we all dove in with dusty fingers, scraping the dough up and licking it off. Someone complimented us on our cookies, and someone else pointed out that these were not so much cookies as they were hot dough. Because I am my father's daughter, I said, "I used to play bass for Hot Dough." The group chuckled, and without missing a beat, Steve thoughtfully added, "I think I saw them play at that new hot club...Convection?" And it began: "I remember their comeback album, We Will Rise Again!" "Oh, yeah? I prefer their live album, Raw." "Is that the one with their hit single, 'Slow Rise'?" "You know what their fans are called, right? Doughboys." "I remember dancing to that great slow song, 'I Wish You Kneaded Me (Like I Knead You)'."

You know when you're laughing and laughing and you look around and you just have a moment of, these are my people? It's one of the best feelings in the world. Possibly my favorite.

So, when it came to the night of the burn, the night when the whole thing goes from a level seven party to a level twelve, the night where you stay up all night under the stars and you dance and you hold hands with everyone and you head back to camp at three, four, or five o'clock in the morning, knowing that you'll be up with the sun to pack up your entire camp...that night is always bittersweet, but I was more sad than not that night. The idea that these people lived so far away and that I wouldn't see them for at least a year...it depressed me. And, not unlike camp, every year at Burning Man you forge these crazy bonds with strangers, but other than the occasional e-mail in September, you don't actually keep that bond going throughout the year. And the next year, you get lost again in the swirling chaos of new people. And that thought made me sad. It's not everyone who appreciates the power of the pun.

Steve and Ben were going to the burn with other friends of theirs, and our camp was headed out together. I asked, rather forlornly, "But how will we find you out there?" to which Steve replied, "We'll have a code word! You shout it, we'll shout it back, and you can find us." Because I always like a good echo-location plan, I agreed. "But what will our code word be?"

That's right. "Platypus."

So, we all dressed up. We watched a whole lotta stuff burn. And we wandered around, calling plaintively, "Platypus?" But really? Fifty-thousand people, most of them stoned out of their gourds, and seven voices calling out the name of a semi-aquatic mammal? It was bound to fail. I don't know why we kept calling.

And then...

"Platypus!"

Seriously? "Platypus?"

"Platypus!"

I think it came from over there! "Platypus?!"

"Platypus!!!"


(See, and you didn't think I was going to get there, did you?)