The festival is a drug, and I am hooked.

It's taken its toll on me, to be sure: I'm on the verge of exhaustion most of the time, my immune system's perilously close to shorting out, my complexion has declared war on the rest of my face, and I'm considering sewing bear-trap-style steel jaws into my wallet to curb my spending.
I should stop. I really should.
But then I think about all the Thai transvestites. The Russian circus clowns. The penis puppeteers. The guy who hammered forks up both his nostrils and read a scene from a cannibal porn novel out loud. The adorable comedienne who handed out zines and homemade buttons and drew cartoons of shrimp. Kevin Smith, in the (quite substantial) flesh, and a bunch of British celebrities I've never heard of. And so on, and so forth.
And then I think about how all the stuff I've seen and done and experienced in the past couple of weeks is just a microscopic fraction of all the stuff I could be seeing and doing and experiencing.
And I just keep on coming back for more...