Actually not very brief, but oh well:

Yesterday, Rowsby's auction reached its reserve bid, so he's as good as sold (hopefully). I'm stewing in a tasty bittersweet broth surrounded by morsels of nostalgia, glee, pride, regret, inspiration, self-fascination (srsly how good does my butt look when it's Rowsby's butt?) and other flavors too subtle or novel to name. With Birds, I've sold a bunch of fursuits in the past three years, some with a slight reluctance, but none have made me feel this way because none of the others were MINE. He certainly won't be my last fursuit - something I never thought I'd say a few years ago - but he's my first, and he means a lot to me.

If I'd retained a single fursona - if Flip were still with us - he would be old enough to drive, smoke, vote and fuck with impunity. I've been in the furry fandom now for 18 years, but for the first 15 of those years, costumes were a blip on my radar not much bigger than the Poetry submissions on FA or gray muzzle meets at cons. I fondly remember the giddy jolt i received when a frisky cat groped my butt mid-hug at an early Anthrocon (99? 2000?) but apart from that isolated encounter, fursuits occupied the merest fringes of my furry attention span, be it online, at cons, or in my fantasy life. My attitude towards fursuits was indifferent at best in the early years. I wanted to interact with - to be! - an anthropomorphic animal, not a person dressed as one. By attempting so earnestly to bring my fantasies to life but arriving only at blank-eyed mascots, fursuiters only served to remind me how unattainable those fantasies were.

As I developed a healthier, more mature attitude towards furriness as both a social phenomenon and a personal affinity, I was able to appreciate fursuits as works of art. It was impossible to ignore that they were improving by leaps and bounds in terms of craftsmanship and character, but I still never felt compelled to give them much beyond approving glances at cons. The first suit who really captured and held my attention was Jasper, whom I met at MFF 2011. The appeal of the suit - the character - was instant and undeniable, as anyone who has encountered one of his many guises can attest, but he held special attraction for me because I'd been crushing on his maker/wearer,  birds, for the preceding 10 years. Over the course of that weekend, I upgraded my crush to love for reasons that ran far deeper than - but did not exclude - Jasper, and less than a month later I was fleeing a failing farm in Florida in an overstuffed car, heading back to California.

Another two months after that, and I was sitting in Birds' living room with a needle and thread: she needed help, and I need a job until the farm season started in the spring. It was exciting to be spending so much time with my lady, and in such a markedly Furry context. Was I actually getting paid to do furry stuff? Hell yes. Did I enjoy the work? Hell yes. Did I want a fursuit of my own? Nope. Still a bridge too far. With the prospect literally at hand, I toyed with the idea and even started thinking about what sort of suit I'd make IF I made one, but what for? Why make a suit for myself when I had no aspirations to wear one? I'd rather have the CA$$$H. Like so many other furries I've spoken to since, I didn't want a fursuit of my own until I actually WORE one, and that changed everything.

Yes, technically I'd worn suits before: modelling our Wild Life creations for fittings and photos in our living room, trying not to feel or look too awkward as I held static poses in front of a static backdrop. Very little about the process recommended fursuiting to me except the pleasant discombobulation that comes from looking into a mirror and seeing a cuddly critter staring back. Then in June 2012, Birds and I attended The Frolic, a monthly furry dance party in San Francisco. Jasper came, too, and in the moist and noisey hours leading up to my sloppy DJ set, I discovered what all the fuss was about. On the crowded dancefloor, blinded alternately by pitch black and flashing lights, deafened by throbbing bass and 2 inches of foam and fur, sanctified by my own sweat, I received my furry baptism. For half an hour I was reborn on a fuzzier plane of consciousness.

All I cared about was doing my doggy dance, and that singularity of purpose combined with sensory deprivation and alcohol really greased the rails under my ego. Then along came all this positive attention and slid the fucker out to sea. Even blind and blurry I could sense that the attitudes of strangers around me were different towards Jasper than they were towards the scruffy man with darty eyes inside. I would look in their direction and they would beam. I would step on their toes and they would beg my pardon. I would grope and grind on them without so much as a how do you do and they would grind back like they were trying to polish their balls on my fur. If I was thinking rational thoughts at all, they were most likely "These people would never act this way towards Brian, ergo I am not Brian, I am Jasper."

This sudden and undeniable transcendence of the confines of my own personality was tremendously enlightening. Most of you who have fursuited before - and not merely tried on a fursuit - can surely relate. Those of you who have not but aspire to... you aspire rightly. Get thee to a costumerie. Those of you who fail to see the appeal, as I once did... this is the appeal. I had previously brushed off costumes as plastic attempts at physical transformation without understanding or appreciating the subtler internal transformations that they facilitate. Further attempts to express the highly personal and highly variable qualities with words will only deepen my cliche quagmire, so let's get back to Rowsby.

Rowsby was a glint in his daddy's eye on the Frolic dancefloor, and by the next day he was a full-fledged fantasy. 12 hours after peeling myself out of Jasper, I was at Mendel's in SF looking for mutt fur. Technically - if distinctions between fantasy creations can be considered technical - Rowsby is a Wirehaired Pointing Griffon, a breed so scrappy that they look like wily mutts, though they clean up nice. As an upper-middle class kid from the suburbs who resented the upper middle class and the suburbs and had spent the last 4 years courting a soft, sentimental brand of romanticised danger and poverty, the notion of a pedigreed dog passing himself off as a mutt seemed an apt character choice.

But mutt-passing-as-pedigree fur is hard to find! At Mendel's, I found fur of the perfect length and texture, but it was black and white not the brown and white I needed. I took photos and placed a couple inquiries with Birds' and I's fur-buying contacts but got no leads. It would be another 8 months before we found a nice brown and white fur in the garment district in LA. It wasn't quite what I was looking for, but it was the closest I'd found, and if you can't find the fur you're looking for in the garment district... good luck. So I bought 4 yards. Cash. And then literally 10 minutes later, idly browsing the same store, I found a plusher, darker fur that was undeniably better suited to the cause, so I bought 5 yards of THAT, too.

Alas, by then another farm season was picking up, and my fursuit pursuits were limited to those that would earn us some money to help pay for Birds and I's upcoming wedding. And then the closer the wedding got, the less time there was for anything not wedding-related.. .And then boom, it's the fall, we're married, life is awesome, it's 4 months til Further Confusion, and then it's three months, and then two and then oh shit, if we want to have costumes for the con we'd better get cracking! Photos were referenced, concept art drafted, a muslin body suit constructed from modified parts of older dog patterns...

The character of Rowsby really started taking on shape as I drew the markings onto the blank muslin. Up until then, pretty much all the suits we'd been making (and most of the suits everyone else was making) had symmetrically-patterned bodies, produced by patterning out one side of the body and then cutting two pieces of fur from each piece of muslin: the obverse and the reverse. But symmetry is not the way of the mutt-impersonator; an asymmetrical body pattern was essential to developing and expressing the dog's potentially off-kilter personality, and I think the body is much more visually engaging then it might have been if the markings were simply mirrored.

I carried this concept into the hands and feet, deriving particular pride from the toe coloration. Birds' head is hand-carved and inherently asymmetrical, even though the fur pattern is mirrored, and the addition of a gold tooth and a slightly cocked ear helped throw him further off-balance. The subtleties really make this suit special: the way the dark fur patch on the right forearm lines up with the dark around the ribs; the shaggy brown of the butt creeping off one thigh but giving way to spots on the other; the deep canine curve of the chest; the ridiculously unsubtle crotch-spot; the way the tail bounces and wags and raises depending on how you move: all of these little details make me incredibly happy.

The head was still unfinished at 3am before we were due to depart for Further Confusion; Birds stayed up all night finishing the eyes, teeth, and neck while I grabbed a 4-hour catnap. On the road by 8am. I sewed the ears on Thursday night at the con over beers and then suited until i could hardly stand. He made a few more appearances over the weekend and garnered much admiration, but none admired him more than me. I couldn't pass a window without stopping to glance at my reflection. Reflections can only reveal so much, though, and it wasn't until photos from the con started cropping up online that I really got to appreciate how the suit looked when not seen through it's own mesh-covered eyes.

Ironically, my appreciation of Rowsby is currently at an all-time high, not (only) because of his imminent departure (Joni's whole Got til it's gone thing), but because the sale necessitated more photos. For the last week I have been browsing and re-browsing the photos we shot, ostensibly for the very practical reason of editing and posting them, but every time I have a cause (excuse) to pull them up, I find myself lingering on the task for much longer than necessary, transfixed. What a handsome doggy! But what am I looking at? Something I made, or something I am? Am I looking at someone I was, or someone I want to be (with)? None of those answers need be mutually exclusive...

Looking at the photos doesn't provide the same visceral sense of temporarily discarding my identity, but it does raise questions that help fuzz the lines a bit. It's a very pleasant side-effect to suit-wearing that lasts long after the initial buzz has worn off. Outside of cons and Frolics and other furry ground zeroes, suiting just isn't the same: wearing the whole suit around the house is neither practical nor comfortable, and in the absence of true believers looking at me like a big dog, it's much harder to feel like one. But looking back at myself as a big dog, I can conjure up little wisps of the magic that made the identity sleight of hand possible. I've got my photos. And now I've got my thousand words. So someone else can have the dog.

To whomever wins Rowsby... you're gonna be one lucky, handsome son of a bitch. Take lots of pictures.

Post script: Rowsby's still got two days left on his auction! You can help write the next chapter of his life story.