Alrighty then. Time again for some more Tales of Interest. Tonight's episode, Rocky Mountain Fur Con! An uneventful drive out, really, apart from its length. Losing my stop in Canton was a big change in the character of the trip. The first jaunt out to Aurora was over eight hours, so quite a trip. It went well though, apart from the torrential rain that happened only during the couple minutes wherein I had to stop for fuel and at no other time. Fuckin’ cheeky sky gods. All that driving made for a lazy day on arrival, certainly, and it set the tone for a few more lazy days to come. One we got to talking I realized that I’d devoted so much time to getting the itinerary worked out and making sure that I could actually be in the place that I meant to be in at the appropriate time I gave comparatively little thought to what I’d be doing whilst there. It was a little late to revise that though, and there’s nothing wrong with a few quiet days to catch up with an old friend. I suppose “uneventful” is a better term than “quiet”, seeing as my friend’s daughter has reached an age where screaming makes up the overwhelming majority of her communication.

I got to add a second entry to my list of Tiny Dogs I’ve Met That Weren’t Unrepentant Assholes. They’d gotten a Dachshund recently and it was also at an extremely high-energy age. Everything she did was full-throttle weaponized adorableness. She would zip all around as fast as her comically short legs would carry her at the slightest provocation and was constantly clamoring for attention. She knew that jumping up on the couch was a great way to get my attention, and her attempts to make the leap were quite reliably entertaining. In the end though, she got into my suitcase and chewed up my good belt, so I’ll call it a wash.

We never did manage to come to a consensus on which movie to see, but the one big event that really did work out was laser tag. They have unlimited play for $12 available on Thursday, so we got to have a good long session of that. We got our money’s worth, certainly, playing for several hours to our utter exhaustion. I suppose my next Incredibly Short List would have to be physical activity that I enjoy, so I’ll add laser tag on there right underneath bounce castles and above… I can’t think of another example actually, so I’ll just leave it at that.

It’s always such a stark contrast to visit this guy, what with his family and his two jobs to support that family, he’s always got something going on. Even when he’s doing everything he can to spare some time, I still find myself sitting around at his place using his X-Box to watch Youtube videos on his big screen TV. Not a bad position to be in, certainly, but also not what I came there to do. I didn’t exactly keep tabs on what time was spent doing what exactly, but I had enough time there to finish Crash Course World History and get all the way through American History too. So yeah, I had a bit of time to myself. I guess all the sitting around and doing nothing is appropriate, seeing as I’ve been doing a lot of that these days.

After that I was off to Ace’s party. That was something of an odd scenario, as I was at a gathering of several dozen people, of whom I knew precisely one. Of course that matches the con dynamic pretty well. The people that I know ratio at a convention is usually about 1:400, so when looked at from that perspective this was actually a much less burdensome situation. I made out pretty well there, overall. I managed to burn up an entire day without really noticing, so I could safely say that it was a good time. Ace’s friends are a pretty even mix of furries and gearheads, both pretty easy groups to get along with, even if I have very little in common with the latter. One of them brought a Corvette Stingray with them, and on numerous occasions they would literally say “Hey, let’s go look at the Corvette some more!” and they would all go giddily flock around it to fawn over their idol for another ten minutes. Didn’t really get that at all, but then we got drunk and played volleyball with a comically large inflatable ball, so that I understood and we all got along again.

Two fursuiters got properly decked out and added a little life to the party. Tiggy and Doctor Fox were both excited to have a chance to bask in the adulation of the crowd. Tiggy made the very generous but possibly irresponsible decision to let some of the drunk girls borrow his head, the resulting hilarity was well worth the risk. Strange how generous I am in assessing risk when someone else anted up for it. I was a fair bit warm even though I was just wearing my human disguise, so I greatly admired the resilience of the performers. I sat for a while next to each of them pointing a big box fan at them, since I felt bad for them and I wasn’t doing much else useful. Doctor Fox mumbled some exasperated gratitude as he leaned into the stream of air. I sat and chatted with him for a little while as he recovered. It was a nice chance to get to know him a bit and… wait, are we holding hands? Ah well, whatever. It’s in fursuit, it doesn’t count. For some reason that only would’ve been weird if he’d lacked claws and had the correct number of fingers.

I’ll have to add that one to the bookjacket of my memoir. “You know, if not for the big cartoon animal costume that would’ve been really awkward.”

The Town of Carol Stream certainly knows how to throw a welcome home bash for a veteran, I’ll give them that. The whole yard was lined with little American flags along the curb, which of course everyone knocked over when they were getting out of their cars, but you know, good thought. We got a visit from the Red Bull Beetle, bringing refreshments for those of us dissatisfied with their inability to hear their blood pounding in their ears at all times. The two Red Bull girls parked in the spot that I had recently vacated when I noticed that it was next to a hydrant. No one was particularly worried about it as the police presence in the sleepy little town was scant at best. And then of course eight police cruisers and a couple fire trucks showed up.

Like I said, this place really knows how to welcome someone home. It was all for Ace’s dramatic and very temporary return to his roost. That was a real unexpected treat. We did lots of photos with the whole squad, did competitive breathalyzers and got pictures of us being thrown into the back of a squad car. You know, all the things one usually does when they encounter the police in a context other than having just broken the law. And for the record, yes, one of the officers did tell the Red Bull girls to move their car. I was just blown away by that whole production. I get a few free drinks at the American Legion now and then, but damn do these guys put on a show. I suppose it’s fitting that my and Ace’s respective welcomes mirror our respective enthusiasm about the Navy.

Speaking of the Navy, Ace took on the mantle of the time-honored tradition of forgetting that your tolerance ebbs somewhat when you spend three months at sea without drinking a drop. I got to sit back and watch the most entertaining progression of him going through happy drunk, silly drunk, emotional weepy drunk, and holy-shit-what-did-I-just-do-to-myself projectile vomiting drunk. Yee-Haw! Anyways, he’d asked if I’d like to come with him to autocross the next morning and a concert that afternoon and I’d said that I’d take him up on it, even if it now looked like he’d be offline for at least a day, if not two. We managed to stop him just short of hospital drunk, so he was not in the best spirits. Though he certainly had the best of spirits in him.

Even though I was relatively certain that the next day would just be me saying my farewells to a friend doing his best washed-up corpse impression, I elected to stay the night there. I’d been there a lot longer than I’d planned to, and that would have me arriving in Ohio between midnight and one in the morning. Seeing as my friend in Oxford had to work the next day, I’d presume he would rather that I not do that. It got me out of renting a room and it gave me the chance to say goodbye in a way that Ace actually had some statistically significant chance of remembering, so I went for it. I even got a mattress instead of a couch by virtue of its intended users already passing out in other locations. They also had a mixed-breed small dog of more typical small dog demeanor, but he was tolerable for the most part outside of waking me up at odd hours and his excruciating habit of eating my leg hairs while I was still wearing them.

In any case, the next day Ace was still throwing up which was… kind of impressive, actually. I took that as my confirmation that he wasn’t going anywhere today and got ready to leave. I was in no particular hurry, mind, but I was surprised to see that he’d actually gotten himself together enough to head out to lunch. He even felt like going to the concert afterwards. Apparently staying drunk through the night had enabled him to stave off what ought to have been quite a crippling hangover. A feat that only professional drunks can pull off with any reliability. We rounded up a couple of his old friends and headed out to a fair that was in town for the weekend.

The band that he’d taken us there to see was a local operation called 7th Heaven. A pretty solid group of traveling minstrels, really. It’s nice to hear a band with some good fundamentals. Diction, tone, and musicality, all very good. You don’t see that often enough these days. Performance has gotten to be too much about fancy effects and stage spectacle, the actual good music part of the performance has gotten left behind. The best was yet to come though, as after their opening set they got to the 30 Songs in 30 Minutes Challenge, which is very much what its title would suggest it would be. They segue through the best parts of thirty old classics far faster than should be possible. I’d thought that it would be a silly gimmick, but the whole thing was extremely well put together, and the way that they made all those different styles of music mesh together smoothly was quite impressive. They even did plenty of songs that I knew, so I found myself singing along at a number of points. It was enough to catch the attention of the band, it would seem, because I got one of their albums when they were handing out free ones to first-timers. The heat had withered us by the end though, and so we took our leave.

On the way home, Ace thought that he might check in on how the autocross event was going. Even though he couldn’t compete on account of his innards still being pickled that morning, he knew a few people there, so it was worth visiting. With this inspiration came the noteworthy complication that he didn’t know how to get to the event from where we were. You’d think that getting to the point where we could see it from the highway would be the hard part, but that’s not how the American highway system works. I was content to sit back and let this slapstick play out at first, after all, what use would I be? I did end up helping some in the end, as I brought to the table some useful skills like reading roadsigns and recognizing places that we’ve been before in our search. In any case, we made it and got to see the fancy obstacle course that they had set up in a big parking lot of a stadium.

I’ve likely mentioned before my profound indifference to motorsports, so it was fair to say that my enthusiasm for this event was lukewarm at best, tepid even. It may be a bit hypocritical of me given how subdued most of my hobbies are, but ‘Yeah! Racecar, go fast!’ isn’t exactly my idea of a good time. Still, it was at the very least somewhat interesting to be able to watch the cars executing some pretty difficult maneuvers from so close by. This course was a lot more about control and handling than speed, with sharp corners and tight spaces featured heavily throughout. Tiggy had enough runs left for each of us to take a ride, and I’ll admit to feeling just a little bit of excitement at that prospect. After one run though, he said that having a passenger was throwing off his weight balance and he wouldn’t be able to take anyone else. And like the small child that I often emulate with my behavior, being denied something made me really want it. Even though I don’t really know what they’re on about most of the time, I’ve found gearheads to be a congenial and sociable bunch, so I went for it. I threw on a helmet and walked up to one of the cars to ask the driver for a ride. She seemed flattered that I was impressed by her machine and how she used it, so she said that I could hop in.

Going through that course was most assuredly worth doing once. There’s a lot of exhilaration to maneuvering at speed that you don’t get from simply going really fast. There’s tension and excitement, the ever present threat of knocking a cone over and feeling the shame that comes with even the slightest of errors. It’s a pretty good time altogether. The things that they do with these cars are also just damned impressive. They have these obstacles called garages that are roughly the size of two parking spaces arranged lengthwise. They have small openings at opposite ends of the long sides, necessitating their navigation by weaving through the thing almost sideways. Some of these things I couldn’t navigate at any speed, let alone racing speeds, and indeed, garages are impossible to traverse without going fast enough to swing the back wheels around and drift through the turn.

Regardless of what I think of car culture in general, there’s always a certain amount of fun to be had in watching someone that’s really good at what they do. That made it well worth the price of admission. And given that the price of admission was signing a waiver absolving them of liability if I injured myself doing this, debasing myself a little in front of a stranger and bullshitting my way through some gearhead talk while we waited for our turn, I’d say this decision had quite a hefty profit margin on it. Of course once I got back my true colors showed again. There was more gearhead talk among Ace and his friends that I was woefully unprepared for. I did indeed talk to the driver for quite some time, and my audience found it inconceivable that I wouldn’t have picked up an extensive dossier on the car’s design, performance capabilities and vital statistics in that time. If it’s just a little idle back-and-forth, I can sound like I know what I’m talking about with just about any subject. That’s something that you learn in the Navy quite quickly, as it’s far more useful than actually knowing what you’re talking about when your supervisors also don’t understand your job. When confronted with a direct question like what kind of suspension the car had or what the cylinder displacement is, it’s kind of hard to sneak around that question. Hell, I couldn’t even get past the easy ones.

“So, which car were you in? The Bel Air?”

“The one with the girl in it.”

“Yeah, but what kind of car was it?”

“I don’t know. It was the orange convertible that Claire was driving.”

“You learned her name but not the model of car you were in at the time?”

“Yes. I believe that my priorities were well in order, thank you very much.”

This sounds like a setup for a ‘one of the guys’ sort of joke, but that falls kind of flat given that I was the only person in our group more interested in women than cars.

After that we all went to Buffalo Wild Wings to fuel up before we parted ways again. They have Strongbow there, so I had a couple of them. The way everyone else was visibly sickened by the mere presence of an alcoholic beverage was quite a reliable source of amusement. I’d forgotten how much fun day-afters can be when you were once again the responsible one. I’d paced myself and stopped drinking early in anticipation of needing to drive out the previous night, so I got to lord my unpoisoned gullet and functioning brain over the rest of those assembled. Hey, ya gotta savor the little things.

After that I was on the road again. Once more quite an uneventful trip. I’m beginning to wonder when my luck will run out and I’ll have an ill-fated trip fraught with disaster, but for now these have been nice. The worst thing that happened was my new radio transmitter widget started to lose out to a local station. I’m thoroughly impressed with how long it took that to happen. It made it through a whole audiobook on the way in, so I’m very happy with that purchase. The remote is a little irritating to use, but I usually just tell it to go and leave it alone for a couple hours, so that never really comes up. The other fancy technical machine that I added to my car recently was also put through its paces. Fearing the toll-collecting disaster that happened last time I was in Illinois and Indiana, I asked about the particulars at one of the tollbooths I stopped at. The teller there said that Easy Pass is compatible with I-Pass now. That’s a great convenience, to be sure. I took her at her word and used the I-Pass lanes. That was a tremendous convenience, even though something about the roadway architecture causes my GPS to register the toll plazas as left exits, leading to some confusing directions. I still can’t shake the feeling that I’m going to come home to a big pile of toll bills when I get home though. Here’s hoping it all works out.

A somewhat later arrival than planned made for a shorter visit than I’d anticipated, but that’s fine. Thanks to the modified itinerary I had a second chance at this destination after the con. My Navy friend was settled in enough by that point to drop by for a visit and hang out with me and my high school friend for a bit. I wasn’t sure how that meeting would go, seeing as we’re talking about two rather different social spheres here, but it went quite well. We’re all of similar sentiment and sensibilities, so we got along quite well. I even found out that we all play Hearthstone, so we got to do that together. Games of various sorts filled in the rest of that day and the next, with going out for meals in-between. We played the old standbys of Munchkin and Betrayal at the House on the Hill, and also some Monty Python Fluxx. I didn’t care for that last one too much, actually. I like Fluxx, but Monty Python fans are rabid practically by definition, so the game wanted a lot of knowledge from me that I didn’t have to give thanks to the many years separating me from my last viewings of Monty Python’s Holy Grail, Life of Brian, and Spamalot, the only pythonesque things I’ve ever seen.

Lastly, we all went out and saw Guardians of the Galaxy. I figured I’d give it a look because I hear that the Twitbook and the Facetube and whatnot are all abuzz about it. Really, if not for all the positive word-of-mouth I wouldn’t have had any inclination to see it. The trailers make it look like a whole lot more incongruous fantasy nonsense wrapped in insubstantial spectacle and special effects. I don’t know what’s more offensive, that filmmakers believe that flash and glamor are the only things that we’ll get people to see a movie, or that they are not entirely incorrect in that assertion. In any case, GotG was a pleasant surprise in many respects. They made a lot of really solid casting decisions overall. I don’t know how necessary it was to bring in Vin Diesel to say “I am Groot.” Sixteen times, but elsewhere they did a fairly good job. The choice of the Wreck-it Ralph/Stepbrothers guy for the well-meaning security guard was excellent, and Glenn Close found a good fit in her military commander role. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen her in a role that wasn’t soul-rendingly evil.

Judging by the title and trailers, I was expecting this to be some more samey, bland, big-goddamn-heroes, stalwart savior of the land stuff that I’ve seen a million times. Granted, the ragtag group of adventurers isn’t a new concept either, but they did it very well in this one. My favorite scene was when our heroes had been imprisoned and the jailers were going through their dossiers. The warden commented “What a bunch of assholes.” Which nicely encapsulated the group dynamic, really. The perennial favorite, and not just among furry circles, was Rocket Raccoon, and I can easily see why. He brought that grounding element of realism and practicality to the more hammy and clichéd scenes, keeping me from tiring of the tropes and making me stay invested in the movie. All around it was a really fun experience, and I’d highly recommend the movie.

The next day I got up at sonofabitch o’clock in the morning to be obnoxiously early for my flight, as one must in these trying times. I suppose I can credit the Navy with making getting up really early a great deal easier. Though I still take issue with their methods and believe that the final benefit was in no way worth what I endured. In any case, I got to the airport and got my car parked in what I thought was good time, but it would appear that I underestimated the needlessly bewildering design of the Cincinnati airport. I’ve never seen critical services arranged with such a vast vertical separation between them. The floor I came in on had nothing of use that I could find, and after wandering around enough I saw the security checkpoint one floor above, and for the life of me I couldn’t figure out a way to get up there other than taking the escalator down a floor, and then taking the two-floor superescalator up again.

Oh, and in all this time I never came across a single goddamn baggage check counter. Usually you can’t not find those things. I still don’t know where they hid them and it’s a mystery I may never solve. By then I was pressed for time, so instead of doing something brash and unreasonable like asking for directions, I just took my checked bag through the checkpoint and to the departure gate, where my keen intuition told me that my plane would be. Bitch about air travel all you want (I know I will later), but they do take care of you if you just have a little patience and tact. All I had to do was go up to the gate and tell them I fucked up and would they please help. I was fully expecting to pay extra, but since I’d paid the baggage fee already they had no problem just tossing it in the hold and sending me on my way.

Speaking of fees though, holy mother of Christ are they in love with fees at Frontier Airlines! Checked AND carry-on bag fees, fees for snacks, a fee to choose the seat you want, oh and did I mention that you get bag fees in both directions when you buy round-trip tickets? I bought these tickets based on the fact that it was a direct flight and was only moderately more expensive than getting routed through the dark side of the moon like Delta and Southwest wanted me to. Nearly $100 in fees later I’m beginning to regret that decision. They’re fuckin’ snooty about it, too. I had one carry on and one checked bag, both of which were assessed fees that were charged to my credit card as “excess baggage”. How is ONE bag “excess”? Tricky bastards. Whatever, I still got to the location of my next furry con though, and on a plane with foxes painted on the wings, no less. Nevir came to pick me up at the airport since I’d managed to land just before he had to go in to work. Of course that meant that he ferried me to a rather empty house. That was fine by me, as I had just gotten up really early and time-traveled a bit, so I was in need of a little time to reset. A shower and a nap later I was starting to feel and perhaps even resemble a human being again.

Casa Nevir did not stay empty particularly long, as there was in fact quite a crowd living there. Lots of hasty introductions that I wasn’t too on top of in my hazy state. I remember probably half of the five or six names I was meant to learn, which is actually pretty good given my name-recognition track record. It was most assuredly a furry household, lots of activity and somewhat nerdy swag all about. There was also a large black and white striped lizard quietly pattering about the living room, periodically startling me by licking my ankles. He eventually got stuck behind a bookshelf and ceased to trouble me. He was back there a long time, but I’m sure he’s fine. Interesting pet though, to be sure. And like everyone else in the house, he has a Furaffinity page.

I was mostly uninvolved in the departure hullaballoo that the next morning brought. Ryoken, Nevir, Arashiin, and Vaisz all had a great deal of shit-get-togethering to do. I on the other hand, was ready to travel at a moment’s notice, seeing as I was already traveling. I did get a little behind thanks to some complacency born of hearing “Okay we’re leaving in a few minutes.” Every ten minutes for an hour or two. We still got underway in good time though. Not that I was particularly worried about it. I knew practically no one at this con, so I figured I’d be at a loss for a way to fill in the time before the con started. I’m not often wrong thanks to my expansive skillset and impeccable judgment, and it is even more seldom that I am glad to have been mistaken. And as it turned out, almost first thing on arrival something to occupy my time with all but slapped me in the face.

And you'll have to wait until next time to find out exactly what that was because once again the heft of my prose has broken FA's brain. The exciting conclusion, also known as "the part of the con journal that actually talks about the convention" happens to be right here.