Following Anthrocon 2016 I was sick because, of course I was. That happens literally every convention. So really I didn’t think much of it and was just grateful that I didn’t have a whole lot to do for the rest of the summer. It went on for quite a long time though. Three weeks, easily. Like usual it was never bad enough that I thought to do anything about it though. It’s just a cough and nasal congestion. I’ve been to the doctor for those symptoms many times and the result is invariably that you wait an hour or two and get charged $85 to have them tell you that you should rest and hydrate yourself well. Oh THANKS. I was planning to do 200 pound deadlifts and shotgun 24 ounce cans of Rockstar energy drink until I felt better. Good thing I sought the sage advice of someone who went through like 12 years of advanced education to arrive at the conclusion that water and sleep are good for you. That attitude kept me going for a long time, as sarcasm always does, but the latent appearance of some severe chest pain led me to finally give in and go to the hospital. In part because I knew that would get me seen, and in part because I know that chest pain is often the last thing you feel before you die. It felt more like a muscle ache than anything else, but it was getting to the point where I couldn’t breathe without the stabbing pain sending me to my knees, so I thought I’d have it checked out. I know, what a wuss, right?

So the ER crew did their normal routine to make sure my heart was okay. That workup included a CT scan, which of course entails lying flat on your back with your arms over your head. You’ll never guess what was the MOST EXCRUCIATING position for me to be in at the time. Yeah, I much preferred the way they did it last time when they did the drugs and THEN the scan. (Remember kids, drugs make life easier!) Eventually the attending physician got around to looking me over and poked at it a bunch to localize the problem. Not only was that the NEW most excruciating thing, I found that the pain was much more localized than I thought before. He found one small, particularly agonizing spot that was unquestionably the source of the problem. It was quite a dramatic and conclusive search actually. A pretty quick sequence of "Nope, nope, nope, aaaaaAAAAAAHHHHH YES. THAT IS THE THING. Good job. Also you're going to have these fingernail scars in your forearm for the rest of your life to remind you of this occasion now please step away from me thank you."

The “poke a bunch of spots to see what hurts the most” protocol may not be very fun, but it turned up a fair amount of useful information. The problem spot was small, specific and very close to the surface, meaning that the fault was likely the muscles of the chest wall, and not the deeper, keeping-me-alive muscles. This admittedly relieving revelation brought with it a different, much more existential kind of worry once we started working through the diagnosis proper. Upon reviewing my history, the attending physician asked if I’d encountered any ticks recently. Apparently, persistent cold symptoms followed by sudden chest wall pain lined up pretty well with the onset of Lyme disease. Now I never found any with their teeth in me, but I did pull easily four or so of the little bastards off me during my visit to help out at a friend's ranch in West Virginia. So it would be difficult for me to claim credibly that I was entirely free of them in recent history.

That added a bit of a new wrinkle to the interminable wait for the results to come back. I’m hardly an expert on Lyme disease but I hear sucks a lot. Only one star on Yelp when last I checked. I’d really hate to have that. In due course all of the vital statistics tests came back normal. That means I get the trademarked ER “You’re not dying so get the fuck out.” That directive came with a coupon for more narcotics, so I didn’t mind too much. That solved the pain problem, which is what got me in there, and God willing the pain was the only problem that I had. At least I knew that I was out of immediate danger, so I could put up with the delays in getting my results back a little better. Perhaps too well, actually. Had I been more of an ass about it I might’ve actually gotten this shit pushed through in a reasonable timeframe. As it was I just tried to take it easy and not let my opiate-induced sense of invincibility cause me to make the problem worse. I felt better after a couple days, but I couldn’t tell if that was “healed” better or “codeine” better. If ONLY I had some sort of objective measure of my health. Something that would return a definitive go no-go result, like say some medical lab tests or something. Turns out those were something I’d have to fight for, and I’d run out the clock on my chance to do so.

You see, it was coming up on my time to fly away on my magical journey to Denver, in order to participate in my now-annual tradition of darkening Nevir’s doorstep in and around the Rocky Mountain Fur Con timeframe. So, with a plane flight coming up and an extended stay in elsewhere to follow, it would be extremely helpful for planning purposes if I knew whether or not I had a debilitating disease that lasts for many weeks. It all stems from my extended stay away from traditional medical support in order to go fight terrorism on a 90,000 ton floating airfield. When I finally took umbrage with the delay and went back to the hospital to ask just what the deal was with the delivery of this highly critical piece of medical intelligence they told me that “you’re not dying” is the kind of result that they can just tell to a patient, but blood test results are for whatever asinine reason NOT such a thing.

Apparently only a doctor is emotionally mature enough to take in, then properly distill and deliver such news. I however, found myself at the lack of a doctor. Thanks to departing from my homeland to go fight for glory and freedom the moment I completed the sacred trials and became a man, the person listed in my records as my primary care physician was still my pediatrician. Naturally my pediatrician’s office considered the results that they were sent for the ER visit of a 27 year old man to be a bit beyond their purview and discarded them. Since I learned all this on a Friday and my flight was on a Wednesday that left me with only two business days to obtain a physician and undertake the necessary ceremonial rites to make him my own to the extent that the hospital would respect his right to observe those test results and break the news to me. Such thrilling adventures I find myself at the helm of these days.

In any case, I did the responsible thing to do when one is trying to make an important decision such as selecting who is going to oversee your health for the foreseeable future, I picked the guy whose last name was alphabetically first whose office said they were accepting new patients when I called them. So first thing Monday morning I was off to Doctor Curtin’s office (His was the fourth that I had to call) to fill out the new patient information form. After that I went back to the hospital to fill out the other form necessary to transmit my test results to him. It was a gamble, but his office was a small one, so I was betting that their clerical mechanism was a fair bit less of a bloated, lumbering bureaucracy than the large area hospital. I figured that meant I could safely bet on the office paperwork coming across the finish line at least a couple strides ahead of the hospital paperwork. Tuesday afternoon brought many happy returns on that particular bet. Too bad I didn’t spring for the trifecta ticket. They had 220:1 odds on it that day, I could’ve gotten a down payment for a new car. Thought I’d go with the sure thing though.

Anyways, that victory was stopped in its tracks by the response from my new doctor’s office. I’d have to have an appointment in order to have the results read, and their first opening was nearly a week away. I asked if the good doctor was available to take my call and subsequently threw myself on his mercy to get the answers I so desperately needed. For those keeping score at home (please consider other hobbies) it’s been two weeks since my hospital stay that I’ve been having to fight to get a look at my own goddamn test results. I’m pretty sure if our coroners were more honest and didn’t care if they got fired we could truthfully reclassify about half of hospital deaths under the cause of “Obtrusive paperwork”.

When I explained my situation to my-new-doctor-whom-I've-never-met (in far less florid language than I use with you lot, I assure you) he understood and to my desperate plea that he end this interminable suffering by but simply undertaking the effort of flapping his face meats into the communication mechanism before him, he agreed. I didn’t have Lyme Disease, nor any of the other things they tested me for, which included quite a broad array of illicit substances. I’d be offended by the presumption of all the drug tests but I was about to pop some codeine and fly to Denver to go suck down a bunch of weed, so as it was I could barely even see the moral highground from where I was at the time. You win this round, presumptuous hospital admitting nurse! Now if you'll excuse me I have some different "high ground" to get to. (Get it? It's an altitude AND drugs joke. I'm clever! AND SUBTLE! Notice meeeeee!)

For those of you who lost interest or succumbed to inevitable creeping madness somewhere in that tirade, the Sparknotes version is that there was nothing wrong with me, at least not that modern medicine could divine at the level of thoroughness that my modest insurance provided me. Their best guess was a tear in my chest wall muscles. Which would go away if I took it easy for a while, but it was still at least a little distressing that it seemingly came out of nowhere. If I’d done something to hurt myself that’s one thing, but it just kinda happened when I was chilling out over summer break. Oh well, I guess I’ll just quietly stew on the mystery for a while and then die. It only remains to be seen how long “a while” will be and whether me dying will be related to this incident or not. I can’t wait to find out! Turns out it's at least two years, so that's nice.

So yeah, with my newfound anticlimactic and yet still existentially troubling revelation I took to the skies for parts unknown. Upon arrival I got to do battle alongside the legendary Sketch Knight and I was around for a few other get-togethers at Ryoken’s pad as is the usual pattern. It’s a pretty happenin’ place, I’ve found. I also got to head out on the town for Foxtrot, one of those nightclub “furry night” deals. Those are always disorganized, overcrowded mosh pits, but furries are super pro at overcrowded mosh pits, so still fun! And of course I got to drop in for one of Hyenablu’s truly legendary afterparties. Fun nights all around. They’re the sort of events that I really love, but it’s tough to make them sound interesting in a text recreation. I guess the most typifying quote of the night would be my response to whether I'd like to join in on several rounds of whippets. It was a mature and responsible "Uhm, no thanks. I'm gonna go smoke weed, like an adult." Boom. Responsibility! I ended up bitching out and not getting particularly high because I'm still testing the waters here. I've gotten so high that I couldn't sit upright from a single hit before, so I'm operating with a fairly narrow green-zone here and I much prefer the low-end failure mode than the high-end one.

Other than that there's not a great deal to say that has any appreciable dose of narrative fire. It's a phrase that gets overused a little, but you really had to be there. A shot-by-shot recreation of the conversations would be tedious, and a summary isn’t much beyond “Yeah, we hung out and chatted and drank and had snacks and stuff.” Sure it wasn’t balls-to-the-wall action (although I did get a few offers at Foxtrot…) but you need that kinda stuff in your life. Mainly it’s a chance to get to interact with some cool people, of which the furry fandom has many. I really wish I had what it takes to remember all these guys because they’re just great. Especially since at this point a number of them are starting to remember ME, so I feel a little guilty continuing to call them “these guys”. Hopefully I can just blame the time delay for it, which is also my fault now that I think about it, so that doesn’t really get me anywhere. Anyways, I got to see the usual crowd, Nevir, Loomy, ZinWolf, and Ryoken’s new flame Reggie Hycoon. And I made the acquaintance of Ruckus Wolf, Kaida Tiger, and Reynard L during later engagements. So congratulations to them I guess. You’ve got an information half-life in my brain of nearly two years! I don’t know what higher complement I could pay you.

The impression that those parties left has dulled somewhat with time, and as such I do regret not writing it down sooner. A memory that I will surely take with me to my grave though, is my time at Casa Bonita. I was astonished enough simply to find out that the place was real, let alone to actually set foot in it. I assumed that this particular institution had been fabricated for that one episode of South Park. That was the only place I knew the name from, or at the very least I thought that it was some pseudonym or affectionate parody of something that actually exists. I came to find that Casa Bonita is absolutely real and that South Park’s portrayal of it is actually not bombastically insane ENOUGH. In fact, despite having been there I find myself LESS convinced that it's a real place and not some kaleidoscopic fever dream produced by oxygen deprivation and my ham-fisted experimentation with controlled substances.

This bizarre creature was far more complex and baffling than I ever could’ve imagined something shoved into the dirty armpit of a Cold War era strip mall could be, and it was far more of a mindfuck than any of the drugs I did during my stay. Casa Bonita is a mystery, wrapped in an enigma, wrapped in a delicious flour tortilla and sprinkled with utter contempt for even the most fundamental physical laws that govern all of existence. I struggle desperately to describe it and dammit I am really good at describing things. The exterior was the sort of “Defunct K-mart spackled over to look like an old Mexican church” aesthetic that I was expecting. 3/4.7 stars at best. Yet my first impression when just literally walking through the door was that this place was a bizarre funhouse where somehow none of the incomprehensible nonsense reaching your eyes is an optical illusion. I think that one of the busboy's gender identities was "optical illusion" but everything else was ostensibly actually there. On Earth. THIS Earth even.

First of all the place was Tardis-level bigger on the inside, and of course also Doctor-Who-level lacking in continuity and constantly pulling nonsensical bullshit out of their asses. Even their line-management setup was crazy and over the top. Railings that looked to have been carved out of old church pews by a team of underpaid dejected street urchins lined the halls in complex patterns that probably looked like a cubist reinterpretation of the Nazca Lines from above. Most of them were set up so that you could skip past them because the crowd that night was apparently spectacularly underwhelming to both the staff and the structure, the latter of which I'm quite certain was also capable of observing and judging us. They had enough space there to put through two whole middle school field trips, or be invaded by Belarus. Perhaps both at the same time if Mrs Henderson’s social studies class and the 33rd airborne were willing to wait in the annex.

I was too disoriented by the negatively curved local spacetime to think too much about food. Honestly I expected that I'd be able to walk up to the counter and order "the usual" and they'd know what that was because I'd been there sometime in the future. I managed to blearily mime something to the cashier and ended up with food that was ostensibly mine at the other end of the quantum tunneling event that conveyed us to the main hall, so I'm calling a success there. A pleasant surprise, really. Usually I end up with terrible food after a volumetric probability wavefunction collapse. The wilderness guide conveying us to our seats moved with disquieting swiftness through the central hub structure, a speed and tenacity surely borne of many years of grueling survival training. You'd have to be quite battle-hardened to keep to your task and not be taken in by the sights and experiences surrounding you.

The main chamber of this expansive keep looked as though they'd taken the Great Hall from Hogwarts and extruded it vertically through an aperture with the footprint of an average Walgreens. All the strange grandeur and time-lost medieval décor was thus squeezed upwards and came to line the walls in row upon row of irregularly shaped trellises that tiered upwards like mountainside terrace farms that grow dining tables instead of rice. Subsequent to all this, whatever power-addled SimCity player was designing the place decided that the vertical integration of all the main dining space would make a perfect opportunity to add a giant waterfall that emptied into a pool on the main deck. I say 'deck' because 'ground floor' presumes that we were still in our dimension of origin, an assertion that I'd lost my confidence in by that point. It should go without saying that the waterfall came with the standard compliment of catacombs and winding lava tubes that traversed the rockface that it cascaded over, with palm trees, tropical sands, rope bridges and the usual bric-a-brac that populates automatically when one spawns a waterfall attraction in the middle of their Mexican restaurant. You know, as one does.

Now then I suppose I shall address the food, as this was, ostensibly, a restaurant. Had the food addressed me back somehow I wouldn't have been terribly surprised. Having lived in New York all my life I'm quite familiar with the dynamic of people from anywhere-closer-to-Mexico being supremely offended at what is referenced as "Mexican food" in the local parlance. I'm pretty sick of hearing about it because Maine and Alaska are pretty much the only places NOT closer to Mexico than we are, so I tend to avoid the subject. I've heard plenty of iterations on "You call this 'good Mexican food'? I don't know which of those three terms you've misused the worst!" Okay, I get it. I'm sorry that our migrant day-laborers are Puerto Rican where I come from and we don't have any different term to describe what Chipotle is. (Chipotle is also, oddly enough, the subject of a far les complimentary South Park episode.) The same thing happens if you mention Panda Express in a place where actual Chinese people live. That's just the reality for me of growing up in a place with more diversity (and headcount) in its livestock than its citizens. (We have cows of ALL colors thankyouverymuch.) Plus it happens all the way across the map. Anyone who's even half a notch higher than you on the Mexican-food-quality/Mexico-physical-proximity scale thinks that what you call Mexican food is no better than instant gravy and Quikrete reconstituted with elk saliva and there's no escaping that dynamic, so I'm not really even going to discuss the quality of the food. Since it's me, you know that having ONLY this 300-word paragraph counts as effectively not discussing it.

Though I will say that it rated pretty high on my Mexican-authenticity-slash-state-of-matter scale, a correlation that I find helpful in quantifying such things. Basically the more "authentic" I'm told that Mexican food is, the further towards the liquid end of the scale it is, and the more difficult it becomes to identify its constituent parts. With this stuff, most everything could be mixed evenly by stirring my fork around, so points for consistency in everything's... consistency. It could be eaten via fork but didn't have the constitution to hold the fork up. So that's pretty liquid and thus, super authentic I guess? Anyways it tasted real good and I put it all away with great satisfaction as we resumed our efforts to plumb the depths of this latest strange spacetime anomaly we'd come across. The hitherto unmentioned fresh-faced Ensign that we brought with us had long since been killed dramatically so we knew that we were getting to the good part.

So yeah, after our meal, and the shows, because some form of dinner theater/sketch comedy/local qualifying diving competition/costumed deathmatch seems to be quietly simmering in the background on the main stage at all times, we decided to venture into the catacombs, because how could we not? Also the main stage is the waterfall and performers occasionally run past you shouting about pirates or whatever. I don't even have that much fidelity on that aspect of the experience because it was somehow the LEAST crazy thing that was going on at the time. Like, a scraggly homeless man in a quiet public library asking if you want a piece of candy in a hoarse wheeze would be pretty creepy, but swap the setting to a blood-stained mental ward that's alight with gunfire in the background and suddenly you barely even notice that dude. It's much the same with Casa Bonita's labyrinthine and apparently non-Euclidean floorplan. When the mere existence of the structure itself is some kind of dent in the basal nature of reality, the guy in a gorilla costume chasing a girl in a bellydancer outfit off a cliff kind of becomes background noise after a bit. Don't worry, she fell in the pool so she was fine. Unless she never existed in the first place, which is a caveat that applies to just about everything I experienced there. I was at all times prepared for a dramatic zoom-out while the Twilight Zone narrator enumerated our strange and quasi-ironic fates.

So yeah, from one of the upper echelons of the table trellises (trellii? Treleses?) we stumbled straight into a video arcade, confirming my theory that the local spacetime flux caused certain portions of the structure to exist in different time periods. None of us much fancied the opportunity to blow a couple pounds of quarters trying to beat "ASS"s high score on Donkey Kong Junior, so we proceeded through the arcade to emerge in the like... downtown area, I guess? It's really hard to describe the shape or purpose of anything because I have no references for what the different areas consisted of or even a general concept of their shape. The area was laid out more like a World of Warcraft dungeon than a restaurant, and these interstitial transit areas looked like an indoor version of a chintzy state fair designed by Dr. Seuss that moonlighted as a highly festive fallout shelter. Somehow the different levels of the structure stayed up despite none of them really agreeing on a single vertical plane to exist on. Many of the levels just kind of sloped gradually into one another in the many grand causeways in front and secret passages in the back, such that it was easy to lose track of your exact elevation relative to your starting point. I'm convinced that we reached the edge of the map and wrapped around at one point, because I have no other explanation for the shape of the circuit we made. In no way did the total displacement of our path integral form a closed loop unless there was substantial clipping at the edge of this pocket dimension.

Despite the lion's share of the trip being dedicated to exploration and getting repeatedly lost, I don't think we saw half of that place. There was always more to discover, even if all you were discovering in that direction were MORE huge dining halls. Suddenly the huge-capacity line management glyphs that were traced out in the entryway made a bit more sense. They could feed a platoon in here. That platoon would need huge combat logistics coverage so that they didn't lose anybody, but they would be well accommodated. Little shops and attractions dotted the landscape as we journeyed past all the other temporally-displaced artifacts that littered the timeways. I found a giant old radio at the end of one hallway that I of course flicked the switch on, figuring that at the very least some kind of secret passage would open. The silence confirmed that it was just for decoration, as one would've reasonably expected. Then the ensuing roar of static reminded you to check reasonable expectations at the door because the gap was merely a delay for the vacuum tubes to warm up. That or the damn thing was haunted. I didn't stick around to figure out which. I don't know how many old supermarkets had disgorged their stock of gumball machines and other coin-operated viscera here, but it had to be at least a decade's worth. There was even one of the mechanical horses that bobs back and forth if you put a quarter in it. That one later went on to become famous in a fun sort of way. We wandered through a souvenir kiosk that went back far enough that we got separated, but we met up again at the haunted cave and went through there back to the saloon. It sounds like I had a dissociative episode in the middle of typing that sentence but that was a sequence of events that totally happened in exactly that way.

When closing time was on the horizon and all of us were exhausted from exploring, we resolved to make for the exit. A scant 40 or 50 minutes later we were out of there. We had to take a brief pause for the necessary quantum translation events such that we were no longer moving at an oblique angle with respect to earth's native spatial dimensions and we were on our way. I'd say that I'll never forget my time at Casa Bonita, but I'm not sure of that. I'm not sure of anything anymore. It's likely my brain does not function the same way after leaving as it did when I entered. In a way I may have experienced that matter-transporter death conundrum in that one cannot be truly reconstituted from your constituent molecular pattern without necessitating the destruction of the original image. But, in all, it was certainly a mystery worth investigating. Even if most of what one discovers in there is naught but the madness that has quietly seethed deep within you all along.

Well, at this point I've completed the mission that I set out to with this journal, and relayed to the people who are attempting to assemble my psychological profile after I hijacked that Soyuz craft some insight into what drove me to forsake this ruined, treacherous rock for the cold embrace of endless oblivion in the stars. So I guess this is the part where I keep pushing buttons on my keyboard and see where this momentum takes me. Sounds like an awesome plan. Let's get this trainwreck a rollin'! So the next adventure after the Restaurant at the End of the Universe and attached Boundless Caverns of Time was our foray into the much more solid and less quantumly unstable Wailing Caverns. It's a national park founded around the eponymous cave system that I think I never paid back my admission for. Oh shit have I owed Ryoken $25 for the last two years? Fuck, this is why I need to write things down in real time!

Anyways, normally an undertaking such as this would've been rather exceptional, as one doesn't often get an opportunity for amateur spelunking in like manner. But honestly being cast down into the unceasing dark void of the earth was rather tame compared to the wormhole that we'd been pulled through on our last outing. And honestly that somewhat reset the meter and brought it right back to exceptional again. The place was very notable in its simplicity. You wanna walk through caves? Have at thee! Our guide regaled us with a lot of historical trivia about how the discovery of the cave made rich, and then utterly ruined the explorer who came upon it, as so many great discoveries do. And then ghost stories and the like, but mostly we just walked through the place and appreciated what a singular experience it is to be so deep down in a natural, unspoiled place like this. The quiet and darkness of the cave was a very dramatic contrast to my journey thus far. I'd liken it to going on six roller coasters in a row and then dropping straight into a sensory deprivation tank. Like, that's such a dramatic hard reset that I had to short the CMOS jumper on my brain to get it started again. I think its MAC address is still reading 00:00:00:00:00:00. Oh well, I set the date and made sure that the BIOS was still set to send a start signal to the cooling fans so it'll probably be fine.

While it was tempting to just do the old bit of startling people while the ghost stories were being told, I found it even more fun to undercut them with punchlines.

"The ghost usually does little things. Minor, unexplained disruptions. Knocking over things, making little rattling noises, snuffing out candles..."
"Leaving the coffee pot empty, claiming tour guides as dependents on its taxes..."

"The depths of criminal depravity that he sunk to in here have likely never been equaled on the surface."
"He later served four terms as governor of New Jersey."

"Terrified, she ran all the way out of the caverns and stumbled into the gift shop-"
"Where she remains to this day."

A lot of those got pretty solid laughs from those assembled. I felt accomplished. It's a little tough to lighten the mood when you're cloaked in pitch darkness underneath thousands of tons of rock. It was a good trip. Altogether I'd rank it among the best places to be buried alive.

So yeah. The con, then! Just in case any of you had forgotten what I was writing about this in the interim. I know I certainly did! Honestly it doesn't stand out that much to me after all I had to go through to get there, but I'll give it a go. This particular year's con may not be the most emblematic of that region's events, but it's still worth talking about a bit. I say that because this year we were at a different venue due to renovations. It's always interesting seeing a new venue react to a furry con. "Interesting" in both the gift and curse sense of the word. Places are just never prepared for us in so many different ways. I scraped an exit sign with my head in the hall and I didn't even have horns or giant ears or anything. Apparently I can see the future because I foresaw that being a bit of a problem and by the end of the con it had been knocked clean off its mount. So there was a lot of that kind of adjustment for the place that occasionally hampered things. This time around was also not particularly typical because this was the last year before the con had to be hard-reset in order to put down a fascist insurrection among its ranks. Now I know that sounds drab, but this was 2016. Fascist insurrections were quite rare back then if you can believe that. Regardless, that was all in the future. Or it was going to be in the future. It's your past now, but it was that version of me's future containing things that will have had already happened by the time you read this. Sorry. Lingering temporal distortions.

A small slice of time at the opening was actually used by me typing on my laptop in the lobby to finish my Anthrocon 2016 report, because at the time I still insisted upon finishing it before embarking on the next con. This was of course, the start of my great tapestry's unraveling. It was also an unusual year in that I'd elected not to bring my fursuit. Part of that was what an expensive pain it is flying with one, but I also had the consideration of the literal pain from my mystery wound in my chest, and my ongoing sickness. There was actually sort of a dip in the middle on that front. At the end of the con someone asked me if I'd come in with that cough. I responded as truthfully as I could "Nope, I came in with a different cough. But you know, shit happens." I'd tried to tell myself that lacking a suit wasn't a big deal and that I'd previously had fun at cons, this con even, without one. Its absence did still sting a bit though. Plenty of gaps cropped up wherein fursuiting would've fit in pretty well and probably been good times. Ah well, I dug that hole, I may as well sit in it because hole-sitting is a good low-strain activity for when you're injured and going through a key illness transition to a fresh new bacterium. Plus if I die down in here from all of that stuff they can just throw some dirt over me and be done with it. It's like killing yourself in a bathtub. Death is all about convenience these days!

I led with the Housepets panel, led by the guy who made that thing. It was a delightful little exploration of the unique kind of fame that the internet age has brought about. Wherein one finds someone who is popularly considered to be quite a success in his chosen field walk up in front of a group of his adoring fans and just say "Wow, people actually showed up. I was not expecting that." That humility is a beautiful and charming thing that just doesn't seem to hold up under the pressures and cocaine-addled hedonistic adulation benders that real fame appears to consist of, and I say that as someone with very few accomplishments to justify the extremely high opinion that I have of myself. In any case, that panel went really well for something that started with "Okay uh, let's talk about the thing I guess."

After that I got to have a chance to hit up my cellmates for this excursion. By this time I'd visited Denver on enough occasions to have an extensive network of underground contacts with which to secure lodging. Or maybe I just had Ryoken hit up some of his bros or something. I don't remember that well so I tend to just assume that it was the more cinematic one, as I do with most such moments of indecision. I had a good crew this time around, and having failed to acknowledge them was one of the things that motivated me to actually write this stupid thing at long last. So without further grandstanding to stall for time, I'll present to you my years-old first impressions of some people I've never seen since then. I'm sure they'll be thrilled. We've got Ejit the super cute bat, Lumas the freaky spiderdog, Apari the dog who had some dope-ass vinyl decals that he kindly shared with me, and Fictive Fox who... also exists in my memory in some way connected to these other folks. Anyways, we had a good dynamic there in that room, and I'm not just saying that because I got free leftover pizza basically every time I saw them, though I'm sure that helped. If that was a subtle conditioning mechanism to trick me into forming positive associations with you guys then bravo! Really, this was a period wherein this whole pattern of "throw in with a huge group of randos and instantly act like you're all best friends" was really starting to come naturally to me, and they were great sports about me plying my trade. I do hope to see all of them again and God willing I'll be coming back to this record such that I can track all you lovable critters down! In a like... friendly non-predatory sort of way. Unless you're into that, I ain't gonna judge.

Many of the usual con things happened. A fursuit parade, fursuit dance comp, fursuit charades, fursuit games. Naturally those probably would've been a bit more memorable if I'd had a fursuit but I've specifically called people out for feeling despair at experiencing the consequences of their decisions so I'm not gonna dwell on that bit for a second longer. 'The Amazing Pickles' was indeed pretty amazing with his truly unique comedy magic act. It kind of mirrors this con journal in a way. I've got a lot less content than usual thanks to this critically flawed stringy jelly computer in my head I'm using to bring up all this detail, so I've gotta play up the performance aspects of it in order to stay entertaining. That's basically Pickles' style as well. Delivered by someone with less stage presence who wasn't obviously having the time of their lives with it, this content would've been supremely boring, but he made a laugh riot out of it just because he believed in it, and made us believe in it to. "Pickles" is far to common of a name for me to successfully dig up a link for ya but who and where ever you are, top notch work to you! I went again to the performances and improv workshops of 'the Unmentionables' and was asked AGAIN if I'd like to join them. So apparently SOMEbody appreciates my sense of humor, MOM. I guess I'll just add that to the list of things pulling me towards this strange and magical kingdom in the sky. Or as Loomy says basically every time he sees me "So when are you moving to Colorado?"

I got invited to a party for Mavi, at which I'm honestly not certain whether or not Mavi ever appeared. That certainly does describe a furry gathering though. Plans made by and of furries tend to be more like general guidelines than law. We gathered, hung around for a bit, walked to a different hotel, found people, lost people, went for a spin in a hot tub, drank a bit in someone's room, all the while wondering where in the hell Mavi is. Ah well, such is life. You can't always succeed, but you can at the very least have interesting failures. Freefox's 'Free Can Cook' was once again an informative and delicious show, during which I learned a few neat tricks about pan-frying that I may not have survived college without. Other people who existed, probably, include Paintless Dog, someone called 'Pocket Monster' whose name is completely unsearchable for obvious reasons, and 'Fri Ri Jackal' whose name is unsearchable because that's probably not how it's spelled. Good job to those people for whatever it is they do.

Towards the end Srice the Deer got some QT with me and fulfilled the all-important requisite of giving me a place to put my stuff on the last day when I had to check out of my room but wasn't leaving yet. Always a contentious moment, that. You'd think he would be a little more searchable than some of the others but actually has a pretty spotty net presence. Here's my best guess for him. And that's really all I've got for the con. Phew, I'm glad the other stuff was so interesting because this is the quickest rundown of a con I've ever done. Maybe that'll make the other reports a little easier because they didn't have quite so many interesting ancillary activities. That ought to help me get over the tiny spastic episode that I just had looking it up and realizing that I've got SIX more conventions to talk about if I want to do this thing properly. Here's hoping that the time-based information-density ramp-up doesn't totally kill me by the end of that.

Oh also I did a weed before I left because I knew I'd have a job that forbid it again very soon and hey, when in Rome... light one up for Nero or whatever I don't know. Also also it was because they had edibles, which I've always wanted to try. I'm still on the fence about how my brain feels regarding weed, but my lungs definitely disapprove. That makes edibles a good fit, and I'd had their chief pitfall explained to me MANY times by MANY people, very few of whom I'd even requested that information from. Most every edibles story I've heard follows a similar five-act structure, that is to say:

1. Not high 2. Not high 3. Still not high 4. Not high 5. Oh fuck take me to a hospital.

The drug permeates your system very slowly by this vector is what they're saying. It takes easily an hour to start to feel anything, and by no means is that the last thing you'll feel from an average dose. So using weed in this way and not way overdoing it when you don't get instant gratification is something that requires patience, discipline and good impulse control. That's rather a lot to ask of stoners, so tales of folly are quite common. Here's one spot where I actually won't go into a ton of detail because I find people talking at length about being high to be insufferable at the best of times so I'm not about to be the one subjecting everyone to it.

I will say though that when I looked on the coffee table the next day there was a dosage report that was listed to the minute and to the milligram for the whole day. So not only did I stick to a starkly conservative dosing plan even while pretty baked, I actually wrote it all down in perfectly understandable metrics. There were also a LOT of doses on there. I ate a fair bit more than I'd planned to and probably more than is prudent. That's my guess anyways, I don't know my illicit-drug-based social conventions very well. That particular mis-step was a bit of a surprise to me. It's as though some unfamiliar element interfered with my decision-making process in some way during that period. Mystery, that. I guess I'll put down "you left me alone with the weed and I very slowly ate it all" as the obligatory disaster that always seems to happen when Ryoken leaves me in his house unsupervised for too long. I don't think I ever paid him for any of it either. Good God I am such a terrible guest, why do these people keep putting up with me? Hm, that sums it up pretty nicely actually. I could title half my con reports that.

Anyways, it seemed that the world needed to maintain balance or whatever, so I figured that I had to counter the powerful narcotics that I flew in on by being high on the flight home. It's only fair. And there you have it folks. All this stuff is what I found memorable about my most recent adventure into the Rocky Mountains, thus confirming how physically incapable I am of tamping down my word count. I mean, I didn't need more evidence of that but would you LOOK at this thing? There's like hardly any information in here and I nearly overran FA's word cap again! Oh well. It's good to be right even if you're right about something that infuriates you. Until next time, folks. Same bat-time, same bat-channel.