AKA My first furry convention as told in more or less 2200 words from the the back seat of a Greyhound bus while half-zonked and half-zoomed somewhere on Highway 5A

Before I dive into anything else, I want to give a shout out to as many people as I can remember from hanging out at Vancoufur 2016. The biggest possible thanks ever for being totally super amazing people go to in no particular order...  March-Dragon  beherit  scruffkerfluff https://twitter.com/haemish_smash https://twitter.com/Reweth https://twitter.com/tachiweasel https://twitter.com/FarPier https://twitter.com/zigstripes https://twitter.com/Accophox https://twitter.com/JesseR92 and at least half a dozen other fantastic folks who I cannot remember the name of because I'm a total jerkface and I'm super tired, but ya'll are amazeballs awesome! ANYWAY!

I write this sitting in the back seat of a Greyhound bus stopped a little ways past the the town of Merritt, BC at around 10 pm on a Sunday night. My ass and back are burning up, I’m simultaneously tired as hell and in the midst of a Nanimo bar-fueled sugar rush, and have a few hours of transit time back to my destination. I’m on the way back from my first furry convention: Vancoufur 2016. In short, I think I feel pretty good about the whole experience.

I came upon this crazy fandom at the tail end of the 7th grade after a chance discovery of Deviant Art via Youtube via Godzilla fan sites. I’m now in the tail end of my 3rd year of university, and I with the passing of this weekend, I feel I’ve run a pretty full gauntlet of my emotions towards the fandom from “I’m not a furry, I just really like all this stuff” to making a fursona to trying to roleplay with someone I met in a free online FPS using the buddy chat system, to ditching that fursona and making my first actual character, to trying to draw anthros, to making MORE characters, to meeting an online buddy while stuck in Seattle for an 11-hour layover, to…Well…Sitting in the back of an express bus after spending several days with some of the nicest, coolest, funniest, friendliest, most excellently fantastic people I’ve ever met. Sharing meals, sharing doodles, sharing stories, just…Connecting. From people I’ve known through the magic of the internet for years, to complete strangers I’d only just met; artists, writers, partiers, drinkers, quiet average Joe’s and Jane’s, people in their teens to diving headfirst into middle age. It was fantastic.

The whole experience, looking back at it now after having a bit of time by myself with a few dozen other people also by themselves, was distinctly surreal and exceptionally weird. One minute there’s just likeminded individuals hanging out talking about whatever, and the next minute someone’s walking down the hall in a 7 foot-tall, brightly-colored animal costume. And it’s all just…”Normal”.

I have to admit. I was very, very unsure of things at first. It had been a long bus ride, late and or delayed transit mooshed plans around and had us all rushing a bit, and the whole while I’m constantly repeating “Don’t make an ass of yourself, don’t make an ass of yourself, don’t make an ass of yourself” in my head until the words have no meaning. I piled into the back of Beherit’s car with Accophox and Marchdragon, introduced myself as best I could and…Laughed nervously a lot. I stayed back a little in conversation circles, drifted a little, let other people talk as much as I could rather than enter salesman mode out of lack of self-assurance. Lunch happened, all was well, and I was thinking it was going to be okay and fun. I met, I chatted, saw people, tried to get used the fact that I was being called one of my many screen names in real life (Which didn’t stop being weird!), and…Everything was fine. Everyone was nice, even though there was a bit of awkwardness associated with any sort of meetup. And then in the hotel lobby, as we were checking in behind two businessmen…Someone in a fluffy canine fursuit walks out of the rain, into the hotel lobby, waves to the concierge, and strolls onward. I freeze. In my mind, I’m not with them. I’m some random bystander here on a weekend trip, nope, not a furry, not even the slightest bit, why would you assume that? Oh fuck oh crap please make the fursuit go awaaaaaaaaaaay!

“Oh hey, is that one of those ah…Oh man, what are they called?” says the businessman on the right.
“Fursuits!” chimes in the one on the left
“Yeah! Fursuits! That’s some pretty impressive costuming on it.” replies the one on the right.
“I’ll say!” finishes the one on the left.

And that was that. They checked in, the world didn’t crumble, nothing went to hell. We checked in. I think at this point I went with MarchDragon to go pick up our badges from registration. We stumbled around lost for a few minutes before a staffer in teal mask that a jaw that articulated when he spoke asked us if this was our first con, then showed us how to get to registration. Fursuits and fursuit parts are still deeply nervous-making at this point. Registration is nothing much to speak of. Signed a piece of paper, got a lanyard, wore lanyard, got educated on the magical practice of laying badges back to back so when they inevitably flop and spin around you always have a named side up. (Thanks Beherit!)

Registered and badges in hand, the group squished back together, and we went to kill time before Zootopia. While I’m no stranger to hanging out with people a fair bit older than myself, most of my mountain biking buddies have a good 6-20 years on me, this all felt…Different. With mountain biking, I always felt younger than everyone else, but never out of place, because we’d all been interested in our shared interest for roughly the same amount of time. Skill levels weren’t too widespread, we all had our strengths and weaknesses as a riding group, and in the areas of bike setup and maintenance and whatnot, I was the “knowledgeable elder” because of my insane habit of reading EVERY manual and piece of info I could get my hands on, and from having had time working in a bike shop. Here…I was meeting people in a similar age bracket to my bike buddies, but who also had been invested in this thing we shared for FAR, FAR, FAR longer than me. I felt out of my depth, I felt like I was going to step on someone’s toes as every turn, and well, I felt like the little kid getting to finally sit at the grown up table at Thanksgiving dinner. And I had no damn reason to feel that way. When I say everyone was welcomed with open arms, I mean it. Literally. Haemish, Reweth, everyone in room 105, and around the convention who I forgot the name of because I’m a terrible person who can remember the torque spec of every bolt on a 2014 Felt Compulsion LT3’s Equilink suspension linkage and what standards go on every mountain bike in the Giant 2016 lineup, but cannot remember a name if my life depended on it…Ya’ll are fantastic people. Awesome badge doodles were received, hugs and handshakes happened, and just as fast as we all said hello, we were off to the movies in the rain.

Again, I was nervous. More people were going to be showing up, I was sneaking snacks into a theater for the first time since middle school, and oh shit just relax dammit. Everything was fine, the movie was darn good, it was still weird being called “Spykr”, and holy FUCK Nanimo bars are next level good when they don’t come from the campus cafeteria. Back to the con. No time for dinner, just grab a quick snack, then stand in the lobby of the con hotel “people” watching and trying to chat.

There are a lot of fursuits there. Okay, maybe 6-8 pass through with the rest either being elsewhere or in the dance next to us through half-closed doors, but other than Ms. So and So down the street renting an Easter Bunny costume for the day for the neighborhood Easter Egg hunt or character costumes at theme parks, this is my first time seeing anything like this. A guy in a digimon hoodie (half of a kigu/partial suit in progress I later learned), friends with Acco, walks up, starts chatting, and I just listen. Arts and crafts and sewing and maker-ing talk goes all over, fascinating stuff. A sabertoothed, highlighter yellow-green fursuit hugs Scruff Kerfluff next to me. I take a few steps back and relax as much as I can. Talk shifts back to the movie and stacking things on Scruff’s head.

I’m starting to get it. I’m starting to feel comfortable and relax, like this is all just a bunch of buds I’ve known forever hanging out and shooting the shit. And then March and Beherit drop this on me. As simple as them saying they dig my characters and that I portray them in a way that makes them feel like, er, well, characters. An smile and a thank you. It took a while for that to set in. It’s not like I’ve been living in a bubble of self-loathing or anything, but to hear, face to face, out in the open that something I’ve made, some little bit of me is in some way significant, cool, up there as a thing…Holy shit guys, I can’t possibly explain how amazing that feels now. It took a while to set in and for me to realize just how amazing that was; probably somewhere between Langley and Coquitlam.

I’m not saying the rest of the convention wasn’t significant or full of amazing, freaky, surreal, or crazy experiences; but I’m already over 1500 words into this thing and considering I want to actually post this as a journal, I should probably stop rambling and get to the point. The con itself was fun, I mostly just hung out in Haemish and Reweth and co’s room or the Art Jam room, and then ate food with people. Didn’t go to any panels or dances, and walked quickly by the very end of the fursuit parade. (They’re certainly cool, but…It’s gonna take a while for me to get used to them.) Anyway, let me try and wrap this up…

Maybe not for the first time, but absolutely more so than any other time in my life…I feel like a part of something. Not just that I fit in, or that I matter as part of a group, but that I was part of something, part of something with so many amazing, outstanding, crazy awesome people as, at least in a few people’s eyes…Somewhere close to having made something and contributed to stuff amazing, outstanding, and possibly even crazy awesome. I’ve never been heavily invested in the fandom. I’ve really liked it, I’ve really enjoyed all my amazing friends online and sharing experiences and characters and art and the good and the crappy times…But I’d never felt connected to the whole furry thing. That’s very different now because of the amazing people I’ve met, shared time, meals, art, and a few short days with. I want to do it again. It was a helluva thing, and I would like to go to a furry convention again.

All of that said, all of the awesome stuff put in, all the nerves overcome, the worries washed away by strokes of ink, sips of tea, and handfuls of candied fennel seeds (and Nanimo bars)…I can see how the rush and excitement of conventions could be addicting. I can see how people turn this whole crazy, amazing furry thing from a hobby into a “lifestyle”. I understand it completely, I absolutely get the draw, and because of that, I feel I need to be very conscious of how I engage with it beyond the screen in the future. I’ll try to go to more furry meetups either in Kelowna or back home in the greater LA area, and I’ll absolutely try to get to more conventions; definitely VF next year, possibly something in between then and now. But I need to be well aware, even more so than I already was, that all of this has to be pushed into the background, or at least away from my most public face, as soon as I leave the hotel, the pub, the restaurant, and head back home. I loved almost all of this past weekend, but I cannot ever get to a point where escapism becomes my salvation, and my life revolves around the furry fandom above all else. Vancoufur was an amazing experience, but it has made me ever more acutely aware that if I want to be a part of this thing, and if I want to be able to enjoy all the fandom has to offer and really cherish what makes it special to me, I need to keep it separated most of the time, and put in more and more and more effort into assuring I stay afloat, focused, and primed to push forward with a regular life that's as stable and pragmatic as it can be. The thrill of escapism and what made these times so special is the rarity of it. But I don’t want to end on a more bitter note. I don’t want to end this thinking about how I have to keep all of this amazing, awesome, fantastic community at half an arm’s length away at all times lest I lose myself in it.

This past weekend was one of the best times in my life as I look back even just a few hours and think about what it, and everyone involved means; right up there with finishing my first marathon, right up there with lying on top of the summit of Mt. Pinos staring off into the star-filled abyss of space on a moonless night for several hours and contemplating how the vastness of the universe far more than I should have, right up there with staring at a mass of lines and squiggles on a piece of paper and realizing “holy fuck you can draw!”…It’s gonna be something I’ll remember forever, and I can’t wait to wait through a year full of regular, ordinary, everyday life so that next Vancoufur 2017 is almost as special as this one was. My bus is nearly in the station, I’m tired as all hell, and I’ve gotta dash off to snag another bus back to campus or I’m wrangling a taxi or walking 7k. G’nite everybody.

(I got a taxi)