I never did that before

Actually showed up for Poly BigFun, that is, for more than a few hours.  This time I was at least present, if not really participating, the entire time from Thursday afternoon to Sunday morning.

Moon picked me up about noon Thursday, having managed to find our house without even calling for me to talk her in!  (Fascinating.)  Instead of dashing straight out to Bastrop, which would have put us there at least two hours before we could check in at the site, we did stuph like (1) a tour of my neighborhood, which Moon had never seen properly, (2) a stop at Blue Moon Glassworks so she could pick up some tools for working glass beads, (3) lunch, and (4) a credit-union run to deposit some late PBF registrations.  THEN we went on to Bastrop.  Moon handed the mini-van keys to me, saying she’d enjoy it a lot more if she could just look instead of trying to drive in an unfamiliar area.  Fine by me, I’m a lousy passenger.

As two of the first dozen people out there we had our pick of barrack space, so we pitched our stuff onto a couple of beds in the Vanilla cabin (cabins for the weekend were, respectively, “Kid-friendly,” “Naked,” “Vanilla,” and “Kinky”).  We realized almost simultaneously that we had hit the bottom of our circadian cycles, so the next hour or so was devoted to a nap—or as much of one as we could get given a stream of people squawking the door as they went in and out.  (More about the door later.)

Poly 101 that evening, down at the tiki-torch ring, started with a round of introductions from everyone, and whatever blurb each felt like sharing about himself.  Moon and I were halfway round the circle, so I had time to think about what to say.  When the toss came to me, I said “I am He-Who-Does-Not-Wear-a-Name-Tag; I am the Ineffable Listowner; I am the Treasurer.  I’ve been a member of this group since—oh, since about the time that God was a little boy.  I’ve been poly for rather longer than that, and this is STILL the first BigFun I’ve really attended.”  To which Hero Woman quickly added “and his name’s Sam” before I could shush her.

After 101 was finished and we’d visited around a few minutes, Moon and I went back to the cabin to crash for the night.  Yeahright.  There was even more of a procession of Residents and Visiting People in and out of the cabin, the lights were blazing (official “lights out” was scheduled for 0100, which was perfectly absurd), and the door continued to groan and complain every time someone opened or closed it.  Fortunately, I’d had the gumption to stop at a gun shop and pick up shooter’s earplugs for us both, so we stuck them in, covered our heads with pillows to block out as much of the light as we could, and tried this “sleeping” thing we’d heard about.  It was only middling.

Because my body is The Way It Is, i.e., middle-aged and male, I was up two or three times during the night to visit the toilet across the way.  During these trips, I discovered the cabin door didn’t groan if I lifted up on the doorknob as I opened or closed it, which gave me an idea of what might be its problem.  Friday morning after breakfast, I took a proper look at it and found that, as I suspected, the screws holding the hinges had worked loose and the door hung crookedly, dragging on the threshold each time it moved and creating a commotion.  I borrowed a screwdriver and tightened the top hinge screws, but THEN!  I looked down and saw the bottom hinge had torn completely loose from the door, and also saw that the dipshit installer had tried to hang a solid-core door with FIVE-EIGHTHS-INCH LONG SCREWS!!  Hell, no wonder it had torn loose.  You can’t hang a heavy exterior door with screws that short and expect it to stay up there.

This discovery annoyed me so that I got in the van, drove to town, bought a box of #8 x 2” screws and a ratchet screwdriver, and came back and re-hung the door one hinge at a time.  Total cost to fix it:  twelve dollars and an hour’s work.  By the time I was done and the door was being held up by a dozen LONG screws instead of eight dinky ones, it opened in a very peaceful, civilized way and didn’t give a second’s more trouble the whole weekend.

My cabin-mates gradually discovered me fixing the door, and the way they carried on you would have thought I had performed some major feat of civil engineering.  I was astonished at them, and as baffled as a water heater at the notion that this door had been giving trouble for a long time (more than a year, as I later learned), and that no one, either TPWD staff or any of the many people who had used the cabin, had had the basic gumption to SEE a simple problem and then do something simple to FIX it.  Driving twelve wood screws isn’t HARD, people!  That night we still had a procession of people in and out, but the door wasn’t adding to the ruckus.

Friday I didn’t go to any of the sessions, but I didn’t really want to either.  My goal this weekend was to begin re-connecting with Moon, as we try to rebuild and relaunch a wrong-time, wrong-place relationship from several years ago.  I was quite content to stay with fuming about home repair, visiting with the few attendees I like and care for (a limited list), and reading or napping.  Moon did go to several sessions, and was pleasantly surprised to find herself running into some spiritual learning she hadn’t expected to happen.

Sessions or no sessions, Moon and I did a LOT of talking all over the map.  She’s working on just who I am and what that means for us, and I was doing some of the same.  I did a lot less of it, to be truthful, as I’m not an introspective person at bottom and also tend not to ask other people about things they don’t volunteer, on the premise that what someone doesn’t tell me should be presumed as None of My Business unless I explicitly find out otherwise.  Even so, there was enough for LOTS of talking, and maybe some of what I said either made sense, was enlightening, or (in the happiest of cases) both.

Saturday morning I came close to being the epicenter of an explosion.  As I walked through the mess hall after breakfast I saw crumbs, dripped food, spills, and who-knows-what on the floor; some of it I could identify as having been down there since Thursday night!  It annoyed me hugely that of almost a hundred people registered, it appeared nobody had bothered to get a broom and sweep up.  I don’t know whether they were all supposed to have Minds Above Such Small Matters, or were a bunch of Lower Slobbovians, and honestly I didn’t care.  I found a broom, dustpan, and mop, and spent the next three-quarters of an hour policing the entire hall, winding myself with bending over picking up drifts of toys and papers scattered by various Small Children, and generally getting more and more Pissed Off about it.

I was in a wheeze, a sweat, and a right fury by the time I was done:  fully loaded, primed and ready to go off at the first person who annoyed me at all.  I went out and leaned myself against a big pine tree, and devoted the next few minutes to Keeping It From Falling Down.  Fortunately, the first person to come along was Hero Woman, one of perhaps three people who were capable of dealing with me in that frame of mind.  She spent several minutes backing me down from “boil” to “high simmer.”

By then it was time for the session Moon was facilitating on “Building your Poly Family/Tribe,” and I felt I ought to go to show willing.  However, a few minutes down there made me realize that I had no business trying to sit through the session.  A side conversation about legal status and custody of children produced so many fatuities that I went right back up on flame.  I realized that if I stayed I would likely kill the whole discussion with the amount of mental negativity I was broadcasting (LOTS), or perhaps end up savaging several someones, so I quietly excused myself and went away, and spent the time until lunch re-reading The Five Red Herrings, one of my Comfort Reads.

Rather than stay at PBF, I suggested to Moon that we run into town and take Saturday afternoon for ourselves.  She happily agreed, so we drove in and had lunch at a deli housed in a converted commercial storefront (perhaps a drugstore originally), then explored the tourist-trap tchotchke and antique/junque stores along Main Street in the historic district.  The “just us” time was exactly what I needed, and by the time we went back to the park I was in a good mood again.  Saturday’s supper was far better than Friday’s had been, and we happily helped ourselves to a variety of mildly peppery and garlicky dishes.  After, Moon got out a bottle of sloe gin (her preferred tipple) and we sat for a long time drinking sloe gin and Cokes and talking even more.  At one point I got maudlin, drawing a comparison between Alexander the Great and Walter Prescott Webb.  We finally gave up about half past midnight and went to bed, for additional communing.

Sunday cleanup and checkout, fortunately, didn’t involve TOO much beyond reassembling the bunk beds in our cabin that had been dismantled for the floor space and the mattresses, and sweeping out to find the odds and ends people had left behind (a pair of Jockey shorts, a pair of flip-flops, a book on some flavor of Wiccan theology).  We got back to Bastrop just in time to find several thousand bicyclists from the BP MS 150 just making the turn off 71 into town, so I turned the other direction and we came back via Elgin, which gave Moon the chance to see a whole bunch more old houses, of which she’s as fond as I am.  She dropped me off at home about one, and L and I sent her home up 183 to Lampasas, 281 to Stephenville, and 377 to Fort Worth, which she later said was FAR more pleasant than fighting up I-35.

Subatomic derivatives flocculate some left-handed asphalt.  Fnord.