Back now from the Florida Poly Retreat, where kellyv, Shelly, and I spent a weekend with other freaks in a gorgeous nature preserve.

I’m not even going to try to make this a coherent post. There’s rather a lot going on right now, so I’m going to string it all together at random, in no particular order, and leave the sorting of feelings and impressions for another day.

Shall we begin, then?

Lena and getting down with the sickness

One of my strongest memories of my January trip to San Francisco was when Lena (altenra) took Shelly and I to an S&M sex club called Power Exchange. Lena brought her laptop and her collection of porn.

There’s a thrash/industrial band called Disturbed whose song “Down with the Sickness” appears on the soundtrack of one of Lena’s porn flicks. (It also appears on the soundtrack of the wretched “Queen of the Damned,” the sequel to the not-quite-so-wretched “Interview with the Vampire,” which is amusing in its own way.) That song has been intermitently stuck in my head since I heard it on Lena’s laptop, so I finally surrendered and bought the album last week.

I will forever associate that song with watching porn with Lena and whipping Shelly. The world is a scary place, now that you’ve woken up the demon in me…”

We cast our troubles into the water…oh, shit! INCOMING!!

Late Saturday night, the last night of the Florida Poly Retreat, Shelly, our friend Evelyn, and I built a five-foot trebuchet out of scrap we’d discovered in a run-down barn, while kellyv documented it.

We set the trebuchet up not far from the retreat bonfire. Shelly played Igor to Evelyn’s Renfield; as the Mad Scientist, I got to direct my henchmen through the process of assembling and test-firing the machine.

As it was late at night, we used flashlights for the payload; after all, it does no good to fire ancient seige weapons in darkness if you can’t enjoy watching the projectile sail into the heavens. We aimed it across a broad swath of grassthat terminated in the nearby river.

While we were assembling our fearsome engine of destruction, a healing circle was taking pace at the nearby bonfire, where the karma of peace and love was no doubt being brutally savaged by our karma of destruction and violence. We test-fired our flashlights several times, and discovered that the machine worked rather better than we’d anticipated.

Presently, it came to pass that the healing circle went down to the water’s edge to conclude their ritual, as we fired our last shot of the evening. Which worked, ahem, far, far better than we expected it to. The projectile reached the water’s edge easily, and would no doubt have come crashing down in the middle of the ceremony but for a lucky group of trees between us and them. Well, lucky for them, anyway; less lucky for the trees, and far less lucky for the flashlight that collided with the trees.

I’m going to hell. I’m definitely going to hell. But at least I’ll still have my henchmen. And we have a cool trebuchet victory dance, too.

Other Florida Poly Retreat stuff

Much of the rest of the retreat was a blur. A few things that stand out:

– Going canoeing with Shelly. Her first time in a canoe; my second. We had a marvelous time, and didn’t get eaten by alligators.
– The Polyamory 101 panel with smoocherie. At 9:30 in the morning. I think I was coherent, but I’m not really sure.
– Invader Zim with Eric, Kim, and Keirston. Invader Zim is a short-lived and highly surreal cartoon that ran briefly on Nickelodeon. I won’t even try to explain it; it’s whacked, that’s all.

Intrusive Iraq stuff

janezero, author of one of the most interesting journals on LiveJournal, has also written one of the best analyses I’ve seen yet on the matter of military action in Iraq. I won’t bother to try to repeat her points here; just read it. Really.

Sex and Money

In about an hour, lordfuckbeast and I have a meeting with a distributor who’s interested in distributing Symphony, our internet-controlled sex toy. He wants to put it in a bunch of stores, which is both good news and bad news. Good, because it’s exactly what we need; bad, because the amount of labor that goes into building these things is nothing short of insane. Who knew bringing a product to market would be so goddamn difficult?

Sex and Love

Shelly is discovering in her needs that can’t be met within the context of our relationship. We’re working on the discomfort this causes her; when all is said and done, both kellyv and I do want her in our lives. It’s good stuff; I think we’ll be okay.