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Boston Chapter 4: The Horror of Middle America

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If you drive across the American Midwest on Interstate 70 for long enough, a sort of hypnosis begins to set in. The road goes on and on and on and on, and there’s nothing interesting on it, save for the occasional dead animal of indeterminate species on the side of the road.

If you continue driving, eventually your brains will liquefy. Your eyes will begin to bleed. Strange apparitions of Hunter S. Thompson doing battle with Napoleon against the backdrop of war-torn Sarajevo while gibbons drift high in the sky strumming gently on lutes will slide in and out of the corners of your vision. When that happens, keep driving until you find your happy place. You know, the one where small insectoid life-forms crawl out of unexpected parts of your body demanding Pop-Tarts.

It is about then that you will see Prairie Dog Town, in Oakley, Kansas, just a stone’s throw from the interstate.

Prairie Dog Town is a microcosm of everything that is strange and horrifying about Middle America. It is the quintessential slice of Americana. Ray Bradbury could set horror films there. It advertises the world’s largest prairie dog, among other wonders and atrocities too numerous to mention. So it was a given that we had to stop there.

But before I talk about that, I need to talk about the Jesus of Wheat.

The Jesus of Wheat adorns a series of billboards that cluster along the interstate near a small town almost exactly an hour west of Prairie Dog Town. We pulled off the interstate to eat, as up until this point we had subsisted largely on lovely, succulent grapes hand-fed to us by Claire. This is a wonderful way to dine, and I highly recommend it, but inevitably we hit Peak Grape and it was all downhill from there. Soon we were forced to confront a stark reality: There Were No More Grapes, and it was time to deal with that, whether we liked it or not.

So we stopped for sandwiches, and met the Jesus of Wheat.

I don’t know what this billboard means, other than Jesus really, really loved wheat. This image occurs on every onramp and offramp in the town, as near as I can tell: Jesus, looking enigmatic, holding a stalk of wheat in His freakishly-long and perspectively-challenged arm.

Or at least I think it’s his arm. Maybe that hand is thrusting up from the ground, clutching wheat in its cold lifeless fingers, as a parable for the cycle of all life and the inevitable coming of the Zombie Apocalypse, I don’t know. I spent some time trying to work out the mechanics of whether He could actually hold wheat that far from His body, and I will admit, ultimately, to theological bafflement. Perhaps there are some things Man was not meant to know.

At any rate, I really had to record the billboard for posterity, by which I mean my blog. So while my companions dined, I slogged back up to the interstate on foot in 99-degree heat, roughly a half mile away or so, to get this shot.

The 99-degree heat turns out to be relevant later, as we shall see.

The theological ambiguity of the Jesus of Wheat left all of us, I think, in a fragile state of mind, so when an hour later we saw signs advertising Prairie Dog Town, our natural resistance–what little was left after the endless drive, anyway–was already considerably eroded.

Prairie Dog Town is a small, dilapidated building with signs promoting the World’s Largest Prairie Dog and other wonders beyond mention. It’s the sort of place that serial killers stalk in Oliver Stone movies, or the Great Cthulhu might seek out for a midafternoon snack of moon pies and the souls of the damned. We went in the front, picked our way through a gift shop overflowing with rattlesnake egg paperweights and small carved wooden toys, and bought our tickets in the back.

The back of the shop is crowded with the fruits of the taxidermist’s art, applied to various abominations of nature like this two-headed sheep calf:

It’s also lined with a series of very large wooden crates, about five feet tall and topped with wire mesh. “Go ahead!” said the lady working the till to my traveling companions. “Look inside! See what’s in there!”

As soon as they did, she hit the crates with a stick. About a dozen rattlesnakes, all of them more pissed off than Dick Cheney on a quail hunt, immediately started rattling and striking at the wire mesh, much disconcerting both of my companions. The smile on the woman’s face suggested that she lives for that.

Payment appropriately rendered, we walked out the back door into Prairie Dog Town. This…is Prairie Dog Town.

Each cage contains a forlorn animal or three. There are two aspects to the Prairie Dog Town Experience which this picture cannot convey: the brutal, oppressive heat that settled on us like a tangible, suffocating thing; and the smell. Oh, God, the smell.

Though, in all fairness, most of America’s heartland smells that way.

Beyond the eponymous prairie dogs, the pride of the collection at Prairie Dog Town is their herd of mutant five-legged cattle. Yes, they are mutant cattle, and yes, they have five legs, the fifth one of which dangles pathetically from their back.

This is exactly the sort of thing one sees when something goes wrong with an organism’s hox genes, as I was talking about a bit ago.

The place also offered for our amusement birds of various descriptions, some really forlorn-looking foxes behind a wire enclosure, a couple of pigs, and a very friendly donkey who was quite happy to see us.

And, of course, it had prairie dogs, who perched in the heat and chittered at us reprovingly, as if to say “You paid money to be here? Didn’t the Jesus of Wheat warn you about this place?”

It also had, true to the billing, the World’s Largest prairie Dog, which is neither a prairie dog nor particularly large. It’s a big fiberglass sculpture of something that’s vaguely reminiscent of a prairie dog in overall body plan, though the artist seems to have missed some ingredient, some artistic flair that might have captured that spark, that fundamental essence of the Platonic ideal of prairie dogs, or for that matter even of mammals in general.

That’s Claire standing next to it, using the high albedo of her sweater as a partial defense against the blistering hot radiation of the uncaring sun bombarding us from above.

A bit dispirited and lighter of currency, we finally wandered back to the safety and relative sanity of the car, each of us bearing the psychic scars of the time served in that place.

Fortunately, the most amazing thing the eight-year-old within me has ever seen was in our near future. Unfortunately, the time was now close where we would lose one of our numbers to the Guatemalans. But both of those stories will have to wait.

Boston Episode 2: To Utah And Beyond!

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Late in the evening, we arrived in Salt Lake City at Claire’s friend’s house. I was a bit afraid that I’d have difficulty sleeping, as my ear was…

Okay, I need to back up a bit, to the day before we left, and explain something about my relationship life.

I live with zaiah. She and I share a very kinky relationship, in which various forms of consent play and consensual non-consent play a large role. Large enough, in fact, that I think we sometimes frighten some of our friends…and nearly all our friends are kinky, too. You might think this has little to do with traveling to Boston, and you’d be right, except for the thing with the ear.

It started while I was on my computer chatting with a friend of mine, who like Claire is also whip-smart and knowledgeable and courageous and generally sexy as hell. (This is, as some of my readers might recognize, a common feature in my life. I really dig smart, strong women who aren’t afraid to make unconventional choices. But I digress.)

Anyway, while I was occupied with my chat window, zaiah walked up to me, set a bottle of alcohol on the corner of my computer desk, and walked away. A minute later, she walked back, set a pair of latex gloves on the desk, and walked away. A minute after that, she walked back holding a needle. She put on the gloves, opened the needle, put her knee in my chest, pushed me back in my chair, and stuck the needle through my ear. That done (and howling subsided), she cleaned my ear with alcohol (more howling), and stuck an earring through the newly-minted hole and walked away again.

I had to explain to the friend I’d been chatting with why I’d stopped responding for a time, which led to some interesting conversation. The real point here is that I would be sleeping in strange places with a brand-new, and still sore, piercing. I normally sleep on my left side, and zaiah had (naturally) added the new hole to my left ear, so…yeah. I was expecting a difficult night of sleeping on the wrong side.

Claire’s friend lives, as I previously mentioned, in a former Mormon polygamous compound that’s been converted into apartments. Each apartment is basically a series of bedrooms arranged around the outside of a central living room, connected to a huge kitchen–a quite serviceable floor plan if one has a number of wives who may not necessarily be too fond of one another, but all of whom are expected to spend their time in the kitchen when they aren’t raising children or on their backs making more.

I managed to survive a harrowing night of sleeping on the wrong side (the wrong side!), mostly by telling myself that when one is traveling the breadth of a continent, there are certain privations one is expected to endure. In the morning we were off adventuring again.

When one is traveling across Utah, a certain sameness begins to set in. Most of the scenery looks like this:

Most of the roads look like this:

After a certain number of bare-knuckle close calls with enormous tractor-trailer rigs being driven at lightning speed along narrow roads by people who are either five-eights asleep or hopped up on a combination of crystal meth, cocaine, and Monster energy drinks, the experience ceases to enthrall, and one soon finds one’s self thinking “Wake me when something interesting happens.”

So it was that we made our way through Utah and into Colorado, which is just as dry but a lot less wrinkly.

Claire had been waxing enthusiastically about the hot springs in Glenwood for some time prior to the trip. Now, ordinarily, water is something I’m pretty much against. I mean, I recognize its utility and all; it is, after all, the primary ingredient in Mountain Dew. But immersion in it is something I don’t much fancy, especially when it’s hot.

However, life in Oregon has been a period of transition for me. I have, since moving here, found myself in a hot tub on no fewer than two occasions, largely at rekre8‘s urging. “Give it a try!” she told me. “It’s not as bad as all that!”

So when we arrived in Glenwood in the evening, I was game to give this “hot springs” thing a go.

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. When I heard the phrase “hot springs,” as in “we’re going to stop at the hot springs and immerse ourselves in them,” the image that was conjured up in my mind looked something like this:

though to be perfectly fair, this picture is lacking in the human skeletons my imagination had thoughtfully arranged to provide scattered all around the edge of the springs as a warning to those luckless enough to linger in them too long.

What I actually saw was this:

The principle behind a hot spring is quite simple. Millions of tons of molten rock, heated to fantastic temperatures by intense radioactive decay deep within the earth, forces itself under tremendous pressure through miles and miles of solid rock, until finally it comes near enough to the surface to contact water percolating down through porous substrate. When they meet, the water flashes instantaneously into superheated steam, which blasts up with ferocious energy to the surface, where it…

…manages to feel quite pleasant, really.

The hot springs were surprisingly enjoyable. And I don’t mean that in the “it was surprising any part of the experience was enjoyable at all” sense, but rather in the “I had quite a wonderful time” sense. In fact, all too soon was it time to be off on our way to Denver, where we stayed with another friend of Claire’s.

Or so it is alleged.

We didn’t see hide nor hair of this friend. We arrived at a lovely house in a charming suburb of Denver quite late at night. Claire claimed to have been in contact with her friends, who had, or so the story went, elected to go to bed after leaving a key for us on the porch. We let ourselves in and set ourselves up in the supposedly “spare” bedrooms. The next morning, Claire announced that her fiends had left for work early that morning, so we would not be meeting them.

To this day, I have no way to prove that what actually happened wasn’t that she had scoped out a house whose owners were away on vacation or something, and confabulated an entire yarn about friends of hers who live in Denver as part of a ruse to make us agree to a little breaking and entering.

At this point in our adventure, Louisville, Kentucky, and our encounter there with the Guatemalans, was growing ever nearer..but that tale will have to wait for another time.

Boston Episode 1: The Phantom Move

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It has been, as regular readers of this blog are no doubt aware, some time since I’ve posted a meaningful update.

This is not because nothing has been going on in my life. Far from it; there’s been so much going on lately, for good and ill (much of the last involving Eastern European organized crime, though that’s a post for another day) that I have scarcely had time to talk about it.

I have, for example, been spending quite a lot of time camping lately. My sweetie zaiah, her husband, her daughter, a number of friends, and I all went camping for her birthday; then shortly afterward she, her husband, her daughter and I did it again, only this time with kittens. Yes, I took pictures. Yes, you will get to see them. (Kitten in a tent! Kitten in a sleeping bag! Woohoo!)

And then there was the Boston trip.

We didn’t know, when we set out for Boston, that Guatemalans would run off with one of us. We also didn’t know about the hurricane. It– Wait, hang on, maybe I should back up a bit.

This is Claire.

Claire is a friend of mine. She’s smart and geeky, she’s spent time in Israel doing archaeology and in a metal workshop learning how to weld, she has a background in immunology, she does computer graphics, she’s whip-smart and charming and generally all-around interesting. Sexy, too.

This is Claire’s friend Ero, who I met mere days before the trip to Boston.

I don’t know that much about her, to be quite honest, other than she’s fluent in Chinese.

This is me.

The bunny ears belong to my sweetie emanix. On a trip such as this, they are mandatory, not optional.

And this is Boston.

Okay, so now that the major players have been identified, let me start over.

Claire recently decided to go to grad school in Boston. She wanted to have her car available, which meant driving cross-country…not quite the longest possible drive from one place in the US to another, but pretty close. And for obvious reasons, she didn’t want to make the drive herself.

She put out a call for folks willing to help her drive. Both Ero and I volunteered. Operating under the notion that when given a choice between two people, the best thing to do is choose both-a notion I heartily endorse, by the way–she opted to select both of us as her traveling companions for a week-long journey through America’s heartland. Adventure! Excitement! Really wild things!

We didn’t know, when we set out, that Guatemalans would run off with one of us. We also didn’t know about the hurricane. In those lazy, carefree, naive days before our adventure started, we thought that things would be simple. We would take turns driving, we thought; we would stop and see the sights along the way; and then, once we arrived, we’d chill for a few days, after which Ero and I would fly back home to Portland.

Ah, the naivety of youth.

The original plan was to depart from Hood River, Oregon at about six AM. I should have known just from that plan that hurricanes and Guatemalans lurked in our future. Nothing good can ever come of anything that starts so early in the morning, the way I see it.

This plan was amended so that we’d be leaving closer to 9 on account of OMG six AM WTFbiscuits, so when the day arrived, I found myself, somewhat blearily, meeting up with my fellow travelers at the home of mutual friends, bleary of eye but still (mostly) functional. We set out toward Utah, where we had planned to spend the night with a friend of Claire’s in a former fundamentalist Mormon polygamous compound.

The drive out through the Columbia Gorge was gorgeous, because the drive through the Columbia Gorge is always gorgeous. Oregon manufactures nearly 60% of the world’s total yearly output of natural scenic beauty, so it’s pretty much all over the place here. One can scarcely swing a cat without it sinking claw and fang into stunning natural beauty round these parts. We stopped on the climb up out of the Gorge to take pictures:

Yeah, I know, right? They just leave it lying around!

The first part of the trip went seamlessly. We listened to music, we talked about Chinese culture and archaeology and anal sex1 and social stratification and geekery, the whole while snapping pictures out the window of the car. We passed through the mountain range dividing the wet half of Oregon from the dry half, without any particular incidents; I had halfway hoped to see some of Oregon’s famed giantic pterodactyls that ride the thermals over the mountains and occasionally eat an unwary hiker, but there were none in the skies. Wrong time of year, I guess.

And then we hit Utah.

When we reached the border, the culture shock was so great it rattled the car. There ought to be signs warning motorists, really; I don’t know how many people get killed every year just from the sudden icy plunge into an alien culture alone. It damn near knocked us clean off the road.

Utah has nearly as much scenic splendor as Oregon, owing no doubt to its proximity to Oregon’s massive natural beauty factories.

They put their own spin on some of it, though, Utah takes stunning natural beauty and adds a certain lovely, stark barrenness to it that’s quite beautiful.

I don’t know what it is with Utah. We made two pit stops on the way to Salt Lake City, City of Perverts2. At the first, when I went to make use of the facilities, I was confronted with this…rather ominous sign:

Now I personally have to wonder, with more than a fair amount of horror, about the kind of folks who need to be reminded to close the bathroom door in a gas station.

I mean, not closing the bathroom door in the sanctity of one’s home is one thing. I mean, really, who among us hasn’t occasionally left the bathroom door open while peeing, just in case an Italian supermodel or the entire Brazilian women’s volleyball team should happen to wander into the house by mistake and be stunned into silence by the merest glimpse of the awe-inspiring throobing manhood on display? Guys, I’m sure you all know exactly what I’m talking about. But in a gas station? Really?

Our next stop was even higher on the creepy-meter. We paused at a rest stop along the side of the Interstate, and a woman walked up to me, pointed to the bunny ears, and said “What’s with them rabbit ears? You think you’re some kind of funny bunny or something?”

Which, I will admit, was a new one.

Now, I’m accustomed to getting odd looks when I wear bunny ears out and about. Usually, the odd looks I get fall into two camps: hostility and amusement. And the reactions tend to be neatly separated across gender lines; most of the hostile looks I get are from men, whereas women tend to be amused by them. That probably says something about the social construct of gender roles and gender normalization in Western society, and I’m sure there’s a master’s thesis or two luring in there somewhere, though at the moment I can’t be arsed to tease it out.

But I’m not generally confronted about it in such a hostile way.

There were a lot of things I could have said that I seriously thought about saying. Like, “It’s part of the gay agenda!Once gay marriage is passed, next comes making everyone wear bunny ears!” There were even more things I considered later, like “What’s with them manners? You think you’re some kind of rude douchenozzle or something?” However, I took the high road3 and just smiled politely at the nice lady.

Encounter with the locals over, we piled back into the car and headed on toward Salt lake City, where we would spend the night before traveling on. At this point, the hurricane was only days away, lurking in our future like a gigantic swiriing monster of spirally doom, but we were as yet unaware of the surprises Mother Nature had laid away in store for us. More on that, and things that delight the eight-year-old me, later.

1 I have been told by reliable sources that whenever two or more women spend more than a certain critical threshold of time talking, the subject of anal sex inevitably comes up. I don’t know if this is true or not, but it was true during the trip. The vote in the car was two to one in favor.

2 Supposedly, Utah has the highest per-capita rate of porn Web site subscriptions in the United States. The most popular of these? The various kink-related properties owned by Kink.com. Mormons apparently might be against pervy sex when they’re in church, but when it comes time to watch Internet pr0n, they know how to get their kink on!

3 Or the lazy road, depending on how you look at it.

More on the Mathematics of Sex Toys

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I’ve been posting a bit about the Tormentor, a sex toy I’m designing for the sole and nefarious purpose of not letting the user get off. Quick recap in case you haven’t seen the project so far: it’s a vibrator connected to a programmable microcontroller that’s programmed to run the vibrator in random patterns for random lengths of time with random pauses in between, to keep the wearer sexually aroused but without being q-u-i-t-e enough to allow the wearer to come.

Because, yeah, I’m kind of a bastard.

My sweetie lapis_lazuli beta tested the first standalone prototype, the Tormentor version 0.2, and the biggest problem that arose was that the deice was just too damn bulky.

Part of this was the fault of using a 9V battery to run the microcontroller, but part of t was the fact that the Arduino Uno board I’m using is just plain big.

I mentioned this problem to roadknight last time I was in San Francisco, seeing how he’s also a micorocontroller hacker and general mad scientist. He suggested that I use a Teensy USB board in place of the Arduino, and even gave me a spare that he happened to have handy.

The name doesn’t lie.


Size comparison, top to bottom: 9-week-old Tonkinese kitten, Arduino Uno, Teensy USB

The Teensy is certainly that; it was the second-smallest programmable microcontroller in his collection. (The first was an obscure Chinese something something on a flexible board, about the height of a grain of rice and three times that long.)

I’ve started looking into building the Tormentor version 0.3 around a Teensy. It’ll take a bit of work; the Teensy lacks an on-board voltage regulator, for instance. I’m thinking of using a 6.3v lithium battery to drive both the Teensy and the sex toy; I’ll have to cobble together a recharge/regulator circuit of some sort, but it should let me get the finished gadget very, very small indeed.

The Teensy people don’t understand something that Apple does: User experience matters. The Teensy board is unlikely ever to knock over the Arduino as the reigning champ of DIY microcontrollers, even though the Teensy is smaller and has better technical specifications, because the user experience when it comes to programming a Teensy is, to put it bluntly, abysmal.

You don’t get no Arduino-style all-in-one IDE and device programmer, where you can type code into a window and press a button and bam! The device is working! Oh, no. The Teensy requires you to install a gcc compiler, then type your code in a text editor, run it through gcc with make, and then load the resulting hex file onto the board with a loader program. It’s archaic and barbaric, and it brings back memories of my Programming 101 class in college, in which I wrote 8080 assembly on a CDC Cyber 760 mainframe, compiled it to a hax hex file, copied it onto a floppy disk, then ran it on a CP/M machine using a hex loader.

Someone, please kill me now.

There is, though, an Arduino IDE plugin for the Teensy, and though it’s a bit weird and doesn’t run all Arduino code, it looks like it should work for me.

A new experiment

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I’ve been hearing about this Kickstarter thing for a while.

I’ve also been wishing that I had the capital to print some more posters for a while.

So, since the two seem like a good fit, I’ve started my very first Kickstarter project.

Before you get oo excited, no, it’s not to make a poster of the Map of Non-Monogamy, though that is something I’d quite like to do. This project is a bit different; it’s a project to make a poster version of one fo the photos I took while moving across the country to the lovely city of Portland:

This project runs for 30 days. If it’s successful, I will do more in the future. If it’s successful and the poster sells well enough, I’ll be able to do more in the future without relying on Kickstarter, which would be awesome.

So. Want a poster? Click the link!

Fragments of Frolicon: Spontaneous Drag King Shoots

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Operation Wifebeater (or, as some of us call it, Operation Drag Franklin Down To The Dungeon And Double-Team Him) was such a success that upon our return to Orlando, joreth and emanix decided that an encore was in order.

Well, of the outfits, at least. There’s only so much your humble scribe can take, after all.

In any event, I had the opportunity for a quick photo shoot outside joreth‘s house, which was quite a lot of fun, and went rather well, I think.

Yeah, you all wish you were me, I know you do.

I took quite a number of pictures, which you can click here to view.

Fragments of Frolicon: Nuclear Missile Porn

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There is a town called Cordele, Georgia. It’s a tiny town well south of Atlanta, barely a blip on the map; if you blink while you’re heading along Interstate 75, you’re apt to miss it. It has a small gas station, a couple of rail lines, a Krystal burger…

…and a nuclear missile.

The missile is behind the gas station, right in front of the Krystal. It’s an old Titan, set up just off the freeway.

People walk their dogs next to it. There’s a very proud sign in front of it, solemnly informing visitors that this site is Confederate Air Force One.

The sign offers, I think, quite an insight into why the South lost the Civil War. They never did quite get the hang of this whole “industrialization” thing.

The careful reader will notice several punctuation errors on the sign. There’s also a technical error; a callout points to the “Stage III lox tank,” but the Titan I is a two-stage missile.

The South never really did much cotton to this science and technology stuff, so it’s probably not too surprising that they get bits wrong.

We stopped on the way home from Frolicon to take pictures of the missile. It’s slowly turning into rust, but it’s still quite lovely in a strange way. Viewed up close, some parts of it almost look like art.

You’ll find quite a few bandwidth-crushing pictures under the cut. Click here to see more!

This Old House

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During the way back from the great Sex For Science In A Seedy Hotel In Seattle Experiment last month, zaiah and our innocent victims companions and I stopped at the ruins of an ancient house along the interstate so that I could take pictures of it.

I vowed back then to return with a model and a lot of rope.

About a week ago, zaiah, my friend Scott, and I did just that. We brought with us a friend of his, the lovely slavetopurple, and another mutual friend who’s a bondage rigger.

The house has changed rather a lot in the past month. It looks like it’s being disassembled bit by bit; structurally, it’s in significantly poorer shape than it had been. It’s also being devoured by gigantic feral blackberry bushes.

As least that’s what I’m told they are. They’re actually more like the Great Cthulhu incarnated as vegetation, with even more tentacles than he is customarily depicted as having, and totally covered in thorns.

I used a wide-angle lens to get this rather fetching shot of the interior. You can see one of the feral blackberry bushes invading what apparently used to be the kitchen, presumably in search of souls to devour. It’s a little-known fact that every time you masturbate, God puts the souls of the unbaptized underneath your stove. That’s why televangelists don’t have stoves.

Clicky for more pictures, which are definitely not safe for work unless you work in a place that's pretty laid back about these sorts of things.

The Mathematics of Sex Toys Made Tangible

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A while back, I posted a picture of a very early prototype sex toy designed to prevent its wearer from getting off.

This project is entirely separate from, and shouldn’t be confused with, the prototype sex toy that’s operated by the wearer’s brainwaves, which I’m still working on. The sex toy that is designed to keep the wearer from getting off, which I’ve started calling the “Tormentor,” is a vibrator connected to a programmable controller board that’s set up to run at random intervals with random pauses in between–perfect, in other words, for keeping whoever’s wearing it always aware of it, while not letting that person get enough stimulation to reach orgasm.

The very first proof-of-concept version was basically a bare controller board tethered to a laptop and connected to a vibrating egg. As it wasn’t exactly portable, it wasn’t able to do what I wanted, which is to be worn around while shopping or doing housework or otherwise going about one’s business.

So I started working on getting a more portable, self-contained version set up and running.

Click here for details, schematics, and pictures of the prototype being assembled

Fragments of Frolicon: Operation Wifebeater

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I first started hearing rumblings about Operation Wifebeater weeks before I headed down to Florida. Little hints, tiny suggestions of some dark and dire plan being cooked up by joreth and emanix, as vague and insubstantial as a rustling under the bed filled with implications of an unseen monster.

So on the first night of Frolicon, when emanix told me that joreth was already down in the dungeon and it was time for Operation Wifebeater to begin, I…

Hang on, let me back up a bit.

During my time in Florida pre-Frolicon, I did manage to accomplish a bit more than being abducted by emanix and modifying a MindFlex to act as a makeshift EEG. Hidden away in the suitcase I brought, tucked between the floggers and the rope and an abundance of clean socks, was a Clone-a-Willy kit. These things, in case you’ve never seen one, are do-it-yourself dildo kits designed to be used to take a casting from, and make an exact replica of, one’s penis.

joreth had given me this particular kit two (or was it three?) Frolicons past, and somehow we’d never found the time to use it. That’s not as surprising as it might sound; Frolicon can be a very busy time, and this year we were so busy we didn’t have time to schedule an orgy.

She wanted to make a point of cloning me this year, though, so the night before we were to leave for Atlanta, we set aside time to use it.

They’re actually pretty difficult to use. The mold material is fussy and extraordinarily temperature-sensitive, and I’ve experienced sexier things than sticking my you-know into a tube filled with gooey lukewarm mold material and holding it there for several minutes. Even with emanix‘s help, it was a complicated undertaking that was really only marginally successful. Nevertheless, it was successful enough, and the next morning, as we made our way north, we brought with us a replica–a bit misshapen, perhaps, but a replica nonetheless–of my willie.

Once we arrived in Atlanta, I had expected to start the debauchery with alacrity. Fate had other pans for us, however. As it turned out, the first six hours or so of our stay was spent running repeatedly to Wal-Mart and dollar stores in search of things we’d either neglected to bring with us or had deliberately not carried with us, thinking that they’d be easy to procure once we got there.

Two of those things were “a big sheet of foam core board” and “a whole bunch of pins with different-colored heads.” One of the plans I had for Frolicon was to put a poster of the Map of Human Sexuality on the motel room door with a bunch of pins, and let folks stick pins in it showing where they’d ventured.

The foam core was easy to find. The pins took three runs, two to Wal-Mart and one to a dollar store. The result ended up looking a bit like this:

We stuck it up next to the door with a handwritten color key (purple pins for things that folks had tried and liked, yellow pins for things that folks had tried and didn’t like, green pins for things that folks really wanted to try) and left it in the soft, gentle hands of Fate.

Between the late arrival and the bajillion runs to Wal-Mart to get yet another thing we’d managed not to have on hand, it ended up being quite late by the time we settled into the hotel. I stayed in emanix‘s suite as her captive, and joreth went off elsewhere to prepare.

emanix did some preparations of her own, before telling me “It’s time” and leading me down to the dungeon.

The name “Operation Wifebeater” was, as I discovered, more literal than figurative. joreth had dressed the part exactly like you might expect. I don’t know that emanix actually owns a wifebeater, but she came close, in a polka-dotted kind of way.

You can’t tell from this picture, but when I was dragged into the dungeon I soon was made aware that both of these lovely ladies were wearing strap-ons under their clothes. (How emanix managed to hide hers is a mystery still unsolved by your humble scribe.)

What followed was something out of either a B horror movie or a really interesting porn, depending on how you look at it, and gathered quite a large audience quite quickly.

Or so I’m told. I wasn’t watching. And it probably would have been impossible for me to have seen the audience anyway, given the fact that my face was buried… *ahem* Moving on…

The two of them had their way with me for a while, which was fun, and made just a bit surreal by the fact that joreth was wearing in her harness the clone of my willie we had produced the night before. I’ve heard the expression “go fuck yourself” on many occasions, of course, but I’d never seen its application in quite such a literal way before.

The rest of the con is still a bit of a blur to me.

A few bits stand out. The pet lesbians that zaiah and I had inadvertently acquired shortly after I moved to Portland, though a strange set of circumstances too complicated to go into here, were able to make it down to Atlanta of a visit, which was lovely. zaiah and I are both quite fond of them, and don’t get to see them nearly often enough.

Aren’t they cute?

emanix hosted the Frolicon Darkroom Party in the suite we were sharing the same night that the pets came down, and they helped run it for a while, which was totally awesome of them (and definitely counts as service above and beyond the call of duty).

At some point–I think it was the next afternoon–I had the opportunity to use joreth and emanix as victims lab rats test subjects for another round of EEG sexual arousal testing. The EEG setup exactly fit into a round metal tin, thoughtfully decorated with an Aperture Science logo courtesy of datan0de.

We do what we must, because we can.

For anyone who wants to see what an orgasm looks like from the perspective of Science, the complete data set from joreth‘s session is posted here, just in case you missed it.

emanix looked particularly fetching all wired up and ready to do Science.

joreth managed to squeeze in just enough time at the con to sweep up the top award in the costume contest, in her role of her alter ego, Miss Poly Manners.

There’s a corset under that dress. Yes, she looks hot in it. Yes, I have pictures.

Now, in all honesty, I’ve been going to Frolicon for years and I literally did not know that they even had a costume contest, which might say something about my priorities.

By the end of the con, the poster of the human sex map had been rather heavily used, and was bristling like a porcupine on crystal meth. I wasn’t able to figure out a way to get it home in one piece, but damn did it have a lot of pins in it. I got a crummy low-resolution picture from my cell phone, and some pictures from my real camera that turned out even less well, which is a pity…I’d love to have an accurate record of all the pins, you know, for data-mining.

Which reminds me, at some point I should rprobably do a statistical analysis of all the custom maps people make at the Web site for the map. Might be interesting.

emanix suggested making another foam core mounted poster for next year’s Frolicon, and putting it up in one of the con’s public spaces with instructions to stick pins in all the things that folks did while actually at the con, which sounds like a lot of fun to me.

The trip back from the con was almost as much fun as the con itself, but I have forms to go fill out, so I will leave you with one more picture of joreth in her wifebeater. Enjoy!