Happy Pride!

 Polyamory in fic has plenty of group sex and non-Euclidean cuddle arrangements, but not much representation of the frantic cat-herding energy necessary to travel anywhere with even a subset of the group. This makes sense, because cat-herding is seldom romantic. I’m often the biggest bitch in any given room, so this weekend I was chief cat-herder.


Our short, clean three hour road trip (1) to a local Pride festival ballooned as more and more people remembered friends or girlfriends or brothers of girlfriends who might like to come along. What in past years had been a 3-5 person trip became a fourteen person trip, to my slow horror. Cue groupchat avalanche!

Among the party were my fiancé, my boyfriend, my girlfriend, two additional girlfriends of hers, my best friend, his roommate, and a local college friend. Never let it be said that I am into timely or organized people. Opposites attract!

I planned many human delays into our itinerary, so everyone ended up fed, entertained, and (with one exception) non-sunburnt. Along the way we met up for meals and hugs and lake time with several old friends, including my best friend from the second grade. We spent a few hours swimming in a lake a stone’s throw from the house where I grew up. Then we showered (2), glittered up, and went to a used bookstore along the parade route to meet up with friends. 8/10 of the people I set out to bring to the Pride parade itself made it there in the end, and 80% is pretty good! (3)

After the parade, we went back into the bookstore to wait for crowds to disperse. It’s this labyrinthine little shop that seems to grow every time I visit, and I always walk away with a copious amount of new reading material. This trip’s acquisitions include The Key To Rondo (a childhood favorite), a Marianne Moore collection, and this gorgeous old book of Longfellow’s poetry bound in green fabric, with gilt lilies on the cover.

I also managed to score a few birthday treats for my best friend. I found a lovely little chest at Goodwill a few months ago, cleaned it up, and have been steadily filling it with small trinkets and presents. His birthday’s in two months, and by then the chest will be full. All it’s missing now is a Weird Sex Object of some description. (Comment-suggestions for weird sex objects under 25 USD welcome.)

All in all, it was a good, if hectic, weekend. I am excited to put the cat-herding behind me and get some rest.

(1) American style, as one of my Discord servers put it.

(2) Don’t talk to me until you’ve marshaled six people through a hotel shower in under an hour.

(3) The other two dressed very slowly, arrived an hour after the parade was over, and went for cocktails. My fiancé’s stepmom calls this “queer time” when she does it. I find it irritating, but tolerable in non-load-bearing situations.