Ok more about the Integrity Bash, if you can bear it
I didn’t get drunk or totally fried. From the time I got there, I averaged about 1 lite beer an hour, and an occasional whiff of inhalation therapy in the mountain air if it was offered. I don’t like to lose control of my faculties.
Some people don’t have that same reservation though. At one point after dark, one guy drank an entire 5th of Jaegermeister, then put on a gorilla suit (all but the mask) and proceeded to fall down everywhere.
Some guys set up a target on an oak tree and used it as a shooting range. One of them asked if I wanted to shoot my gun and I said, “Mine’s where people can’t see it, and it’s staying right there.” Whereupon several guys offered to help me find it.
Autumne is the most gracious hostess I’ve ever seen. One would have thought she was in a mansion instead of a field in the Tennessee mountains, with 150 people, a port-a-pot, and no running water. She was everywhere, greeting and accepting everyone, with gentility. I love her.
Mark, a client who ended up being my tent-mate, lives not too far away and intended to drive home. Two hours later it was more than apparent that that would be a bad idea. I told him he could share my tent if he behaved himself.
He kept losing things (his hat, his drink koozie, his CHAIR, for god’s sake) and I kept finding them. He also lost his hearing from the shooting, so not only was he fairly wasted but one had to shout at him.
That was great fun. I’d be talking to people & he’d come up & say, “What did you say?” and I’d tell them that he couldn’t hear for shit and then shout something totally off the wall at him. The people I was talking to knew that wasn’t what I said, but he didn’t have a clue.
At some point someone put a 12-pack of beer into MY cooler. Hey, it’s my cooler, right? I didn’t drink any of them bc I had my own, still. Later on I found out whose beer it was. Then I had one, with her permission. Because I’m nice like that.
I met a lot of people and mostly remembered their names. This is amazing, because while I’m nearly a genius with numbers, names are just sounds to me so I almost never remember them.
There was some incredible ink walking around there. I got lots of tattoo pictures.
I’m sure I consumed enough germs to innoculate me until the Bash next year.
And Mark (mostly) behaved himself. Gotta hand it to him, he took NO means NO seriously. Might have helped that my 9mm handgun with one in the breech was within reach.
We may never know.
