I have already plumbed the depths of our PCAP 2022 experience. What happened, why, how we (I) perceived what happened and why, and a bit about how we (I) felt about it. To keep that post short (HA!), I limited myself to what happened during PCAP 2022. Several things occurred after PCAP ended that have continued to influence our (my) opinion of the event. And it all started with a downward spiral.
I drove away from the hotel a little disheartened but overall feeling positive. We’d done well for us socially, met a lot of people, and had a great time.
But driving, like running, is often an introspective time for me (particularly when I can just veg out to my music). As well as we had done for us, my overall…ineffectiveness let’s say…was starting to sink in. Memories poured forth in perfect clarity, unbidden and unwelcome, replaying and repeating moments best left to dwindle into forgottenness.
But I’m not allowed to forget, unfortunately. I remain hostage to my mind.
I get stuck in ruts and grooves, you see, like a record that’s skipping and skipping and skipping through the same few lines of a song, inelegantly ignoring the beauty of the whole to endlessly repeat a handful of mournful words.
It can’t rain all the time…can’t rain all the time…can’t rain all the time…
Even as we drove a few miles to our next destination, I was spinning wildly and quickly toward darkness.
Turning and Turning in the Widening Gyre
I think Erin could tell the downward spiral was beginning. She’s seen it happen often enough across the years.
I recall her asking how I was feeling about everything. I mentioned my brain was trying to convince me I hadn’t had a good time. She asked if I wanted to talk about it. I said no, my brain was just over analyzing everything I’d said the past three days, and I knew it was mostly baseless self-ridicule. I didn’t need her to tell me I was being silly with the things I was beating myself up with; I was well aware already.
And I didn’t feel like giving voice to the memories in my head. I wanted them gone, and you don’t speak the name of the Devil lest he appear, yes?
But alas, these moments simply continued over and over and over, the same core few on repeat, but then a new one slipping ever so subtly into the mix. “Perhaps you forgot this,” my brain whispered softly as I sought sleep. “Don’t worry. I recorded it for you. Let me just put it into the rotation.”
As one can imagine, not great for keeping up a positive attitude, eh? I’m reminded of the opening to one of my favorite books:
No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.
I might have taken comfort in dreams, were I not an insomniac. I think I’d gotten 2 to 4 hours of sleep a night the week leading up to and through PCAP 2022. The night following was little better, and now my brain was playing a collection of my least favorite moments of the past few days.
Awesome. The downward spiral continues.
Undaunted, Our Hero Plunges On
Although well aware that my memories were accurate (somehow I’ve been “blessed” with the ability to recall perfectly grammar rules I learned in middle school; poems, lines from books and articles, and quotes from movies; all the rules of D&D; and every time I did something I regretted; the rest is jettisoned to make room), the brutality with which I beat myself up with them was unwarranted.
Like trying to commit seppuku with a nerf sword.
Wait, no, that might be backwards.
Like scratching an itch with a battle-ready longsword.
Yeah, I think that’s more correct.
Despite the best efforts of my personal demons, I was determined to battle through the tailspin. And there’s only one way out of a spin, as Lindemann would be quick to point out: You push forward despite the instinct to pull back.
So I pushed forward. I sought socializing.
But Who Was Still in Palm Springs?
This being Tuesday afternoon—and us being only 15, 20 minutes away from the PCAP 2022 hotel at our second destination—I reached out to Cate to see if she was still around, and if so, would she be interested in meeting up with us for dinner. I figured most people would have left Palm Springs by then, so if she had Event Coordinator things that kept her on another day, she’d be devoid of company.
Which she might have liked. I certainly wouldn’t have thought anything of it if she said no. But she seemed inclined toward our company.
I saw on Twitter that a couple of other couples were also still in the area. Peppy Pineapple and hubby had their flight canceled and were now stuck in Palm Springs, and NotYourAverageMr and NotYourAverageMrs were still in the area.
Through the power of social media, the seven of us ended up having dinner together.
I had a lovely time! It was the most myself I’d felt the entire trip.
That dinner felt like everything I had found lacking during PCAP proper, and that new-found knowledge was very revealing.
The Club Experience Versus the Date Experience
This particular event solidified a point that Erin and I had already been musing upon: smaller groups work better for us.
We’ve always had the best…“success” doesn’t seem like quite the right word but it will do…connecting with people during couples dates or small-group hangouts. We have fun at clubs, but for a variety of reasons have difficulty meeting new people at them unless we’ve already made plans to meet people at them.
We weren’t sure how a hotel takeover would fit with our dynamic. I was thinking it might be somewhere in between. That there would be a lot of time that felt club-like and overwhelming, but we’d have pockets of date-like moments that would be more comfortable and manageable.
For me, most of the social activities were club-like and the pool party was club-like x10. The sessions were a reprieve from that, but they weren’t date-like. So overall, PCAP ended up feeling like a more extreme version of going to the club (sans fucking in the open since we didn’t even like the playroom!). The counterbalance to the club experience—other than morning yoga—was when Erin and I ventured out into Palm Springs to eat.
Which we did just the two of us. Mainly because we were mostly playing everything by ear rather than planning out, but we were also reserving these moments as recharge time. Monogamish Marriage shared on Twitter that they make it a point to never eat a meal alone at lifestyle events.
We went the opposite direction. But we kind of needed to. We were doing so much other stuff, trying to put ourselves out there at other events (albeit poorly), that we needed that time to switch off.
Which I would change if we do something like this again.
Flipping the On-Time
There are a variety of reasons why this wouldn’t have worked for us this first event, so I’m not beating myself up about this. (See? I can be magnanimous toward myself!) But moving forward, if we attend a large social function like this, I would try to reserve our social reservoirs for creating pockets of small group socialization and then using other time to recharge the batteries away from the crowd.
Maybe I should have settled into a distant corner of the pool, pulled out my book, and just read for a while without worrying that it made me seem unapproachable. If I can’t interact well at the pool anyway, why deplete myself struggling through the Most Difficult Kind of Socialization for Me when I could use that time to recharge and refresh?
If someone wants to approach me, I’m fine with that.
I’m not overly worried about the opinions people would form of me in that moment. Hell, having the reputation of being the guy who reads through the pool party at a swinger event is still a better one than being the guy who can’t say anything much worthwhile that isn’t about drugs. I like to think I have a little more depth than that.
I didn’t even rant about appropriate word use or comma placement at any point, so at least I know there are depths still left to plumb.
Not suggesting these are depths worth the plumbing, mind you, just that they are there.
No, I’m not trying to see how many times I can use the phrase plumbing the depths or some variant thereof. Why would you even ask that?
Comradery
A strange thing occurs when humans do a thing together: Comradery.
A hundred strangers having nothing in common might never gel as a group. A party comprising such a group might be a dud. But have them run a 10K together first, and then have a party? Suddenly they have a commonality that unites them. Make it a 10-mile obstacle course that involves helping each other over, under, and through various challenges, and the bond is all the more solid.
I felt such a thing in the weeks following PCAP when attending the Casual Swingers Casual Cocktail event. Not only a solid event in its own right (…as I recall…my memory of such a thing is a little hazy…) (it isn’t hazy at all, actually, this is just someone else’s gag and I’m running with it), but many of the attendees were fellow PCAPers. Many of whom I had little interaction with. And yet, there’s still a sense of comradery. Of familiarity. Of “we did this weird thing together, and now we have a bond.”
And that’s cool!
I wonder if that, too, would make a future PCAP (or indeed, any lifestyle travel event) easier.
The terrifying newness is gone. No matter how we handled the last event, we’re not completely inexperienced anymore.
Continued Interactions
There’s something to be said for having a face and voice and speech cadence and expressions to help make people online seem more real. This is a thing I know well from my time playing World of Warcraft. I’d been playing with the same people for years and considered them all friends. But when the guild started getting together for annual parties, face to face, that was something special!
We’d been going strong for 15 years of in-person parties, and then COVID hit. I wonder if we’ll ever do it again; I miss those weirdos!
I’ve flirted at a few PCAPers since returning home. I realize that at isn’t the typical preposition used with flirting, but I think I might be overselling things if I said with. I lobbed what I felt like were flirting comments out there. Whether they were received as such, I have no idea. I think I might have been flirted at myself…but I’m not 100% sure.
Flirting is a work in progress. I’ve gone 42 years on this spinning rock without being able to navigate the jungles of flirtation. It’s going to take much more than a three-day weekend to get me sorted.
As evidenced at PCAP 2022, I’m still wrestling with “manage to participate in a conversation for 10 minutes.”
Baby steps, right, Bob?
Distorted Thought Patterns
Here’s a bizarre silver lining to PCAP 2022: I realized I’ve been in a depressed state for quite a while.
I don’t want to say depressed/depression because (a) those can have clinical meanings and I have not been diagnosed and (b) the terms often conjure the image of sadness or lack of energy, and clearly neither of those are me. Sure, I might be low energy for me, but that’s still a lot of energy output.
I wrote 10 poetic pages about it. I believe Erin described it thus: “It was beautifully written! But not something you ever want to read someone you love say about themselves.”
The worst part was, writing it didn’t make me think “Oh, man, that’s harsh, dude. You might need to consider talking to someone.” Everything in it resonated with me unquestionably. It was my Truth.
It wasn’t until I had a non-tripping dose of shrooms last week that I realized how bad it was.
Wisdom From the Plants
I took a heavier-than-micro dose. A microdose of shrooms for me would be around .15–.3g for a subperceptional dose. When I get into the .4g doses, I can start feeling a little giddy, maybe get a tiny bit of movement if I’m looking at words on a screen. I don’t enter a real trip headspace until 1.5g, and that would be light. I usually take 2.5g or more to trip on shrooms.
With all of that in mind, this particular instance (I called it a stumble when I was describing it to my running buddy because it wasn’t hard enough to be a trip) (yes, I’m that clever) I had taken .9g. I had some slight visuals and a touch of the fluid psychedelic headspace, but I was perfectly capable of doing yard work, like spreading mulch, in the 96 degree, 90% humidity, pre-thunderstorm day that was my Friday last week.
And I felt wonderful! I felt like myself in a way that I realized I hadn’t in quite some time.
As I replayed parts of that 10-page litany of self-abuse (I often write and revise in my head while doing yard work), I could see just how distorted my thought processes were. Beautifully poetic, yes, but cognitively distorted! One “observation” specifically caught in my craw and hit home the point that I was in a depressive state. If I was floundering on that, if I was questioning that, I had fallen far.
I could see the downward spiral.
It was at that point, I knew I needed to seek professional help. It’s odd, really, when you look back at something you had written about yourself, and you recognize all the thinking that went into crafting it but you don’t recognize the person it’s describing.
Death by a Thousand Cuts
And that’s where I was on this mild shroom stumble as I sweated out liters of water and shoveled mulch into my garden beds and felt exuberant: I couldn’t recognize who I had become nor see when I had fallen this far.
It started with the pandemic. Retreating ever so slowly into myself and doing it well. I turtled up, weathered the storm, and then never actually emerged. Though emerging wasn’t really possible; I couldn’t go back to the World That Was.
My job went 100% remote, and a lot of the people I was friends with have left the organization in recent years. We keep in touch because we’re still friends, but I no longer have that social circle.
I used to go to the gym regularly and was gym-buddies with several of the people who frequented the weight room in the morning. I now workout at home. Sure, I have some gym-socializing via Naught Gym, but it’s not the same.
I used to have three martial arts sessions a week. Now, I’m lucky if the group meets twice a month, and we’ve half the people.
My weekly D&D group meets online, not in person.
One of my cats died.
Basically, I’d been spiraling for the past three years. It happened gradually. The toll it took was paid in nickels and dimes at the start…but inflation and compound interest are a real bitch, aren’t they?
It took not only trying to socialize at PCAP 2022 but also then writing about the attempt and psychedelically exploring my own introspection to see the pattern.
Erin was way ahead of me, of course, and had been trying to figure out how to say, “You might need professional help,” in a way to which I would be responsive.
PCAP 2022: Not My Best Showing
Fortunately for me, I’m still feeling very much like my more glorious self. But I don’t trust that to stick around. Psychedelics have revealed much, but one thing I know is that the lessons are often fleeting. They slip away like a dream dissolving in the morning sun. Or perhaps they are simply beaten out of us by the cold, dreariness of absolute reality.
Even larks and katydids are supposed to dream, after all.
Unfortunately for me, this means everyone I met at PCAP met a less than stellar version of myself. Which I already covered in great detail. But what I mean is, that less-than-stellar version is (I hope) not a true depiction.
Obviously I’m not suggesting that I’d be sporting some significantly different and shockingly better personality should I ever meet any PCAPer again. I’m still me, and just as prone to make those same missteps again and again and again.
But I do think I failed to live up to one of my great personal axioms: I might not make a good first impression, but I do make an accurate one.
Perhaps when I’ve dug the old me out from under the muck, I’ll give it another go.