Pronounced "prissy-fish"
Jul. 11th, 2009 05:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wombat_sochoSo last night I got into the Kia, stopped by Chipotle for one of their excellent burritos, and rolled out for Silver Spring and the first meeting of the Potomac River Science Fiction Society that I've been to in...20, 30 years?
When I was a young fan, barely old enough to hold my liquor, I went to a meeting of WSFA, the Washington SF Association. These were the folks who staged Disclave, back in the days before it went on hiatus and re-emerged as Capclave, and I fondly thought that WSFAns would be gathering monthly to talk about the convention and other things like books and stories. Haha! What a clueless n00b I was! I wound up sitting around in a basement rec room listening to people I didn't know very well get caught up with each other and talk about what had been going on in their lives.
It was my first exposure to the divide that I came to know as "silly versus sercon", a divide that I became more familiar with once I arrived in Minnesota, started going to MNSTF meetings, and realized that I had fallen in with a bunch of fans who were heavily into the silly (or social, if you want to be more accurate) and not so much into the sercon side. :(
But I'm getting ahead of myself...after I got off active duty and came back to the Washington area in 1983, I was invited to attend meetings of the Potomac River SF Society, which met at Paul (RIP) and Aly Parsons' place for the express purpose of talking about SF books we'd read. It was great, and I missed it terribly when I moved to the Great American Desert with my then-beloved then-spouse.
So after missing last month's meeting due to family drama, I went into the hinterlands of Montgomery County and attended a PRSFS meeting. It was mostly good (let's face it, some fans are annoying people) and I wound up staying after, chatting with the hostess and her two older kids about convention war stories until 0330 or something like that, after which I drove to Laurel, hit the Denny's for breakfast*, and then went home, where I logged on to find that I was off the Goonfleet purge list. Praise Lowtax! ;)
Drugs were taken, insulin was shot, and I crashed hard. Hello, Saturday night...
*No carrot cake and/or hot tapioca pudding were consumed as part of breakfast.
When I was a young fan, barely old enough to hold my liquor, I went to a meeting of WSFA, the Washington SF Association. These were the folks who staged Disclave, back in the days before it went on hiatus and re-emerged as Capclave, and I fondly thought that WSFAns would be gathering monthly to talk about the convention and other things like books and stories. Haha! What a clueless n00b I was! I wound up sitting around in a basement rec room listening to people I didn't know very well get caught up with each other and talk about what had been going on in their lives.
It was my first exposure to the divide that I came to know as "silly versus sercon", a divide that I became more familiar with once I arrived in Minnesota, started going to MNSTF meetings, and realized that I had fallen in with a bunch of fans who were heavily into the silly (or social, if you want to be more accurate) and not so much into the sercon side. :(
But I'm getting ahead of myself...after I got off active duty and came back to the Washington area in 1983, I was invited to attend meetings of the Potomac River SF Society, which met at Paul (RIP) and Aly Parsons' place for the express purpose of talking about SF books we'd read. It was great, and I missed it terribly when I moved to the Great American Desert with my then-beloved then-spouse.
So after missing last month's meeting due to family drama, I went into the hinterlands of Montgomery County and attended a PRSFS meeting. It was mostly good (let's face it, some fans are annoying people) and I wound up staying after, chatting with the hostess and her two older kids about convention war stories until 0330 or something like that, after which I drove to Laurel, hit the Denny's for breakfast*, and then went home, where I logged on to find that I was off the Goonfleet purge list. Praise Lowtax! ;)
Drugs were taken, insulin was shot, and I crashed hard. Hello, Saturday night...
*No carrot cake and/or hot tapioca pudding were consumed as part of breakfast.
