I was invited this weekend to do a reading in North Carolina at a fetish club, and just got home from that this afternoon. What a trip! I conned one of my best friends, Patricia, into going with me and we had a very weird, very fun road trip out to the middle of nowhere. Patricia drove her mother-in-law’s van while I navigated, and I swear we must have hit every single tiny back road in South Western Virginia and North Western Carolina. Along the way, we saw a lot of abandoned buildings. So many in fact that we started playing a game of “Zombie Apocalypse.” The game goes something like this…
Me: So Patricia, if the great epic Plague hits, and everybody dies off or becomes zombies, and you’re still left alive and unzombified, which of these houses would you go into to poke around and find supplies?
Patricia: Oh, all of them! I’m always curious to know what’s inside other people’s houses.
Me: Yeah, me too. Plus it’d be time to do some serious looting.
Patricia: Definitely.
(A few minutes pass…)
Me: There are a lot of abandoned houses out here.
Patricia: Yeah. I wonder why that is.
Me: I wonder if we could hole up in one of these abandoned houses if the zombies attacked.
Patricia: We should pick a good abandoned house, not one that looks like the roof is going to fall in.
Me: Yeah, because knowing us, the roof would most likely cave in while we were doing something like going to the bathroom.
(Several more minutes pass…)
Me: Wow, there are a hell of a lot of abandoned houses out here…
Patricia: Yeah… It’s like a ghost town out here.
Me: Or maybe a zombie town… (starts humming, then suddenly sings) ZOOOOMBIE! ZOOOOOMBIE! ZOOOOMBIE-BIE-BIE!! IN YOUR HEEEEEAD! IN YOUR HEEEEEEEAD! ZOOOOOMBIE! ZOOOOOMBIE! ZOOOOOOOOMBIE-BIE-BIE!
Patricia: Jeeze Louise, I haven’t heard the Cranberries in years. You’re really good at singing that song. In a crazed, scary sort of way, of course…
And so on. We made it to our destination Friday evening and spent the night with Beth Wylde, the author who set up the erotica reading. Thank you Beth for hosting us that night! Saturday morning, we all headed out for the fetish club for the reading. On our way there, Patricia and I decided we had to photograph at least one abandoned building we had seen. So we pulled over and photographed this abandoned church we found…
In between photographing abandoned buildings and playing “Zombie Apocalypse,” Patricia and I made our way to La Fortresse, a BDSM/fetish club in North Carolina where we did a reading with Beth and a number of other authors. My sometimes partner-in-crime, Nobilis Reed was there, reading from his latest book, Scouts, and I’d say we did a pretty good job of entertaining the audience. We had a good sized audience too, which was always nice. I did not take pictures of the club, to ensure the privacy of the members who were there, but it was definitely a well equipped facility, and we did the readings down in the dungeon, where they had plenty of St. Andrew’s crosses, a floor-to-ceiling web made out of sturdy chain, paddling stations, shackles and stocks, and other fun stuff. It was definitely worth the trip to see this place.
After the reading, Patricia and I headed out to visit the fantabulous sci-fi author/podcaster Mighty Mur Lafferty. We took every wrong turn we could getting there, and saw way more abandoned buildings than we would have liked at that point (because we were supposed to be headed for civilization, not going deeper into the zombie country). Finally, we ended up at a very large shopping center in Burlington, where we stopped and got a nice dinner at the Asian Bowl. We decided to hit Barnes and Nobles on the way out to get coffee, when I found a dead but still perfectly intact dragon fly that I insisted on picking up and taking back to the van to photograph. So there I was, walking into B&N, carrying this lovely dead dragon fly, and out of nowhere this tiny pixie child appears and starts dancing around me holding up a book. She stops and offers me the book and I see it’s entitled “Night of the Living Trekkies!” It came complete with a lurid cover of a zombified rotting Trekkie in full original Trek uniform. When I asked the bookstore pixie where she found it, she dreamily waved over to the sci-fi section, then danced around me again and thrust the book at me. Obviously I was supposed to take this book, so I did and the pixie disappeared. At which point, I realized I was holding the perfect birthday present for Mighty Mur Lafferty, and since we were headed over to her place for her birthday party…
So I bought the book, got some coffee, explained to the barrista why I was carting around a dead dragonfly (and got a nice white napkin for my photo background because the barrista thought it was cool to take pictures of dead bugs) and we headed back out again. After photographing the dragonfly and respectfully laying it to rest in a grassy median strip in the parking lot, of course.
We stopped at a hotel briefly along the way to Mur’s, got cleaned up, had a very embarassed hotel clerk walk in on us while we were cleaning up, laughed about that and then made our way to Mur’s place where we had a fabulous time eating the world’s best Boston Creme Pie (Mur’s birthday cake made by her amazing husband Jim) and playing Rock Band and chatting with people about zombies and abandoned buildings and dead bugs. While we were there, Jim pointed out a very huge, very neat moth on the front porch, and naturally I snapped a pic of that too.
After the party, we crashed back at the hotel, and headed home this morning, stopping along the way to photograph a few more abandoned buildings. We found…
This abandoned house…
Which came complete with its own abandoned shack…
And of course there was this really lovely abandoned grocery store…
The rest of the trip was nice and quiet. Lots of driving along back roads and discussion of doing another road trip in the fall when the leaves would be changing colors, the weather would be cooler, and the abandoned houses would be creepier. If we go on this road trip, we are definitely taking Mary with us, because we just know she’d be really good at playing “Zombie Apocalypse” with us.
And that was my weekend. Hope you had as much fun and adventure!
