K Stories: The Intro
Aug. 19th, 2012 09:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7In 2007, I attended my first Pennsic. I camped with friends-of-friends. It was all very magical, and overwhelming, and amazing, and it was very hard (and remains very hard) to distill just what… what it was, what happened, what it was even about. That’s the magic of Pennsic.
But one of the first amazing things that happened was that the neighbors, a new household on the block, came over to introduce themselves as I was getting my bearings and just beginning to set up. The heads of the household were a married couple about ten-twelve years older than I was (I was in my late twenties). They recognized the tent I had as being a replica 18th-century tent. They were former Civil War re-enactors. They turned out to be the most interesting people at the entire event. (This is saying something, as there were 11,000 total weirdos at that event.) They were, of course, K and his wife S. And the most representative thing for me about that event was the evenings I spent drinking by the fire listening to K tell stories.
K has stories. He has stories, and stories about stories, and stories upon stories. He is a prepossessing guy, charismatic and outgoing and usually one of the focal people in any given group. And he has had the most bizarre, eclectic, incredible life. S is a little quieter with strangers, a great deal less outgoing (ha, until she gets either comfortable or drunk or both), but she and K have been together since they were barely adults, and know one another incredibly well. A significant part of K’s charm is how, despite his crudeness and occasional violence, he is visibly hearts-in-eyes in love with S, as if they were still twenty-two and had just met.
Over the years I have grown closer with them, and now am not only part of their Pennsic household but am trying to start a business with K (if we can ever get the logistics squared away). At my fourth Pennsic I camped with them in a combined-household situation, and it was then that I decided to start writing K’s stories down. Most of the foundation of that work was done at an event just after that Pennsic when S was sick, my boyfriend was committed elsewhere, and nobody else came, so it was just K and I, and we sat by the fire and drank and he told me stories for about eighteen solid hours.
So the K stories series is my attempt to tell the stories as they were told to me. It’s an exercise in semi-fiction. Because I didn’t record them; this isn’t just a transcription. And most of them, I have now heard more than once, or they were told in a fragmentary fashion and I am trying to compile a clear, thorough narrative from the fragments, often interrupted with other events. I am also trying to capture K’s distinctive voice. I may not be doing this consistently, as it’s tricky— he doesn’t have a distinctive accent, and he’s a bundle of contradictions. He works in construction, but is very well-educated; like many natives of the South, he has an accent that he turns up or down depending on circumstance, audience, drunkenness, mood, etc.
Note: elsewhere in blogs I have mentioned K by name, or with identifying details, so readers of this may well know of whom I speak. I am attempting, however, to keep his legal name and actual identifying details out of these stories, because of course, some of them have details such that it’d be best if they weren’t public. So wherever possible I’m anonymizing, taking out proper names or place details, and so on. That’s why the coy tone— I’m not exactly trying to hide anything, but especially since some of these may well be semi-fictionalized, there’s really no need to go attaching real names and dates and places to them.
Though I admit, as I began the work of compiling these stories, I did engage in a little bit of… not exactly fact-checking, but corroboration— mostly because if I had to fill in a detail, I wanted to fill it in accurately. And I did discover that actually there are a lot of verifiable details; K fibs a whole lot less than you’d assume given how sensational most of the stories are. He’s a person of considerable integrity, though that doesn’t always mean truthfulness— but his logic is generally internally consistent.
But one of the first amazing things that happened was that the neighbors, a new household on the block, came over to introduce themselves as I was getting my bearings and just beginning to set up. The heads of the household were a married couple about ten-twelve years older than I was (I was in my late twenties). They recognized the tent I had as being a replica 18th-century tent. They were former Civil War re-enactors. They turned out to be the most interesting people at the entire event. (This is saying something, as there were 11,000 total weirdos at that event.) They were, of course, K and his wife S. And the most representative thing for me about that event was the evenings I spent drinking by the fire listening to K tell stories.
K has stories. He has stories, and stories about stories, and stories upon stories. He is a prepossessing guy, charismatic and outgoing and usually one of the focal people in any given group. And he has had the most bizarre, eclectic, incredible life. S is a little quieter with strangers, a great deal less outgoing (ha, until she gets either comfortable or drunk or both), but she and K have been together since they were barely adults, and know one another incredibly well. A significant part of K’s charm is how, despite his crudeness and occasional violence, he is visibly hearts-in-eyes in love with S, as if they were still twenty-two and had just met.
Over the years I have grown closer with them, and now am not only part of their Pennsic household but am trying to start a business with K (if we can ever get the logistics squared away). At my fourth Pennsic I camped with them in a combined-household situation, and it was then that I decided to start writing K’s stories down. Most of the foundation of that work was done at an event just after that Pennsic when S was sick, my boyfriend was committed elsewhere, and nobody else came, so it was just K and I, and we sat by the fire and drank and he told me stories for about eighteen solid hours.
So the K stories series is my attempt to tell the stories as they were told to me. It’s an exercise in semi-fiction. Because I didn’t record them; this isn’t just a transcription. And most of them, I have now heard more than once, or they were told in a fragmentary fashion and I am trying to compile a clear, thorough narrative from the fragments, often interrupted with other events. I am also trying to capture K’s distinctive voice. I may not be doing this consistently, as it’s tricky— he doesn’t have a distinctive accent, and he’s a bundle of contradictions. He works in construction, but is very well-educated; like many natives of the South, he has an accent that he turns up or down depending on circumstance, audience, drunkenness, mood, etc.
Note: elsewhere in blogs I have mentioned K by name, or with identifying details, so readers of this may well know of whom I speak. I am attempting, however, to keep his legal name and actual identifying details out of these stories, because of course, some of them have details such that it’d be best if they weren’t public. So wherever possible I’m anonymizing, taking out proper names or place details, and so on. That’s why the coy tone— I’m not exactly trying to hide anything, but especially since some of these may well be semi-fictionalized, there’s really no need to go attaching real names and dates and places to them.
Though I admit, as I began the work of compiling these stories, I did engage in a little bit of… not exactly fact-checking, but corroboration— mostly because if I had to fill in a detail, I wanted to fill it in accurately. And I did discover that actually there are a lot of verifiable details; K fibs a whole lot less than you’d assume given how sensational most of the stories are. He’s a person of considerable integrity, though that doesn’t always mean truthfulness— but his logic is generally internally consistent.
