#stagemance as a ship name

[empiireans]

it’s just gay people calm down

more sillies because they make me SICK

if you got the reference in the second doodle, you get a cookie and a handshake

[lokilickedme]

Okay so I promised a bunch of pics from ScotFest 2018, and I’ve been stuck posting from my phone for the last two days so - sorry for the delay, but here we go with the good stuff.  It’s long, but stay with me, you’re gonna enjoy this mad trip.

First, let me say this.

FUUUUUCCCCCCCKK.  I knew I was gonna be having McClary flashbacks the whole time but it started out ridiculous and just got worse as the day went on.

The moment we pulled up the first thing that stepped into view was a dude in an anarchy tee shirt with a kilt and Docs and long black hair strutting down the sidewalk.  If Chem!Tom was Scottish...oh wait a sec, didn’t he say at some point that he was a bit, on his mother’s side?  Works for me.  So anyway, we arrive at ScotFest and walk the long way to the shuttle bus pick-up with a bunch of kilted guys and an elderly couple dressed in ancient clan clothing (they looked awesome).  And before we even get off the bus at the festival grounds, we’re blasted with bagpipe music as a full regalia marching pipe band parades past the entrance.  Something smells REALLY.GOOD. and off to the left of the entrance is a field where two Mol-pups are chasing sheep around while their shepherd whistles commands loud enough to split your head open.  Yep, McClary flashbacks, right off the bat.  And big Scottish athletes are throwing things that don’t look like they were meant to be thrown, though the biggest and most impressive athletes on the field are the females who are using pitchforks to hurl big bags of sand backwards over their shoulders over a bar that’s about 20 feet above their heads.  Big is looking at me like “What the hell, mom??” so I tell him the ancient Scots were farmers and they made games and competitions out of their farm chores.  He’s like “No, I mean why are you breathing so hard?”

No comment.  Did I mention that the females were really impressive?  Good start to the day.

So we move on past the games into the main festival area and everywhere are man-knees.  I’ve never really paid much attention to man-knees before, but to be honest they’re kinda...hot.  I don’t even know why.  And there were so many of them...hundreds and hundreds of man-knees on open display, it’s almost like I shouldn’t be looking but they’re RIGHT THERE all over the damn place and I feel like a pervert scamming peeks.  And calves.  Man calves.  Not normally a fan, but there were some good ones on display.

The first thing we did was hit the tribal music tent and it was over for me before it even got good and started...because on the stage inside the tribal music tent was THIS Scottish god:

Don’t worry, the picture quality will get better.  So we settle in to enjoy the music and this guy is eating up the stage and spanking the shit out of that drum, and then he starts blowing on a flippin’ didgeridoo (yeah, a nine foot long Australian horn, don’t ask me why but omg that man’s lung power was making the ground rumble under our feet and all I could think was how that skill might carry over, if you know what I mean).

Suddenly I’m really interested in nine foot horns.

A really cool thing about hitting the afternoon shows was the fact that you could go right up to the side of the stage and nobody cared.  So I did.

Physically painful, let me tell ya.  I could just almost look up his skirt.

That horn is vibrating the ground where I’m standing and I’m actually relieved when he switches back to the drum because all that vibration has shifted my panties about two inches to the left and it’s getting uncomfortable.  The drum isn’t much better though, and neither is the view from where I’m standing - he’s a big stout bull and I’m three feet away from him while he beats that drum to a whimpering death.  I could reach out and tickle his bare knee if I felt like getting divorced.

So I go back and sit with my guys again and he starts doing this:

KNEES.  I mentioned man-knees before, didn’t I?  Well here, have a pair.  I’ll post a video later of what he did to this poor little drum, and to his own thick neck - because I can’t even describe it, and you know words are my thing.  He played his freaking adam’s apple or something, I don’t even know.

There were actually two other musicians on the stage with him, but I sort of forgot they were there.

There were also lots of adorable father/son kilted combos present - and yep, a bagpiper rounds out the onstage trio.  But again...man knees.  The ones on the left specifically.

So the show ends after a lot of insane drumming, war cries, didgeridoo blowing, bagpiping, and a really nasty little ditty about a girl who’s been touched so much she’s smooth as a stairway bannister (followed by an anthem to an unhealthy relationship that proclaimed “I’d rather be drunk a thousand years than be sober one minute with you”).  Nice, guys.

As soon as their set is over we leave the tent to go wander around, but most everyone else stays because it is as hot as the freaking surface of the sun on this day and the tent is like an oasis on Mars - which means when the band comes out to let the next band hit the stage, we’re pretty much alone outside with the bull and his two stagemates (sorry backup drummer and bagpiper, you guys were awesome and I loved you but didgeridoo guy vibrated my panties two inches to the left, you know how it is).

Anyway, we’re outside at the merch tent and Husband is buying something and I look up and nearly slam bodily into this:

Drummer/didgeridoo guy.  I vaguely recall yelling to Husband during the deafening noise of the show that he looked like Aquaman, and when I end up face to face with him it’s confirmed.  I think it’s the cranky eyebrow.

I also get to ogle the piper’s bagpipes up close and personal, which was hard to do as didgeridoo guy - whose name is CJ - is standing right behind me while I ooh and ahh over this weird thing, and he’s laughing at me for reasons unknown:

Maybe it was the stupid comment I made about squeezing the bag?

And then the three of them pose for a pic:

Goobers.  At this point Little walks up to them and they all sort of huddle around him and start laughing (Little has light-blindness and has to wear special shades outside so he was half blind and I think he rammed right into the guy with the hat), so I hand my phone to Husband and go to get him.  When I get close, didgeridoo guy puts an arm the size of a tree trunk around me and hugs me up next to him while the other two are tickling Little.  Husband starts snapping pics with my phone, but no, I’m not sharing them because 1) my face, 2) Little’s face, 3) shellshock at being touched by this stud ox without having initiated it myself, and 4) the look on my face clearly says MY PANTIES ARE CROOKED AND HIS SWEAT IS SOAKING THROUGH MY SHIRT AND PHEROMONES PEOPLE OMG PHEROMONES I’M IN PAIN HELP I MAY BE PREGNANT

Yeah, he was drenched in sweat from jumping all over that damn stage schlepping a drum that probably weighed more than me.  My hand was on his back and it came away soaked.  You can consider that a euphemism if you want, it works both ways.

Also - red boots.  Urgh.  And then he goes like this:

Boy was solid as a whiskey barrel, let me tell you.  We came back later to listen to another band and he was out there again, and the girls from the face painting tent had lured him over and braided his hair.  He looked flippin cute.  And by cute I mean Jesus Wept.

So before this turns into an exclusive didgeridoo guy fest (too late, yeah I know) let’s move along to this fine specimen that I found at the blacksmith tent:

Ladies and gentlemen, meet King McClary’s work kilt.

Dude was nice from the front too:

Definitely an Auchinleck, for those of you familiar with The McClary Chronicles.  Check out the tattoo.  And he was making maille battle armor, which I got to touch.  It didn’t shift my panties quite as hard as the drums did, but there was definitely a quiver.

This guy was at the tent next door to the armor tent, making I dunno, bong pipes or something and he was hilarious:

And then there was this guy, listening to ballads in the historical folk music tent and looking all angsty and authentic, like his love just died of a fever and his crop failed so he joined a ships’ crew to find his fortune in a faraway land but the damn boat sank fifteen feet from shore and now he’s just fucking stuck in Scotland and contemplating becoming a villain:

And he was glaring at my child, I don’t know why.  Prissy prick.  I was hoping to see his dick but he was so anal he tucked his kilt under his ass from the front.  Definitely a villain.

After a couple of teary ballads about wailing winds and failed crops or whatever, I dunno, I wasn’t listening because I was too involved in trying to see Prissy Prick’s ballsack, we wander over to the Highland Dance competition and walk in on this:

We’re in there for all of about twelve seconds before Big starts giggling, then Little starts giggling, then I start giggling.  We promptly leave the Highland Dance competition tent, because these girls really worked hard and I don’t want to get arrested for being a dick.

We go watch the Mol-pups chase the sheep around, because nobody cares if you disrupt the proceedings in the middle of a field full of sheep.

And then we watch some more of the Highland Games, in which guys threw stuff while making the best faces I’ve seen since that time Husband wanted to try setting the mirror next to the bed:

Yeah, we giggled.

After that we went back to listen to some more music, because damn.  Scottish rock is da bomb.  Heard a punk band that Husband immediately fell in love with, so I guess we’re evensies on the lusting after Scottish musicians thing now:

Dude on the bagpipes grinned like that through the whole set, I think he was puffing something out of one of those tubes.

And then we walked out into the big freaking middle of about four billion of these:

Noisy effers.  And they don’t stop for anybody - we literally had to jump out of the way because when they paused in front of us, they went into this formation thing and backed up right into where we were standing.  Had to grab Little and yank him up off the ground before he was trampled by some dude wearing a dress and giving an octopus a blow job.

Turned to look at a woman sitting next to us a little later and watched her pull a dagger out of her sock and shine it on her kilt like she was getting ready to go assassinate someone in the crowd.  We left soon after, so I didn’t get to see it go down.  I hope it wasn’t the didgeridoo player, he was cute AF.

All in all it was an 11/12 day, marred only by the outrageous heat and the fact that I’ve been off my supplements and medications for a week in prep for surgery on Tuesday, so I was exhausted and my blood’s gone back to being water again.  We didn’t stay as long as we would have otherwise, but we had fun and experienced a lot of weirdness - I ate haggis on accident, Husband sat down with a plate and I thought it was meatloaf (it was good and I didn’t die, so bonus) - and I got to spend the day surrounded by all the clans that tried to assassinate Thomas The Fucking Marauder.

We’ll be going again next year.  Husband is a descendant of one of the border clans, so he’s heavy into this...and of course you all know what my connection is to it :)

Let me leave you with a picture of a guy about to bullrush a scarecrow.  I don’t know why, I didn’t ask.  Scotland’s weird, ya’ll.