The World That's Coming

My therapist has a question she asks regularly: “But where do you feel it?” Despite her profession, she’s not asking about an emotional feeling; it’s not some coded ask where she’s wanting me to explain that I feel it deep in my heart, or the pit of my stomach, or wherever; she’s asking about the physical responses my aging body feels to a stressful situation, or some other form of upset.

I thought about this as I climbed into bed the other night, after another marathon work session that saw me sitting at my desk, staring at multiple computer screens (multiple computers, even) for far too many hours on end. I’ve noticed that, as I get older, more aches are presenting — or, perhaps, I’m simply feeling them more easily and readily. They actually do have different meanings, it seems, or at least present in recurring patterns that fit with specific stressors appearing in my life elsewhere: anxiety holds onto my shoulders as if it’s trying to lift me into the air, while overwork and exhaustion feels like I’ve been hit in my lower back, this dull ache that throb throb throbs when I move slowly at the end of the evening.

It was that throb, the lower back ache that is probably from sitting over a desk for so many hours without exercise, that I could feel as I climbed into bed, this warning sign from my body that I needed to rest and recover at my earliest convenience. Internally, I felt frustrated knowing that I understood what it meant. Not because it meant that the but where do you feel it question was a good and useful one that I’d spent almost five decades of my life not asking myself (and, when it was initially asked, found myself thinking faintly ridiculous), but because I knew when I felt it that I was realistically days away from the kind of break that my body was already asking for.

It’s one thing to know that your body really is sending you messages, another to understand what those messages mean. Sadly, it’s a third thing entirely to be able to act on those messages with the speed that they are probably demanding.

I knew, before going into it, that March was going to be a very, very strange and probably stressful month this year. I’m far enough into this job now that I know that any time a convention pops up into the schedule, it throws everything around it into disarray, whether or not I’m traveling to the show and doing it in person, or editing other people’s work from afar. The thing was, March didn’t just have one convention — it had three. (Technically, four, but I’ll get to that in a second.)

The first of those conventions was the only one that I attended in person, and was arguably the least disruptive of all of them. After all, I’ve done Emerald City Comic Con on and off for… well, more than a decade, easily, by this point; even though this year’s show was relatively unusual because my work duties shifted further away from actually writing and more towards managing and editing and other things, I still know the lay of the land and the rhythms of that show to not have been thrown entirely by it. (That said, I still had the strange thing where I went to something that’s at least adjacent to a comic show and didn’t actually read any comics; I blame my need for sleep.)

It was after ECCC that things went south. I came back exhausted, both by the show and oddly psychically drained by Spring Forward and the clocks changing, so the entire next week was rough — especially because I basically didn’t have any time off after the show but worked a week as soon as I got home. But that week and the next were also hardcore planning for C2E2, the show in Chicago at the end of March, to the point where in order to hit deadlines for prep I worked a 16-hour day at one point — and that 16-hour work day happened to take place (and, sadly, be genuinely necessary) after I’d failed to sleep more than four hours or so the night before because of a cat barfing right next to me. It was not a fun time.

Yeah, that also happened between ECCC and C2E2: my sleep schedule went to shit, as the change in seasons (and, more importantly, light levels and temperatures) made by all-too-sensitive body forget how to sleep through the night without waking up at multiple times and fail to get comfortable. In the three week period between those two shows, I think I made it through the night without waking up before 5am maybe… twice? It might actually only have been one time. I don’t know what to tell you; I am bad at sleep.

Something else that happened in those three weeks: another convention. MegaCon was another show I wasn’t working in person, but instead editing other people from home — but it did mean that I worked through the weekend again; I actually only got a Saturday and Sunday off once in the entire month of March this year, somewhat surreally, although I did get comped other days to make up for it in a weird, fragmented way.

Oh, and like I said — there was a fourth show in the mix that I was attached to as an editor, but PAX East took place at the same time as C2E2, meaning that I was paying attention to livestreams and notes from writers (and stories from writers, and breaking news from shows) in two separate timezones across the same long weekend stretch.

At one point in the middle of the month, someone pointed out that it was, in fact, literally the middle of the month. How did that happen, we both asked each other. Wasn’t it just February the other day? Now that it’s almost April, I find myself wondering if March even happened in the background of everything else that was going on, or if I just imagined the whole thing.

It’s been a long time since an album has obsessed me as much as The Mountain, the new Gorillaz release; ironically, probably the last Blur album, The Ballad of Darren, underscoring how oddly important Damon Albarn has been to my musical sense of self as I’ve grown older. What’s perhaps funny is, as much as I’ve enjoyed and followed all his work since… fuck, probably Parklife back in 1994…? I don’t think I’ve seen myself in his work as much as I have in these last couple of albums, in large part because I feel like both of them are attempts to regain past glories that succeed because they’re not simply retreads of what came before.

Don’t get me wrong; both The Mountain and The Ballad of Darren have their moments where Albarn and his various collaborators are definitely speaking the musical languages of their past and feeling very nostalgic as they do so. But that’s not what makes them work as well as they do, for me; instead, it’s the tension that comes from doing that while nonetheless speaking from who they are today, older and no wiser but maybe a lot sadder — there’s a weight to Blur’s “I fucked up/I’m not the first to do it” as someone speaking in their mid-50s that wasn’t there in their earlier work; in the same way, “The hardest thing is to say goodbye to someone you love, that’s the hardest thing” hits me harder at 51, knowing that it’s about grieving a parent and having gone through that myself. (That it’s followed by the line, “Your legacy frightens me/Will I keep it gold?” only deepens that.)

I’m fascinated by the way that Albarn grows old but refuses to just play the hits or else pretend to be himself decades earlier when he was more popular — more than that, that he refuses to do that but still tries to compete, at least in pop music terms. There’s something about how oddly stubborn that is that charms me, as much as the fact that he manages to somehow make good music and still get the respect of critics and fans in the process…?

All of which is to say: I’m still listening to The Mountain and still finding new things to appreciate in it. Not least of which is the Mark E. Smith track, which is exactly as chaotic and messy as it should be, really.

Something I don’t think about that often is the fact that, somewhere, people may have parts of my past stored away that I know nothing about. I don’t mean that obliquely or poetically; I’m thinking about the fact that for my BA degree show, and then a year and a half later, my MA degree show, I sold work that I’d created, and that work probably still exists out there, somewhere, a quarter century later.

Perhaps it doesn’t; there’s every single possibility that what I sold — almost all of which was short runs of things I’d written, printed and collected into some kind of publication as basic and botched as they may have been — ended up in trash piles or recycling across the years, given that we are talking almost three decades later by this point. (Realizing that my bachelors’ degree show will have been 30 years ago this summer is a trip, I’ll be honest.) But… what if it didn’t?

It’s not as if I really remember who I sold things to, anymore. I know that friends bought a lot at my BA show in part because I had purposefully priced everything ridiculously low for that purpose. I dread to think how much money I lost with that show, but I also know that I miss that kind of thing and often wish I could do it over again and make the same so-called mistakes. But what about anyone and everyone else who bought something? What did they do with it? Where did it end up, afterwards?

Or, in the case of the more expensive MA show, I printed and bound 5 hardcover books and sold… three? I think three. One I ended up accidentally giving to a friend at the time who I lost touch with a couple years later. Whatever happened to those books? Are they still out there even now? Do people look at them and wonder what the hell ever happened to that guy? (I do, every now and again.)

It’s something that I didn’t really think about at the time — for obvious reasons, not least of which being, I was in my early 20s and who thinks about posterity then? — but each of these things was something that I made and put out into the world, and for all I know they’re still out there, somewhere. Little pieces of my history that will exist independently of me for as long as they’re able to.

Something else about the recent Seattle trip: it was a six-day, five-night trip, and the entire thing was work with one exception — Chloe came up to do a panel on the Saturday night, and so I basically took that night off (after appearing on said panel; it was fun) to have dinner and relax and not think about work, and then went straight back into it on the Sunday morning… and that all proved to be surprisingly odd.

Not the night off or the dinner or any of that; that was all great. But I found myself having trouble kicking back into Work Brain after that brief break, and it felt more like starting over than jumping back in after a short interlude. Oddly enough, I’d experienced this before, last year, when family visited during my time working PAX West; again, I took a break and then went back into it, except… well, getting back into it felt curiously hesitant and awkward at first then, as well.

It led me to think about how, when I’m on a work trip like these ones, it’s very much this kind of flow state mentality where I leave everything else behind and just surrender to the process wherever it goes. That flow state needs a kind of air lock, though, and that’s the prep days before the shows that we get looped into: traveling, sure, but then the process of meeting up with your team and checking in with them, or for many of the shows, doing a walk-through of the convention center a day ahead to see all the particular features that show. (Yes, we’re very thorough; you’re welcome.)

Part of it is also, I think, the accidental preparation of the solitude of the hotel room each night before and the morning of, and the mental space to check off the tick boxes of things you were meant to do or still have to do, from “actual work” to, honestly, remembering to eat and drink and shower and iron clothes and whatever. (Ironing my clothes is a weird but necessary part of my mental morning routine before a day at a convention.) It’s all part of the flow state, and I think a more necessary part than I believed. All of it is maintenance for the whoever I become on those trips, and when the reality of my everyday life sneaks in, that maintenance and that entire Work Me wobbles, just for a second.