Author: Graeme McMillan

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.

So, I bought myself a CD player.

At some point in the last year or so, I started to feel that streaming wasn’t giving me everything I wanted from music. Don’t get me wrong; there’s a lot to be said for the availability of having the world at your fingertips, especially and particularly new music that you wouldn’t otherwise have been able to find, and I’m continuing to build out my playlist of such things as I have done for the last few years. But there’s also something… lacking from that, as well.

I’m not just talking about the instability of streaming media, where you own nothing and favorite songs can disappear off a service without any notice, although that’s not a great thing. And I’m not specifically talking about a physical media vs. streaming/cloud media thing, either, although that too plays into it. It’s something that’s harder to put into words.

It’s the fact that so much isn’t available to stream, for any number of reasons — the band was too small and too old to matter to the platforms today; there are rights issues or fights between labels; songs were b-sides and utterly forgotten by anyone besides fans like me, whatever. It’s the fact that, because you can skip around so much and make your own playlists, I’d stopped listening to things as proper albums anymore for the most part. (I don’t know why that makes me sad, but it does; I feel like I’ve accidentally started ignoring the intent of the artists, maybe?) It’s the fact that it makes the act of listening somehow more passive, and less intentional and important, somehow…?

These thoughts were wandering around my head one morning as I was waking up, and then joined by this odd nostalgia that can only be described as I used to listen to music on these big machines that combined record players and tape players and radios and CD players and now I listen on a phone and how can I honestly say that’s progress? And so I decided to buy a CD player again, my first for… realistically two decades, if not longer…?

It’s tiny and surprisingly cheap — it was less expensive to buy this tiny box than it would have been to re-buy just one of the albums on vinyl, to give you an idea of how cheap — and maybe it’s not going to last that long, either in terms of the actual technology or my desire to revisit the bulging folder of CDs I’ve carried with me since I moved to the U.S back in 2002, but right now, I don’t really care. It simply feels nice, and more than that, feels right, to be listening to CDs on a CD player again.

Nostalgia, but make it tangible, perhaps.

No matter where I went in Seattle, it seemed, I was walking uphill.

It’s not as if I’d previously failed to notice that the city is essentially built on a series of occasionally ridiculously steep hills, but when I was there for the recent Emerald City Comic Con this year, I was staying in a different hotel than usual, further from the convention center and requiring more of a walk there and back every day. I’m not complaining, because (A) it was a really, really nice hotel and I was surprised by how nice my suite was — including the fact that it was a suite, not just a room — and (B) I could do with the exercise, let’s be honest. Also, I like walking; it’s good for my brain as well as my body.

Or, at least, that’s what I thought until I walked down the hill towards what I thought was the closest coffee shop on the first morning. (It was not the closest; there was one inside the hotel that I wouldn’t discover for another couple of days.) You see, there are hills and there are hills, and this was the latter: a hill that I worried about walking down because it was so steep that I feared that gravity might take over and I’d careen down in a cartoonish circle of energy and disaster. Of course, down was the easy part — walking back up with tea and bagel in hand, I had to take to stop midway through because I was out of breath having forgotten to pace myself when climbing this particular paved mountain.

From that point on, I felt painfully aware that, no matter where I was going, I would somehow have an uphill climb ahead of me. Walking to the convention center? After a three block downhill stretch, all uphill. (And then walking back, that downhill stretch was, of course, uphill.) Going to breakfast with friends? Uphill. Headed out for a work dinner? Okay, that one was all downhill, actually — until, of course, I went back to the hotel after.

All of this came to a head on the last night of the trip, when I walked back to the hotel with a work colleague and we were complaining about the hills. At least we won’t have all these uphill walks, we joked, before getting to the hotel and discovering the elevators weren’t working. How did I get back to my room? Walking up eleven floors in the stairwell, puffing and panting the entire way.

I remember when the Gulf War started, and I was 16, I think, watching news reports endlessly with a sense of confusion and anxiety: what was happening? Why was it happening? Was this the start of another world war? Would it ever end? Although I was years away from being 18, I imagined a world where National Service — the British version of the draft — was reinstated and I went to war, entirely unprepared and unwilling, unable to avoid it. It was a nihilistic time, not least because I was 15 and didn’t know any better, but the war war war of the media at the time felt like it was projected directly into my brain, and I didn’t know what to do about any of that. (What I did was start reading Kurt Vonnegut; so it goes.)

I thought of that this past weekend, waking up on Saturday and finding out that the US had launched a war with Iran while I was asleep. Relaunched a war with Iran? Rebooted it? Whatever you want to call it; it feels like the US has been at war with Iran for years and this is just the latest episode. It was at once unthinkable and entirely unsurprising, and left the same pit of confusion and anxiety in my stomach that I felt more than three decades ago.

I spent much of Saturday looking at the news, checking back in over and over as if doing so would somehow uncover a layer of common sense and morality I knew wasn’t really there. It wasn’t as if anyone in the US Government was going to suddenly realize they were breaking international law and care about it, after all, and even if they did, what could be done about what was already happening? It’s not as if an apology and promise not to do it again was possible. There’s no use crying over split milk, or hundreds of dead kids because you bombed a school, as they saying famously goes.

There’s an element of political watchers who look at what’s going on and say, the cruelty is the point, or he’s only doing this to distract from the Epstein files, and both of those things are almost certainly true and I understand that, but also — there’s a point where you have to ask yourself how much that matters, in the practical sense. Whatever the motives, however bad and inhuman and cynical they certainly are, people are dying and it’s 1991 again, 2003 again, and on, and on, and on.