There Is Power In A
I’ve been writing some important pieces for THR lately. That sounds like unbridled ego at work — my writing has meaning and weight and integrity, don’t you know — but it’s not intended that way; I mean it in the sense of, there are times when you write things because you have to, because they’re stories that people need to read and that you can’t fuck up for that same reason. It’s not the announcement of a new comic or some analysis of a trailer or a casting decision, both of which can be fun and popular enough in their own right; it’s a story where you feel, deep down, a need to make sure people understand some important truth in some way.
Working on these stories has been… stressful isn’t the right word, exactly, but it’s close. As I said above, the feeling of don’t fuck this up has been very much in the background of the process, as has the sneaking fear that I was, in some worrying and unknown way, fucking it up and that would be uncovered only when it was too late. I asked for oversight, shared what I was working on with others to fact-check, but also to gut-check: Is this right? Am I asking the right questions, thinking the right things? Am I disappearing down the wrong rabbit holes?
As I’m writing this, not all of the “important” stories are finished, never mind having run; the biggest of them all is still in the reporting process, with another waiting what is now the third round of legal review after a substantial re-write to excise material lawyers weren’t entirely comfortable with. (With any luck, by the time this runs, it will have been published; we’ll see.) Throughout the whole thing, I’ve realized that, as frustrating as these processes are, they’re also freeing in their own way — they’re institutional blocks that provide an oversight that allows me to overreach and be ambitious and try too hard, safe in the knowledge that I have someone (multiple someones) to tell me when to pull back, or put up or shut up. I find a strange comfort in that.
I’ve been writing some important pieces for THR lately, but it’s easier to do than it could be, because I’ve not been doing it alone.
July 28, 2020
I Know This For a Fact, You Don’t Like How I Act
Of all the many strange things about this year to consider, wandering around town and feeling as if we’re living in a literal police state is up there with that whole global pandemic thing in terms of “Welp, I certainly didn’t see that coming.” And yet, here we are, in Portland, Oregon in July 2020.
I’m not (just) talking about the federal occupation of the city, with Department of Homeland Security and Customs & Border Patrol agents showing up in armor at riots with live ammunition and a seeming desire to start shit no matter what; I’m not even (just) talking about the fact that protesters are being pulled off the streets and into unmarked rental vans by federal agents who don’t identify themselves, nor have any legal right to arrest the people they’re snatching — although even the fact that those things are actually happening for real feels utterly surreal and horrifying.
No, I’m talking about the fact that, in an evening walk recently, we ran into the police patrolling the streets no less than five times, despite the fact that the walk lasted around, at best, 20-30 minutes. (We were going to the local movie store to return some films.) On two of those five times of seeing the police, they’d stopped to confront people who… didn’t seem to be doing much of anything, to my eyes.
Add to that, the number of nearby sirens I’m hearing daily, or the helicopters flying overhead each night. To say nothing of the sound of flashbangs in the distance every night.
Let me clarify something: I live in a relatively quiet part of the city. It’s certainly far from anything I’d describe as dangerous, and the last time I felt under threat in this neighborhood — outside of seeing the police driving around, checking everyone out at a time when the city’s under the thumb of the authorities, I mean — was more than a year ago, and purely the result of my own paranoia. There is, to put it bluntly, no need for the amount of police presence I’m seeing out there right now.
And yet. And yet.
It’s genuinely surreal to think about where 2020 has taken us so far, and scary, too. I dread to think what could be next.
July 27, 2020
July 24, 2020
Little Short One, Pt. 1
Literally only a couple of graphics from the THR newsletter this time; the week before the July 4 holiday weekend — which we obviously took off, like the rest of the country, so no newsletter and no graphics — was surprisingly light on scoops, and there were no last minute reworkings of headlines or images. So this, dear reader, is your lot.
July 23, 2020
Stay At Home Con
The reality of there being no San Diego Comic-Con has fully set in by now, of course; this is the day I should be in the air on the way to Southern California for a week of overwork and panicked socializing, seeing people in person that I’ve only talked to via email or Slack for a year. Alas, this year, it’s not to be, and I’ll admit that I’m still struggling with that in a number of ways.
Don’t get me wrong; with everything happening in the world, I don’t want to be in a packed convention center with hundreds of thousands of other people right now, especially not in all-too-warm San Diego, with everyone sweating over each other — if ever there was a perfect petri dish for infection, it’d be that scenario. (Also, at this stage of quarantine, even the idea of being in that kind of crowd feels unreal and more than a little scary; imagine going from being cut off from the rest of the world for four months to suddenly being seemingly surrounded in close quarters by it!)
But the fact remains that the loss of SDCC feels like the true signifier that this year has been lost to the plague, for some dumb internal system waiting to reach a particular level before sounding the alarm. This is where the true break is for my ridiculous broken brain. If there’s no San Diego Comic-Con, then all is lost, apparently. Mother of mercy, is this the end of Rico…?
It’s that the SDCC trip has been, perpetually, the closest thing I’ve had to a summer vacation in — what, a decade, if not longer, by this point…? That’s part of it, and that it is a place (and event) that resonates so strongly for me for a number of reasons, as well; more than any other convention — the others all feel like “work trips” far more than SDCC, even though I traditionally work irrationally hard at SDCC — it’s become a traditional place to see friends and have experiences that are often surreal and heightened and a break from reality in some indistinct, but very real, way.
Perhaps that’s what I’m missing the most from the absence of the show this year — that break from the norm. 2020 is a year that’s “not normal,” of course, but it’s steamrolled everything into this new shape where everyday is more or less like the one before because we’re in the same space, doing the same thing, all the time. If ever there was a need for something unusual and special, it’s now — but, instead, SDCC has been cancelled and replaced by an event online that we watch from the comfort of our own homes, like everything else.
I miss the alternative, is all.
