Category: Uncategorized

It’s rare that I have dreams that I remember, as I’ve noted before many times on this site. It’s even more rare that, when I do remember those dreams, they’re not somehow either inexplicably weird enough, or unsettling enough, that they stick with me. for whatever reason. The other day, though — the other night? Well, early morning, I guess — I had a dream that was just… nice. Pleasant. Positive, even. And for some reason, it stuck with me, and so here it is.

As with so many of my dreams, it’s the details I remember rather than the plot, per se. (Do dreams really have plots, or is that just pushing some kind of expectation of storytelling on them that they don’t deserve?) Everything was happening on a sunny fall day — I remember both the sun, and the chill in the air — even though I was inside, talking to people in a big room with massive windows from floor to ceiling. The room was part of an imaginary office, and I remember there was a lot of white furniture everywhere, including white shelving that extended across the window in part to dramatic effect.

I was in that office because, in the dream, I had been offered the job of editing a magazine. I’m not entirely clear on who was offering me that job or why, but there was some weird connection to the fact that James Gunn’s first Superman movie was about to come out and that was playing some factor into it. (Was it DC offering me a job? Who can tell at this point.) All I remember was, it was a job where I was being told I could do what I want with budget not an issue, literally a dream job, and I was sitting in this room thinking variations on, “I can’t believe my luck” and also “But I’m already editing Popverse, would I have to quit to do this? Is that something I’d want to do?”

Such thoughts weren’t anxiety inducing or bad, I should note; this was, again, a positive dream so it was far more, “Oh, what a great place to be in, what an opportunity” than anything else. The feeling throughout the entire experience was one of being fortunate, and of the potential available to offer people work as a result, and make a good thing that also helped other people in the process.

There’s no small amount of dark humor to be found in the fact that my dream was literally, “Imagine the publishing industry was so healthy to launch a new magazine that you got to be part of,” and also, “imagine the industry was so healthy good writers you know could get work,” but let’s overlook that for now. Let’s just bask in the memory of a nice dream. Good vibes only, as the frustrating saying goes.

The fall is, I promise, my favorite time of the year. There’s something about the dull light on the overcast days, or the way that sun is almost mixed with crisp chills if and when it eventually arrives. (I’m writing this on the first sunny day here in Portland in something like three or four weeks, and it feels magical how much it’s lifted my mood.) Despite that, I’ve noticed that in recent years, the fall is also the time of year when everything just… folds in on itself as if time is collapsing around me.

This year, for example, it felt as if October just… didn’t happen. Or, rather, days of it did — I remember by birthday, and Halloween, for example, and I know I went to New York for a week of it even if all I did was work endlessly — but the entire month seemed to pass in the blink of an eye overall. Suddenly, it wasn’t just November but midway through November and I felt as if I’d magically arrived here through time travel or sleepwalking through the last few weeks. (To be fair, that might have been the case, given how intense my workload was for about four or five weeks there.)

Last year, the fall was lost to my UK trip; I left mid-October and when I was back, it was almost Thanksgiving and the holiday season felt as if it was already underway. I spent the holidays trying to catch my breath and wondering what had happened.

What is it about this time of year? Is it the stress of the entire rest of the year finally catching up with us and pulling us under for a little bit? Is it that the darker mornings and evenings just fuck with our sense of time and sending us spinning as a result? Am I simply not as much of a fan of the fall as I used to be?

Maybe I’m just getting old. But the final two months of each year are becoming increasingly tricky for me, and I’m not quite sure what to do about that.

There’s something to be said, I’m sure, about what the spam of any particular era says about that time. Who amongst us fails to remember the time when almost every single spam email wanted to trick us into confirming our existence — not to mention our personal details — by promising untold wealth if only we’d believe that an African Prince was asking for our help? Those were happier, more naive years, when the counterfeit powers that be sought to take advantage of those political promises of “Hope” and “Change” by suggesting that we should dare to hope that our lives could change if only we revealed way too much about ourselves to a stranger. (Hey, he was down on his luck and just needed some help!)

Lately, though, I’ve found that the spam of today has two significant differences to the “classic” spam of the past. (Those quote marks around “classic” are doing a lot of work, let’s be honest.) For one thing, so much of it seems to be coming in as texts, rather than emails — am I the only one who’s getting multiple spam texts every day now? I blame the fact that my phone number is likely on several million lists after years of convention attendance — and, more importantly, it’s… sad now. Take, for example, this spam text I received earlier today:

Maybe I’m just too much of a sentimental old man, but there’s something about this message that feels like there’s enough backstory to fill at least a novella of longing, pretentiously and anxiously written by a first-time writer processing a recent love affair in the most self-indulgent manner possible. But it’s melancholic in such an inescapable way to me that feels fascinating. Is this where we are now, wondering about people we miss and wanting to hear from them?

I could be reading too much into these messages, of course; I am me, after all, and for every “I hope you still have the same number, I haven’t heard from you in so long and I was thinking of you” spam text, there’s a “I work for an employment agency and I’d like to offer you a job” one as well. Perhaps the real feeling out there is “economic and emotional uncertainty,” to which I’d respond, “I think that was my 20s, and my 30s, and a lot of my 40s as well, glad you all caught up.”

I should simply delete these messages, and not think about them so much. And yet, hours later, I’m still wondering about whoever came up with the above text and what’s going on in their lives for that to be their attempt to catfish us into disaster. Spare a thought for the spammers; it seems like maybe they’re having some hard times themselves.

It’s difficult to accurately describe my feelings this morning, seeing the results of the election. If there’s such a thing as “stunned disbelief that is also the realization that this was almost inevitable, mixed with the crushing disappointment in your fellow citizens,” it’d be that. As I said on Monday, I had a pit-in-my-stomach feeling things were going to turn out this way, but I was… I don’t know: I think, despite that, I was hoping that I was wrong and that I was too cynical about everything, and without even knowing it that hope was actually where I actually was.

I actually woke up at 3:45 this morning, stressed about what had happened while I was asleep, even though I went to bed with the dull certainty of the outcome. The first thing I did after checking the news was have a brief moment of depressed introspection and I shouldn’t say anything, and the second thing was to write what ended up being an op-ed on Popverse which was a letter to myself to remember to be kind and fight for the right people in the next four years. It was one of those, “when in doubt, write,” things.

I’m scared of what’s going to happen in the next four years, and beyond. I’m angry about the fact that 15 million Biden voters disappeared on the way to this election, whether through vote suppression tactics on behalf of the other side, or apathy on the part of those who are ostensibly “anti-Trump.” (Trump won a landslide this time out with 3 million voters less than he had when he lost in 2020; some Republicans really did abandon him.) I’m exhausted by the certainty that things are going to get worse across the foreseeable future, and in ways that I can’t even imagine just yet.

In 2016, Trump’s victory felt like a bad thing that was this great unknown. This time, I feel like we know all too well how bad the baseline is. This feels so much worse.

I’m terrified about the upcoming election. I have tried not to be, and failed, completely; I have talked to people smarter than I about why I’m merely doomscrolling and panicking in my head, and that the reality is possibly significantly better than I am imagining, and yet none of it sticks: I am convinced of a worst-case scenario purely because I have a feeling in the pit of my stomach that things are going to turn out badly.

Part of this is, I know, that I’m paying too close attention to the race at this point and getting lost in the weeds. This has been the most disorienting, most frustrating election season I’ve been through, which feels like it’s really saying something, considering 2020; it’s nonetheless true, and that too has added to the feelings of being continually gaslit by reality across the past few months, and especially weeks: how can things be a coin-toss decision after everything that we’ve seen? How can this still be as close as it seems to be, 24 hours out from ending?

That closeness — which might not even be real, but instead the result of people lying to pollsters, or polling being entirely flawed for any number of reasons this time out — is what’s doomed my mood about the whole thing more than anything else: the idea that, in a race between the two candidates where one is so clearly and obviously a danger to all kinds of core ideas of American democracy or even simple decency, there’s an almost even split in terms of support. Who are these half-of-the-country people who are okay with fascism and hatred so such clear display, and what is going to happen to them after the election, no matter how it goes?

I want my very strong sense of impending disaster to be wrong; I want to not feel that 2016 feeling again. But right now, all that I can say for sure is that I’m worried, and I want it all to be over.

One of the things that kept this past New York trip interesting was the fact that, try as I might, as exhausted as I may have been, I only managed to sleep past 5am once that entire week. (Surely, I reasoned, I should be sleeping in, in that 5am EST is just 2am PST, and yet.) In theory, I know that I should have spent that time reading something fun, watching shitty television, or some similarly mindless endeavor to keep myself from waking up too fully or testing my brain, and yet what I actually did every single time it happened was immediately get up to start working for the next hour before I went out and got myself some breakfast from the Starbucks around the corner from the hotel as soon as it opened.

Across the course of the week, I discovered the following things about this accidental routine:

1. 6am is an ideal time to go for a walk around New York, especially in October. The sun’s not up, the people are just starting to walk around for the day, and you get to see a lot of businesses set their shit up each morning. There’s a lot of hosing down the sidewalk and people singing loudly as they do so.
2. There are good “walking around New York at 6am” songs and there are bad “walking around New York at 6am” songs. I listened to a bunch of French hip-hop during those walks. (My hotel was just off 42nd Street, which is perpetually lit up by neon signs and an oddly wonderful thing to experience at that time of the morning when accompanied by French hip-hop; I recommend it to you all.)
3. Inexplicably, there were always people from my company up and around at that time of the morning. Every single morning. Even the morning when the show wasn’t happening and there was no last-minute prep to be done, I ran into someone outside who was waiting for a car to head off into the morning. Perhaps the most surreal example of this was running into the same person just before I got to my hotel room the night before, and then immediately as soon as I left the hotel the next morning; in both cases, she was on a journey between the hotel and the convention center.

As I’m writing this, I’m on the plane back from New York, unsurprisingly utterly exhausted, and also hoping against hope to get a full night’s sleep for the first time in eight days. Surely it has to happen eventually.

To say the New York trip was not what I expected would not be entirely correct, as I’m pretty sure that there was no point before I got on that plane where I thought it would be anything less than “a lot of work” and “very stressful.” That said, it was so much more work, and so much more stressful than I think I’d been imagining, to the point where I worked… maybe 16 hours every single damn day of the trip? Okay, wait, that’s not true; five of the days. I was traveling for the other two. For those days, I worked something closer to 4 through 6, depending.

(It really was a lot of work, for reasons that I’m not going to share publicly.)

The worst day was definitely Thursday, the first “full” day of New York Comic Con, purely for the fact that it was the day where every single techical difficulty hit us full in the face and we had to get ways around them by hook or by crook. How do you do a liveblog when you have no internet connection? Let me tell you, that was definitely a question I had to ask myself, which might give you an idea of how the day went.

Actually, no; here’s the ideal illustration of how the day really went: at one point, I realized that I didn’t know where my phone was. I could remember the last time I had it, and that was maybe half an hour earlier, and thinking about it, I realized two things: (1) my phone had fallen out of my pocket in a convention room holding a few hundred people, and (2) there was a very good chance I would never see my phone again. Which, you know, would not be great for any number of reasons.

Still, I went back to the panel room, thinking, the panel’s not been done for that long, it’s probably on the ground where I was, and I climbed around on my hands and knees only to find absolutely no phone. It was at this point where I realized how stressful that day really was, because upon realizing that I had really, actually, lost my phone, my first thought was, well, this is still only the third or fourth worst thing that’s happening right now.

For what it’s worth, it turned out someone in the room had already found the phone, so when I went to ask if the A/V team could keep an eye out in case anyone hands anything in, they simply handed me my phone and said, “this is probably yours.”

If only all the other problems of the weekend had such simple solutions.

As you read this, I’m in New York for New York Comic Con 2024. I’m actually writing this weeks earlier, knowing (a) at the time you read this, I will be so busy with the show itself that I couldn’t even consider writing a post here, and (b) that I’ve already been working on things for the show for so long that I don’t call it New York Comic Con (or even NYCC) anymore, but New York Comic Con 2024, because that’s the terminology I use at work.

New York Comic Con is a show that takes up a large percentage of my work year, because it’s the biggest show in North America, but also because it’s the biggest show Popverse does every year; it’s the one that takes the most planning and organization, and the one that comes with the most pressure to get it right. It’s also the one with the most moving parts, which also means it’s the one with the most potential for things to go wrong; to absolutely no-one’s surprise, I started having stress dreams about this show about a month before it started, simply because that’s the way my brain works.

Despite all of this, it’s something I look forward to each and every year because I get to go to New York. Even now, there’s something genuinely magical about the city to me — if anything, the magic has grown from the first time I visited (26 years ago now, shockingly; I really am old), filled with awe and entirely unsure how it happened. Now, I have decades of memories in the city that decorate the landscape, each as odd and oddly meaningful as another, even if they’re simply of walking back to a hotel with a particular song in my ear after a day’s work. It’s become a city full of memories and ghosts, which feels entirely right for New York.

So, think of me as I do the job and don’t sleep enough, and enjoy some great food and some terrible food, and some great terrible food. I might be busy, I might be stressed, but if nothing else, I am still in one of my favorite places in the world.

I had the thought occur, recently, when thinking about my 50th birthday — it just happened! I’m old now! — that, now that I’m past my first half-century, that I’m firmly in the second half of my life. That thought was then immediately followed by my brain going, well, it’s not really that likely that you’re going to live until 100 statistically, and then I got very, very depressed.

It’s not the realization that I’ve probably been in the “second half of my life” for at least a decade or so already, as much as that’s an oddly sobering thought. (I wonder, if I’d had that realization when I turned 40, if it would have changed anything about me? Would I have become a different person in some strange attempt to “live life to the fullest”? Perhaps we’ll see now that I’m here, now.) Instead, it’s the even more sobering realization that my parents didn’t live that far into their 60s, which means that if my life follows their trajectory, I’m actually inside the last 20 years or so of my life.

To be fair, neither of my parents were especially healthy, and my mother didn’t die of natural causes, anyway. (Complications from surgery, in case you’re wondering.) I would like to think that, as unhealthy as I may be, maybe, I am still healthier than either of them and try to make better choices, and so perhaps I’ll have a lifespan closer to my grandmother, who made it all the way to 80 before dying in another accident that leaves me suspicious of the bad luck of my family in later years.

But still; I suddenly am aware that, for whatever reason, my family traditionally hasn’t been especially long-lived, a fact that’s hovered around the back of my head for some years and now sits front and center with a new sense of urgency following this landmark birthday.

Maybe it really is time for me to start looking after my health more.