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I can’t get this idea out of my head, so I’m putting it here as a form of exorcism.

For reasons that I honestly can’t explain beyond simple accidental masochism, I’ve been re-reading a bunch of Geoff Johns comics lately; you know this if you look at my lists of the comics I’ve been reading every month. One of the things I’ve noticed that he unfailingly does is concentrate on making the subtext text in almost everything he writes, but in a very specific format. It isn’t just that he’ll make sure that the subtext is made very, very clear to everyone reading the comic, but that he’ll almost certainly have a character say the subtext out loud in such a way that is, almost without fail, either a complaint or a wistful comment about a problem that doesn’t really exist.

I was re-reading The Flash: Rebirth the other week — a comic where the first issue is just filled with characters essentially looking out at the reader and saying, and this is my relationship with the Flash before he shows up and also looks out at the reader to say, and here is my dilemma that I will be addressing throughout this series, and this is how it connects to the readers’ own feelings about me as a fictional construct — and my brain went, ‘I wonder if someone who can do such a thing could create a Geoff Johns mad-libs where an entire comic could be constructed basically by filling in some well-paced gaps?’

This thought then immediately switched to, imagine if Geoff Johns was writing a reboot of The Flintstones and I could see the first page horrifically clearly without any further thought.

It would be essentially one big image of the town of Bedrock, with an all-too-detailed, quasi-realistic bird-like dinosaur squawking in the foreground, against a backdrop of cavemen moving things out of huts. The dinosaur, an update of the idea of dinosaur-as-radio or whatever, would be talking about how Bedrock has been hit by a wave of layoffs and everyone is being forced to move out of the city because of impending meteor warnings. Everything would be in muted, dull colors, and look very depressing.

A relatively small panel is inset into the bottom of the page, showing the tired, downset eyes of Fred Flintstone — again, far too realistic in terms of depiction — as he looks off-panel. A caption, relaying Fred’s innermost thoughts, is at the bottom right of the panel. It simply reads, “It’s hard being a modern stone-age family.”

I didn’t actually realize what was going on until it had been going on for awhile, unfortunately; I was talking to someone at work about the fact that all of us seemed to be operating under less than optimal circumstances lately and I wrote something like, “we all just seemed a little burned out,” at which point my brain went, oh, that’s it. You’re burned out. That’s what this is.

I had, to this point, been operating for a few weeks wondering why I was failing to have the same joie de vivre (which I have likely misspelled) that I normally had; I’d been feeling sluggish both in terms of feeling physically tired, but also emotionally under the weather, with everything feeling that little bit less exciting or even interesting than it usually did. I’d been ascribing a lot of this to the fact that, just weeks earlier, I’d had COVID and it takes time to get over that — something that is still true, it should be noted — but, nonetheless, had also been wondering why I’d failed to spring back as quickly as I had the first time I’d had the virus. Was this a stronger case? Was it just that I’m four years older?

The truth is, I realized when talking to my work colleague, I was burned out — a state that, in my mild defense, I’d practically trained myself out of recognizing back when I was a freelancer. It’s not that freelancers can’t get burned out — they do, and often — but that being burned out didn’t help when it came to meeting deadlines and paying bills. At some point relatively early in my freelance career, I convinced myself that because it didn’t “matter” on some practical level if I was burned out, then I simply wouldn’t accept that I could be burned out. There’s that entirely-healthy attitude I had back then.

Looking back on it with older, fresher eyes: of course I was burned out. I’d moved through three separate highly stressful work periods without a break, during which time I’d also attended San Diego Comic-Con and had COVID for a week. in addition to navigating whatever home life had been throwing at me at any given moment. (That list included the kid coming back from his summer away, and getting him ready for school, in addition to pet nonsense and other stuff.) How could anyone not be burned out, after all that?

The realization was something that allowed me to feel smug, for all of… a minute or so? After that, there was the inevitable follow-up question: how are you supposed to recover from being burned out when you have no less than two separate conventions to attend and report on for work in a two week period?

I have, it feels like, lost the ability to get a good night’s sleep.

This is a problem, of course, but it’s one I’m not entirely sure how I’m supposed to fix. I am doing the right things, in terms of going to bed at a reasonable time and trying to decompress my head by reading a little before turning out the light and settling in for the night. It’s not as if I even have trouble falling asleep, because even that I feel as if I’d be able to address in some form or another. Instead, I fall asleep almost immediately, and I don’t wake up until the next morning. It’s just that… I don’t feel particularly well-rested.

Again, the problem isn’t that I’m not getting enough sleep, although I could almost certainly go for more. I’m getting maybe… seven hours or so a night? Maybe closer to eight on some nights. That doesn’t feel like I’m running at a deficit, especially compared with my historical averages. (When I was a kid and entirely invincible, as kids are, I could manage on four or five and still feel fine the next day. Ah, those were the days…) It’s simply that I do not, for whatever reason, feel as if I’ve actually slept when I wake up in the morning.

The reasonable answer about what’s happening is probably connected with the amount of stress I’m feeling lately — the job is filled with things to utterly dominate my mind and refuse to let go, unfortunately, and that’s been the case since the beginning of June; that’s an entire quarter of a year, almost! — but, despite what G.I. Joe once told us, knowing isn’t half the battle. It doesn’t really do anything for the sense of exhaustion I’ve taken to permanently wearing around my shoulders, like the fur of a shittily-designed fantasy warrior.

Instead, I find myself yawning by the time it’s 5pm, and my eyes feel heavy around 8. I’m in trouble by the time fall will arrive, if this hasn’t sorted itself out; I’ll hide from the inevitable chill in the air and the darkness outside in the evenings, and fall asleep by accident in front of the television, lulled into unconsciousness by the drone of the latest episode of a reality show and unable to properly relax for the same sound quietly nagging in my ears.

It’s funny, looking back and realizing that the term “Doomscrolling” was only invented back in 2020. That’s not to say that 2020 wasn’t a particularly bleak year — the one-two punch of COVID and the election that year were pretty horrific, especially when you factor in all the political upheaval and upset surrounding both — but, when I think about the idea that things started to noticeably go wrong in the world, 2020 feels considerably too late to me.

Instead, I look back to 2016 for that, perhaps obviously. The US election of that year can be pinpointed as a particular level of Bad News; I have very specific, very clear memories of becoming all-too-obsessed with the news especially in the last month or two of that election, as it became increasingly clear that Trump had a very real chance of winning instead of being the joke candidate that people (including me) had initially written him off as being, and that certainly feels like some early form of Doomscrolling.

But it started even earlier than that; that summer saw the Brexit vote in the UK, and there was something there, in seeing the UK (really, England, but the results impacted the entire United Kingdom, so thanks for that) make the stupidest possible choice based on the worst, most xenophobic reasoning, and having a very real sense of, this feels like the start of something very bad.

That feeling of there’s something happening here echoes in my brain right now, with another US election in the offing and complete upheaval in the United Kingdom. Sure, I know that the Tories have been voted out of office (finally!) just a month or so ago, but now we’re faced with a rise of neo-Nazi protests and attacks, and again I find myself worried about what’s going to happen to the US over the next few months. “Doomscrolling” as a term feels too quaint for this feeling, I have to admit; “doom-foreshadowing” or something similar might be more appropriate.

So, funny story: it was COVID after all.

I had convinced myself that it wasn’t, because (a) the home tests said negative, (b) I didn’t feel that sick (or so I kept thinking to myself, as much trying to reassure my own brain as anything else), and (c) COVID would just be really bad, and I didn’t want really bad, in the grand scheme of things. And yet, after going to the doctor at the weekend, the test result came back and… there it was.

To be fair, “there it was” ignores the fact that I actually read the email notification three times, because I had managed to convince myself so well that I was convinced that I’d misread something and there was actually no way I was testing positive. “Oh, maybe it’s just saying that positive was an option,” I thought, as if that was actually something that would be listed under the all-caps heading “RESULT” just for fun. (“Did you know you could test positive for COVID? It’s true!” would be the helpful, jaunty, explanation.)

When it comes down to it, I think I knew the whole time. I hadn’t been sleeping well for a few nights by that point, and when I’d wake up in the middle of the night, my brain was freewheeling like during my last COVID-experience; during the day, my concentration was gone, and I felt perpetually dizzy, outside of all the other (many) physical symptoms, and almost everything felt like a chore that made me generally grumpy to have to deal with. I’d felt like all of this before, even if I’d rather have told myself that it was just con crud and everything would sort itself out the next day, if only I got some sleep.

Of course, by the time I eventually got the diagnosis, it was apparently too late for medication to help. (There’s apparently a deadline starting from the date of first feeling symptoms.) Instead, all I could do — all I’m still doing, as you read this — is relaxing as much as possible and hoping for the speediest recovery possible. Sometimes, it’s 2020 again after all.

One of the strangest moments of this year’s San Diego Comic-Con was the moment of realization that I was never able to leave San Diego Comic-Con this year. I don’t mean that in the horror-movie-esque manner in which it immediately comes across — or maybe I do, come to think of it — but more in the sense of, after years of feeling jealous of those who’d find themselves in the hotels immediately surrounding the convention center during the show, I found myself in that situation and discovered that I hated it very much.

The appeal of staying in a hotel literally right next to the convention center is, I think, pretty immediately obvious: imagine not having a trek between the show and where you’re sleeping! You don’t even have to cross the road to get to your hotel! It’s right there! After many years of walking anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour at the end of the end of a long day to get to where I was staying, there was no small level of jealousy when it came to talking to people staying at the Hilton Bayfront or the Marriott Marquis, who’d talk about quickly headed back to their hotel between panels to take a brief break.

This year, I had the opportunity to be one of those lucky few, thanks to some last-minute shenanigans that I was not party to, only profiting from, and… I feel as if it might have been very bad for me, if that doesn’t sound entirely ungrateful.

Don’t get me wrong: yes, my commute time was minimal, and I got to be right in the center of the action for the entire show. On the other hand, I was right in the center of the action for the entire show. What I had never actually appreciated before this trip was how important those walks to and from the show each day actually were, in the sense of allowing my brain to get into work mode, or into de-stressing mode. What I had previously thoughts of as simply… well, just walks… were airlocks in and out of the real world, reminding me of a sense of perspective that I sorely lacked this year.

Instead of getting a chance to see what passes for normality in San Diego — the entire city does like to indulge Comic-Con, it has to be said — I found myself living inside the bubble for the entire time; everything had an activation, decals, and branding. I could hear the show at all times, it felt like. For everyone who’s still like I was, wishing that they could live the Comic-Con dream for the entire length of the show… be careful what you wish for… or at least learn to aim higher.

I’ve discovered that, on the occasions where my brain is stressed about something to the degree that it buzzes pretty continuously in the background without ever truly taking over and pushing everything else out to make room, the anxiety machine has developed an unexpected new treat for me. At the end of the night, I’ll get into bed and lie down, light off, ready to sleep, and slip away… only to wake up a couple of hours later in a fog shaped by only the most trivial of things.

Case in point: a few weeks ago, I was feeling a very low-key work stress as I went to sleep, otherwise having enjoyed a day off where I was binge-watching the enjoyably trashy Love Undercover — they’re soccer stars, but in America, where no-one could care less! It’s a perfect formula for a dating show where the unaware women are so very not bothered when they find out the “secret” — and reading Batman comics. I had successfully ignored the worry about a couple of problems I’d have to juggle the next day, and felt both surprised and happy that I wasn’t lying there utterly awake and exhausted… and then it was suddenly 1am and my brain was trying to tell me some very confused story about Jamie The Footballer getting engaged but also I was Batman somehow and there was some kind of cathedral linking the two together in a way I couldn’t even fully comprehend at the time.

Looking back, I’m not entirely sure I properly woke up as much as my brain quasi-surfaced but left enough of itself in a dream that I was unable to tell the two apart. All I know for sure is that I got up to piss, then got back into bed and lay there, worried about what the cathedral meant in the grand scheme of things, and whether or not I should be hanging out on the roof, given that I was Batman, after all.

That wasn’t the first time something like that had happened, and I’m sadly sure it won’t be the last. It’s as if a connection has been screwed up somewhere, and what should be the garbage disposal unit of the my short-term media memory is accidentally dumping everything into the front of my brain at the wrong time. Thankfully, it’s only happened to make me think I was the Dark Knight one time, so far. That’s not something I have any interest in repeating. Just think how bad things would in Gotham City if that were actually the case…

As you’re reading this, I’m probably losing my mind. I’m writing it a couple of weeks ahead of time in a vain attempt to try and build up something resembling a buffer of posts before the big event, but on the day this publishes, the annual terror that is San Diego Comic-Con Week is ramping up.

The show itself doesn’t begin for two more days, but basically everything from two weeks out is utterly eaten up by the event itself. Like New York Comic Con in October, San Diego Comic-Con (which has the hyphen, NYCC doesn’t, because “Comic-Con” with a hyphen is apparently a trademarked term; something to bear in mind) is less of a traditional event than an existential happening with an event horizon that consumes everything around it; time gets weird, and it’s probably very likely that I’ve been so nose-deep in planning for the show when you’re reading this that I have already lost track of what day it actually is.

Making things more complicated this year is the fact that I am an editor and not just a writer at Popverse this year, so I actually get to contribute to the planning of everything this time out, and also that we at Popverse have also been dealing with a wholescale switch of behind-the-scenes hosting, organizational tools, and CMS for the last couple weeks. There’s been a lot going on, roughly four or five times what I’m used to at this time of year, so it’s been… a thing.

(Again, I’m writing this weeks ahead, but to give you an idea of how much everything is this year, it’s three weeks until SDCC as I’m writing, and I’m already doing things I usually leave until week-of. There’s no way around it. Light is bending! We’re already on the edge of the black hole!)

The thing that’s keeping me afloat at this point is, unexpectedly, that I keep remembering that I like San Diego Comic-Con. I like seeing friends I rarely see outside of that show; I like the strange feeling that mixes the intense work pressure and the sense that maybe I’m on some kind of holiday just because everything feels so different and unexpected. I’ve been going to the show in one way or another for the past 16 years without fail — aside from the Covid period when it was canceled — and for a handful of years before that more irregularly; I have very strong, complicated but important memories and life events tied to the show. For better or worse, SDCC has become a pilgrimage in its own right for me, and something that almost always feels worth the stress by the time the show is over each and every year. As long as I remember that, then everything becomes easier to work through.

It’s just that, already, I’m having to remind myself to remember that, and not lose my cool. There’s weeks to do that — although it’s probably happened by the time you’re seeing this.

As is my wont, I’ve been noodling around with Garageband recently, making loops out of old 1960s songs without any real purpose beyond just wanting to see if I can do it and make it sound pretty good. (So far, the answer is yes, but it helps that I’m playing with music that I know and love as closely and clearly as I do.) It’s a mental exercise as much as anything else: finding something and reshaping it to create something new, but in a method (and a format, let’s be real) that is somewhat alien and I’m uncertain about and uncomfortable in. It’s play, but play in such a way to keep me on my toes and allow for all kinds of mistakes that could end up being as thrilling as they might be frustrating.

I mention this, as much as anything, because I’ve been revisiting a bunch of music I loved from years and years and years ago — Primal Scream and Delakota and a bunch of the late 1990s “dance” music of the era — and realizing how much of it is, if not born from the same lack of skillset and incompetent bumbling around in software I barely understand, then the same approach of playing and building things block by block and seeing what happens.

I shouldn’t be too surprised, of course; there’s part of the wonderful Beastie Boys Story documentary where they talk about making Paul’s Boutique and that’s not a million miles away from their attitude with that album — of course, they had more patience and more skill behind their efforts than I did, as well as infinitely more taste and finer record collections — and it even feeds into a similar version of how the Beatles went around recording their albums, with a sense of, “I think I want to do this, but I don’t know how to get there, so let’s just see what happens and hope for the best.”

As I said above, the core of all of this is play: of doing something with no set goal in mind, and being ready to embrace and appreciate the journey as much as the destination, in large part because there is no destination when you set off. As I find myself approaching more and more defined goals professionally, such play outside of work becomes so much more important to me — a way to connect back to what animated me throughout so much of my life, and what makes me happy and curious and, well, what keeps me going even now.

Thinking about the General Election results in the UK — for those who weren’t paying as close attention as I was, it was a massive swing towards the Labour Party, which won in a landslide — leaves me with the memory of the last big swing from the Conservative Party to Labour, which also happened to be the first General Election I ever voted in, back in 1997. (I was… 22 at the time, thinking back? I might be misremembering.)

I remember, weirdly, the feeling of excitement felt on the night of the election itself, more than the actual details of where I voted. (I actually can’t remember anything about that at all.) What I remember, more than anything, was the curious feeling of “There’s something happening, everything has reached some kind of critical mass, something is going to change” that felt entirely inevitable, tempered only slightly with the fear that maybe we were all wrong and nothing would change — something that, had it happened, would have broken our spirits in ways I don’t think any of us could have fully comprehended at the time.

I also remember one of my friends telling me they’d voted Conservative, and the rest of us all just ripping the shit out of him, telling him how wrong he was, how he knew better, how upset we all were. To his credit, I think he’d be mortified himself, in retrospect.

I can remember the sense of excitement when the results came in, and the feeling that everything was different as a result. To some degree, that was true; the Labour win of ’97 meant that the Tories weren’t in power for the first time in my conscious memory — they’d been in power for 18 years by that point — and, given how cruel and callous the Thatcher era especially had been, that alone felt celebrating. Sure, none of us had really fallen for Tony Blair’s smarmy smile and promises, but some change was better than no change, we all thought at the time. It still meant that things were different, and that meant that anything could happen, maybe.

(Cut to us, years later, looking at what the Blair era gave to the world, shaking our heads.)

I wonder what it feels like in the UK today, waking up to a non-Tory government for the first time in 14 years. I wonder if there’s that same sense of a new world, and of possibility, or if everyone is just relieved to see the end of that particular era and too exhausted by it to imagine something better on its way.