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As I write this, it’s 3AM on Sunday, July 23rd. It’s my last night — well, last morning now — in San Diego, and insomnia has struck.

I could blame the hotel bed, which is almost the archetypal hotel bed: a little too soft, a little formless and with pillows that are more like suggestions of pillows that are somehow too soft and too hard all at once; pillows that you almost have to ignore in order to sleep in the first place, never mind struggle against when your mind won’t stop talking in the middle of the night.

Or perhaps I could blame the fact that it’s a Saturday night/Sunday morning, which has meant a lot of noise in the corridor outside in the last few hours as people return back from drunken nights out and slam all their doors and giggle loudly, in both cases fully believing that they’re being really, really quiet. That was fun to eavesdrop on, and truth be told, it was what originally woke me up an hour or so ago.

That’s not why I’m still awake, though. My mind is racing because I’m headed into the final day of San Diego Comic-Con and it’s been a weird, busy — very busy — and emotionally taxing show, one that’s left me at once exhausted and oddly exhilarated. I both can’t believe it’s almost over and can’t remember fully what life was like before this, if that makes sense.

By the time you read this, it’ll be tomorrow and I’ll be back in Portland again, likely better rested and reality will be reasserting itself. That’s why I wrote this, though; to record a moment in time when I couldn’t sleep in San Diego, and I realized that all I really want to do, despite everything, is just read some comics. I guess that shows the power of Comic-Con, somehow.

As you read this, I’m in San Diego for this year’s Comic-Con; as I write, it’s still weeks away, which can mean only one thing: the anxiety has started kicking in.

What’s funny is, by the time this runs, the anxiety will be over and done with; once I actually get to San Diego, a zen state overcomes me, and I’m just there, dealing with whatever happens as it happens with an outlook that is, genuinely, surprisingly laid back about the whole thing. (Which isn’t to say that I don’t still get nervous about moderating panels; that’s still very much a thing.) But before the show…?

As I write this, I’m nervous about so much to do with San Diego Comic-Con, but really, it’s being nervous about all these related and connected things that aren’t actually the show itself: I’m nervous about whether or not I’ll buy new clothes and new shoes for the show — the shoes, especially, I need but I also need to get them and break them in, in advance; there’s a lot of walking at SDCC — and whether or not I’ll remember to get a new laptop bag to replace the one that fell apart in the UK. I’m nervous about my workload and if it will be too much, and the timing of my flights in and out of the city; I’m nervous about how comfortable or not the hotel bed will be, and how big the room will be, considering it’ll be both Chloe and myself working there. Will I have enough time to see everyone I want to? (No.) Will I eat well? Will I forget to pack something impossibly important? Will I disappoint my bosses? Will I disappoint anyone?

Traveling is always a Schrödinger experience for me — or, rather, preparing to travel is. There’s all this excitement and eagerness, but everything is also filled with this anxiety bucket of random nervousness and insecurity, as well. At least by the time you read this, all that will be over with.

(And then it’s just the marathon race of a five day convention…!)

There was a period a few weeks back where this site was getting bombarded by spam comments. Out of nowhere, there would be somewhere in the region of 30-50 spam comments daily, all of them either auto-generated by some nefarious AI that had been fed information on fashion designers of the 1970s and ‘80s — yeah, I don’t know why either, but all of the comments were related in some way to ‘70s and ‘80s designers; go figure — or were cut and pasted from some arcane essay somewhere. Either way, there was one comment that kept repeating, over and over, for the week or so that the spam attack kept happening:

“But the future is fascinating.”

That was it: one line, as opposed to the multi-paragraph comments that surrounded it every time it appeared. “But the future is fascinating.” Everything else would refer to Karl Lagerfeld or Ray Halston or whoever, just screeds of theorizing about what they brought to the fashion scene of the era, but then there would be this singular line that would reappear daily. The future is fascinating.

I love that line; the more I saw it as I deleted the various comments, the more I loved it. Sure, it’s almost certainly as random and automatically generated as everything around it, but it stood out and felt unusually important and filled with potential for something good or ill: “fascinating,” after all, could mean either.

It’s stuck with me in the weeks since, and I keep thinking about it on a worryingly regular basis. Out of a spam nowhere, I think I’ve found my ideal approach to life from now on. If nothing else, dear friends, let us always remember to keep our futures fascinating. We can but hope.

The other day (as I write this, weeks before you read it), I was having a conversation about the importance of failure — the idea that it’s not only okay to fail at things sometimes, it’s probably necessary on some deep, inexplicable emotional level.

This was treated with no small amount of cynicism by the person I was talking to, and I get it: failure is meant to be a bad thing, and certainly isn’t the goal of any particular enterprise, especially in the early days. Moreover, I can remember surprisingly clearly how strongly I felt about the idea of failing at something when I was younger: how scary it felt, how overwhelming and horrifying the very concept of people seeing me not do the thing I set out to was at the time. How could I face them if they knew how badly I fucked up? I’d ask myself, mortified at even considering the possibility.

Since those days, I’ve failed at a lot of things, professionally and personally. I’ve screwed up, and I’ve been screwed up by others; it’s been difficult and awkward and, sure, utterly embarrassing at times, too; I’ve dealt with a lot of it badly, and with less grace and goodwill than I’d have liked, looking back, in many cases, too, to my regret… but I can’t deny that a bunch of those failures have been for the best, in the long run.

Not in the, “every failure was a step on the path here” way, exactly — but also that, as cliche as it is — but in the sense of, it’s good to learn your limits and find out what you can’t do as well as what you can. It’s worthwhile to step out of the wreckage and go, “Well, I’m never doing that again,” and know exactly why. There’s value in fucking up and learning from your mistakes, even if sometimes the real lesson is that someone else is a real dick.

I’m not sure how much of this translated to the person I was talking to, or how much they realized that (a) they’ve failed at something and that’s fine as long as they accept it, and (b) it’s better to fail and move on than pull everything down around them in an attempt to disguise the failure from themselves and others. I know that the me of even a decade ago might not have been ready to accept that. Nonetheless: sometimes it’s good to give in and admit that you made a trash fire.

I’ve shared what I’ve been reading in terms of comics all year so far, but I figured as we’re approaching the midpoint of the year, I’d share my 2023 Spotify playlist. I started it at the very end of 2022, as you’ll be able to see below from the screenshots, but this is the second year I’ve done this: made a playlist that’s either new songs that I’ve not heard before but become obsessed with, or else things that I’ve not listened to in awhile that I felt the urge to dive back into. (More of the former than the latter, so far.)

Consider all of these songs recommended, of course.

The playlist so far goes beyond 50 songs, but that feels like a good place to stop for now. I should add that I try to make sure that no artist appears on the list twice, but I’m fudging the details a little on that here: “Neil MacArthur” is, in fact, Colin Blunstone under a fake name. (For those who don’t know either name, but generally know their pop: Blunstone was the lead vocalist for the Zombies. The Colin Blunstone track here is basically a Zombies reunion a handful of years after Odyssey and Oracle, and it’s glorious.)

Go on; sample some stuff. See if there’s some new (or old) favorites in there.

I am, as I’ve written here before, a fan of stillness and silence. There’s a particular pleasure that comes from the absence of noise and clutter — mental, as well as visual and aural — that I couldn’t even come close to explaining even if I had years to try, but it’s something that I find especially important and fulfilling the busier and more frenetic the day-to-day becomes.

This thought occurred to me recently while sitting on the couch, waiting for something to happen (a specific something, I should clarify, not the generic “waiting for something to happen” that denotes ennui or boredom). I was finishing up an unusual piece of evening work while no-one else was around — they were asleep, making all parts of the house surprisingly still and silent — and for once, there was no music playing and no television making dramatic noises off in the background somewhere. Instead, when I finished typing and closed the document in question, I suddenly realized how quiet it was.

And yet, it wasn’t entirely quiet. At some point, without me really being fully aware of it, two cats had started to lay on me as I worked — one on my legs, another against my shoulders and draped across the upper part of my arm — and both were asleep, cozily snuggled up to me and snoring. The sound of those snores, almost comically gentle and understated as if a human was trying to conjure up an approximation of the cutest snore imaginable for an animated movie, was effortlessly comforting, and somehow underscored how silent and still everything else was around me.

Even as one of the cats pushed against me, as if trying to sleepily will my leg to change shape and become more comfortable (Sorry, cat; there’s bone in there to prevent that from happening), I felt at peace, entirely comfortable and thinking I can’t move, I cannot, I can’t disturb these cats at all over and over to myself — reader, I did eventually; the ache in my leg demanded it — it felt as if I was receiving an unexpected, inexplicable gift: a small strand of the world that was not moving for just a second, letting me exist quietly and happily. That thought came to me, and was immediately affirmed by a low purr right next to my head.

Sometimes, in the midst of everything else, things can feel at least temporarily perfect.

I do not understand why I don’t like soda.

“Soda” as a name for it is an affectation I’ve picked up since moving to the US, much to my dismay; it’s the same as the fact that I instinctively call trousers “pants” now, even though they are quite clearly trousers, dammit. I don’t really want to call it soda, and yet I do. In my heart, I know that it’s called “fizzy juice,” because that’s what we called it when I was a kid, but one of the true joys of fizzy juice, or soda, is that there’s no one true name for it. It’s “pop” to a lot of people, which I love very much. I don’t call it pop, however; I don’t even call it fizzy juice any more, much to my upset. I call it soda, as much as I wish I didn’t.

Anyway: I don’t like soda. I didn’t even really like it as a kid, with the exception of Lucozade — a sugary, syrupy concoction that was initially sold as a medicinal tonic before idiots like me started drinking it for fun — and lemonade in its British incarnation, which is basically Sprite but more bland. My sisters and my friends loved Coke, or Ginger Ale, or any number of a similar carbonated beverages, and I just… didn’t. I feel like it’s a missed skill, a step I somehow didn’t get around to treading upon at the right time. Something I’ve somehow done wrong.

It’s not something I think about, normally, but in summer I always end up wondering if I’d have a better time if I was a soda drinker — if the possibility of a nice big glass of soda with some ice cubes would make the heat more pleasurable in some way, instead of leaving me seated on the sofa, fan in my face, as I sweat and frown and long for cooler days.

More than a month after arriving back in the US, and I’ve seemingly lost the ability to sleep past 5:30 in the morning. I think it’s happened maybe twice in the past few weeks, if that…? Otherwise, there I am, literally waking up with the birds just before sunrise.

Aside from the obvious tiredness issue — oh, man, do I need to go to bed by 10 or 10:30 if I don’t want to feel sluggish as shit the next day; if lights aren’t out by, say, 11, then I’ll be struggling — it’s actually a surprisingly pleasant experience, this particular brand of insomnia: I get to appreciate the stillness and quiet of the morning for at least a little bit every day before the chaos starts, and my reading time has exploded. There’s something particularly nice about lying around with the window open, the daylight approaching and just reading with nothing happening around me.

What’s unusual, and unexpected to me before I remember that I’m me, though, the sense of… guilt, perhaps…? Obligation, maybe. A sense that I get occasionally during these mornings that I should be doing something. Not necessarily something in particular; it’s not as if I’m constantly feeling as if there’s one specific task that requires my attention each and every morning… I simply feel this nagging idea of, maybe this time would be better spent being productive.

It’s an idea I do my best to ignore. So much of my time is spent being productive — for work, for house chores, for whatever reason that I’m needed — that this unexpected downtime feels special purely because I do get to be lazy and selfish. For all I know, that’s the entire reason my subconscious has a secret alarm clock waking me up so early each day.

Like Billy Pilgrim, I’ve come unstuck in time, it feels like.

We joke that, since the pandemic started — fuck, since Donald Trump became President years before that — time has become increasingly difficult to gauge: did something happen this week, or the week before? Was it actually months ago? It’s been the regular go-to with friends for some time (but how much time, ha ha etc.), but ever since arriving back from the UK, it’s been particularly true for me. Somehow, I’ve stumbled and lost my footing on the calendar. It’s a disorienting feeling.

It’s not merely that one week will feel like two, by the time the weekend arrives, although that’s been the case for the past couple of weeks at least. (We can blame overwork for that, at least, I think, as much as I should feel worse about that.) It’s the feeling of uncertainty when waking up and genuinely feeling unclear about what day it is: is it a weekend, or a weekday? Am I meant to be working, and if I am, is it one of those days when there are meetings or interviews, or am I just writing? How anxious about the day ahead should I be?

Beyond that, even, since we reached May, I’ve been convinced that it’s been later in the month than the reality. I’d have deadlines looming that were more than a week away, while other things I’d feel were missed opportunities rather than open doors for me to walk through.

Is this all coming from the travel, or something else? I can’t tell, but it doesn’t really matter where it comes from. What matters is the feeling of tumbling forward, a little unsteady and unclear about just when I am, the entire… well, the entire time.

I had a thought, the other day — two weeks after arriving back from the UK — that surprised me even though it shouldn’t: I suddenly realized I didn’t have to plan the UK trip anymore. It was over and done, and the next one wasn’t for another six months. It felt strange to think that, and somewhat wrong, too.

What you have to understand is that, for the first quarter of this year, the UK trip was a permanent part of my brain. Even when I wasn’t actively planning it or thinking about it, it was there: I’d think of the future as “pre-going to the UK,” and “post-going to the UK.” (There wasn’t really a lot of the latter; it was as if the first two weeks of April were an event horizon that I’d never actually manage to pass, at times.)

I would do mental math continuously: how can I do X, Y, or Z with the time I had there? How much time would I have I have? When should I leave and return, how long am I staying in each place, when should I be where? It was never-ending, and ever-present, and even when decisions were made, then it was time to book things and spend extortionate amounts of money, and worry about that, too, while trying to remember all the details and also wonder if I’d made all the right choices.

All of that is behind me now, and has been for a few weeks, but it took me a long time to actually realize that: such was the enormity of the trip in my head that I needed that time to recover before I could realize what wasn’t actually there anymore. There’s a whole level of stress and background noise that just isn’t present anymore, and as grateful as I am, I’m also feeling curiously lost at sea without it.