Category: Uncategorized

We’re at that time of the year when Best Of lists are being put together, and everyone expects to see carefully curated, well-researched, numbered lists of the cream of whatever crop is being discussed: books, music, TV shows, music, whatever. In theory, it’s something that I’m currently doing for comics, for THR, but there’s just one problem: I can’t really remember what happened this year, as opposed to last, or even  next year. My personal Best of 2020 feels more like a Best of Something Close To 2020 But Really, What Is Time If You Think About It, Anyway, No, Really Think About It?

This isn’t a new thing; the fact that I discover work months after its release — and am lucky enough to read other things far ahead of when it arrives in stores — means that I’m always struggling a little with the timeframes of my Best Of lists. (This is the first year in… at least the last three or four, where I only have to create one list instead of two, now that I’m not writing for Wired anymore. I think I’m grateful for that, but I’m not too sure.) But it’s a problem exacerbated by COVID making my sense of time particularly screwy this year, without doubt.

The pandemic has skewed my thinking along the Best Of lines in other, less obvious, ways, as well. It meant no comic conventions, which has left me unexposed to work that I would’ve discovered there, as well as robbed me of conversations that almost always sway my opinions and get me to try things I wouldn’t otherwise. The lack of any true 2020 “buzz book” is almost certainly down to the absence of comic conventions to help build consensus, I’m sure.

And so, here I am, passively — well, perhaps a little more active than that — trying to remember what came out when, and whether they deserve to be placed in the plastic pantheon that is a Best Of list, while also missing the shows I didn’t attend, and the conversations I didn’t have. It feels very 2020, if nothing else.

It is, as the song goes, beginning to look a lot like Christmas, which means what it always does at this time of year: me overthinking my attachment to the holidays.

That’s being purposefully glib, but the truth of the matter is that, at least once every December, I tend to find myself pausing amidst so much mental tinsel and fairy lights and wondering just why this time of year makes me so happy. Surely, I ask myself, there’s more to it than just taking the word of noted entertainer Andy Williams when he confidently declares that this is the most wonderful time of the year? There has to be.

That said, I don’t quite know what that “more” might actually be. I’m sure that nostalgia plays no small role here; I have a vague, lazy theory that this time of year is as much about nostalgia as it is anything else, after all. But, while it’s true that I had some wonderful Christmases as a kid, I’m not sure that I’d describe them as so wonderful as to create a lifelong attachment to the pageantry and show of the holiday season that I love so much today. So, something else, then.

Perhaps it’s the pageantry in its own right, of course. I can’t deny that I’m a sucker for the elaborate (overly elaborate, in many cases) decorations, the music all filled with aural code and repeated tropes in arrangements and lyrics alike, all of it. (I almost wrote, “the semiotics of the season,” before being forced to admit that I’m unsure about the real definition of that word.) That argument doesn’t really work, though; I don’t fall for such things in different circumstances, so surely there’s something else about this time of year that’s speaking to me in holly, jolly, tones.

I come back, repeatedly, to the sentiment of the whole thing, and my love of the idea that celebrating peace, love, kindness, and goodwill to all. It’s saccharine, it’s often insincere, but still… Just the idea that people will try to achieve that, or even lie and tell themselves that they’re trying — there’s something in there, for me. It may not be the answer for real, but it’s annually been the North Star that I’ve found myself looking to.

I missed a deadline for this blog, for the first time in almost two years, and I feel terrible about it. This isn’t an exaggeration; I had a post in draft for yesterday, but didn’t get to finish it in time — a combination of a heavier than expected workload and my brain deciding to work slower than normal being to blame — which meant that, for the first time since I restarted doing this on a regular basis, I didn’t have anything to post for one of the thrice-weekly posts.

It’s difficult to overstate quite how badly I felt about this; it was the kind of thing that stuck in my head all evening, despite the fact that I knew it wasn’t of any importance to anyone that wasn’t me. Nevertheless, I found myself wracked with guilt over it, thinking that perhaps I needed to drop everything and sit myself back down at the laptop to write something, anything to ensure that the entire day wasn’t missing a post.

(Again, no-one that isn’t me cares about this. And yet.)

Once upon a time, I had a bunch of posts lined up in advance to make sure that things like this didn’t happen; I was three weeks ahead on average, which I’m pretty sure meant that I didn’t even miss anything when I was suffering from something that was probably/possibly COVID at the start of the year.

I prided myself on that, on having a buffer of material that I could rearrange as needs be, and when that buffer slowly got eaten up as summer turned to fall — everything being so stressful and busy that I didn’t really have either the time or the inclination to write as often as I’d otherwise like — I could feel the self-imposed pressure building, knowing that I’d soon have to sit down and handle things one way or another.

As it turned out, that didn’t happen, and I missed a post.

What makes me most frustrated, I think, is the concern that this is the beginning of a slippery slope into not writing here on a regular basis. That’s the thing that I really don’t want to happen. This space has become increasingly important to me, and the idea of it going away through my own inaction is a stressful and deeply upsetting one.

In the last few days, I’ve been thinking a lot about where I was a year ago, more or less. By that, I don’t actually mean the fact that I had the opportunity to go to Brazil for a comic convention that turned out to be a genuinely incredible trip, surprisingly enough — although it really was a wonderful experience, and one that I hope to repeat at a time when the world isn’t gripped by a pandemic that’s peaking again at levels that are horrific to even consider — but, as strange as it may be, what it felt like to come back after that trip.

I’ll preface all of this by telling you that I was, as the saying goes, tired and emotional when the plane landed in Portland; not only had I just spent a busy week working a comic convention in a country where the time difference from where I normally was, was notable, but I’d also just spent a full 24 hours traveling back from there, with very little sleep actually achieved on the plane. I was, to be blunt, exhausted, which might explain some of the feelings I went through as I sat in the drive back from the airport, confused and upset that, somehow, the holiday season had started without me.

It’s no secret that I’m a fan of the holidays; they’ve always felt like the perfect end to the eleven months that have preceded them, as I entirely buy into the sentimentality and the aesthetic of the time, believing that, yes, it really is the most wonderful time of the year. Yet, when I looked out the window of the car and saw that, while I had been away, Portland had decked its metaphorical halls with decorations and garish cheer, I felt… oddly betrayed.

It wasn’t that I didn’t want to see decorations; I really did, I swear. But I felt as if they’d happened without me, and that I’d missed something important in a way that I couldn’t properly explain. Added to that, I missed the weird nostalgic, comforting moment of returning from a period away and seeing everything exactly as I’d left it. Things weren’t as I left them. How could Portland do this to me?

As I said, there was exhaustion and a sleep-deprived lack of logic at play in my feelings of disappointment and betrayal; I know in retrospect just how ridiculous I was being… but I can’t deny that I take a small measure of comfort this year being in town for the first week of December, and being here as the holidays start this time around.

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas, as the song goes. Or, at least, we’ve made it to the part of the year when the decorations can go up and we can start listening to the many, many holiday songs I have in my collection. Either way, it’s a marvelously comforting time of year for me, even if I’m not quite ready to go as far as Andy Williams does when he declares it “the most! Wonderful tiiiiiiiiime of the yeaaaaaar.” (Actually, it may be, although I also feel pretty strongly about fall.)

It’s December, is what I’m saying.

With 2020 being the surreal, difficult experience that it’s been, just the simple fact that we’ve made it here feels almost unlikely in and of itself, to be honest. If it wasn’t for the weather, you could probably convince me that we’re still only midway through the year, the way time has stretched out and felt elastic and meaningless, for one thing; is it really eight months since I found out I was losing my Wired gig? How can that be true? What happened to all the traditional landmarks that happen across the year to remind us that we’re moving forward?

Of course, it’s also been the kind of year that’s underscored how ridiculous the notion of things changing purely because of time moving on actually is; just because we’re in the last month of the year doesn’t really mean anything in the big picture — we will, more than likely, still be living quarantine lives for much of next year, and there’s not even the transition of Presidential power until the end of January. Things aren’t going to significantly shift when we put away the Advent Calendar and the tree.

Yet, bringing those things out, celebrating this time of year and taking part in everything surrounding it, still matters to me, despite the logic and the knowing better. There’s still comfort and security and happiness to be found there, for me, in the music and the decorations and traditions old and new. The holiday season is, at heart, about hope and kindness, and that’s what I find myself focusing on over everything else — a hope that, against logic, perhaps, we can be in a kinder world at least for the next month.

Perhaps it’s because I returned to reading Rian Hughes’ The XX over the weekend, with all its ponderings about the nature of ideas and how infectious information can be — and what it’s actually capable of doing to us, as a result — but I found myself thinking about Teletext for the first time in quite some time recently.

Most people, I’m sure, won’t remember Teletext at all; it’s this strange oddity that will die off when a certain generation does, I suspect, and something that only really is remembered in the same way that certain bands, television commercials, and brands of snack food are, with the nostalgic devotion of the niche fan. (So, of course it’s something that I remember fondly; that description fits me so well, it’s as if it’s a glove I made for myself.)

Teletext was fueled by the same technology that made closed captioned subtitles possible, but instead of simply sending a line or two of dialogue to your television at any one time, it sent entire screens of information, with multiple pages available through keying in specific three-digit numbers and waiting for the correct information to cycle through. Positioned as a transmitted magazine, it was a pre-internet internet, complete with 8-bit graphics and a flavor of snark in its tone that would come to dominate online writing for a decade or more.

There were three “channels” of Teletext in the UK when I was a teenager; the BBC’s was called Ceefax, and I sadly can’t remember what either ITV or Channel 4’s was called; each broadcast network was responsible for its own Teletext content, and each network has its own tone and attitude towards the format.

I was, of course, a fan. I loved that the information was constantly updated and available — it was like a newspaper, but always up to date and always there! — and I loved that it felt infinite, with pages available for seemingly all interests and tastes. Channel 4’s music coverage, in particular, I remember being an essential stepping stone between Smash Hits and Popbitch, two references that likely mean nothing to most and everything to those that recognize them.

Teletext feels like a missing piece of information history today, oddly, and an essential piece of my mental DNA. Who might I have been if I hadn’t been exposed to that? What career might I have discovered without it?

In recent weeks, I’ve become quietly convinced that someone is trying to spam me by signing me up for mailing lists; I’ve had three or four different waves of spam mails just pile up in my inbox, on a quasi-regular basis — always during the recording of the Wait, What? podcast, curiously enough — and I’ve started to get just that little tiny bit paranoid about it.

It could be nothing, of course; it might just be a very strange couple of coincidence and nothing more. But the more I wonder about it, the more I find myself thinking just how wonderfully devious it would be, to do such a thing; how good an untraceable prank, or sneaky a trick, it would be to just sign people up to multiple spam lists and knowing that their inbox would soon be filled with everything from multiple messages from Entertainment Weekly and associated publications — there are so, so many, dear reader — to any number of people offering to take care of legal problems that I most assuredly don’t have. (Also, offering these services to someone whose name isn’t mine, but that’s perhaps beside the point.)

It’s very possible that I’m getting all this spam because my email address has traveled through PR companies or comic book conventions to some mailing list or another, and then been sold onto a third party vendor and beyond; I know that’s happened to other people, and I’ve been around enough to surely be on far too many lists of journalist emails by this point not to get caught up in some kind of a net. There really might be a perfectly innocent — or, at least, not malicious — explanation for the waves of spam messages I’ve gone through.

If there is, though, I’d almost be disappointed. Don’t get me wrong; I hate dealing with the sudden influx of spam and wouldn’t be disappointed if I never had to do that ever again. But, in an entirely perverse way, I like the idea that someone, somewhere, decided that this was the way they wanted to fuck with me, knowing just how low-level frustrating it would turn out to be.

When I got rid of the old phone after mumbles quietly seven years or so, one of the last things I did before I erased it was save the few photos I’d taken on there. They weren’t, by any stretch of the imagination, anything special in terms of photographic beauty or the like, but the few — literally, just three — that weren’t of Gus and Ernie are all particular moments that I wanted to record for no particular reason.

This was taken shortly after moving to Portland, if I’m remembering correctly. It was a cold winter night, and I was struck by the way the light outside the local Fred Meyer looked; it felt so different from San Francisco, where I’d spent the last few years, and looked so different from what had been my everyday that I wanted to keep it.

I’m not sure why I love this as much as I do; I think it’s the weird pixelation effect as much as the sunset. It wasn’t a particularly good day when I took this, but I loved how orange the world turned, and the fuzziness of the final image feels particularly appropriate.

There’s a corner in the neighborhood which always has weird, enjoyable, graffiti; I saw this one day and it felt particularly appropriate for the time, and this was… 2018, maybe? Long before the hellscape that we’re currently living in.

Frank was the first of Chloe’s cats to really take to me, and the feeling was mutual. He was the cat that she warned me about, although that’s far too harsh a way of putting it; it was less a warning, per se, and more of a, he’s a grumpy old cat that doesn’t really like people, so beware. He liked me, and I took that as a compliment, if not a badge of honor.

He looked like an archetypal cat, when I first met him; if someone asked you to imagine a ginger cat, he would be exactly what you’d picture. That didn’t last long. Within weeks of our meeting, one of his ears ballooned up in size and then collapsed into a wrinkled, folded mess; the other would follow suit within a year. He could still hear fine, but his bold, iconic cat look was gone; now he looked more like what I imagined Peter Falk would look like, had he been transformed into a ginger cat.

Nonetheless, Frank was happy. Well, as happy as a curmudgeonly cat that desperately didn’t want to be an inside cat could be — you couldn’t leave the door to outside open for too long or he’d run outside, and he was one of the fastest cats you could imagine, when he wanted to be; if it wasn’t for the fact that he also didn’t want to run too far outside, he would have vanished more than once.

He and I bonded; the joke was that he was “my cat,” because he’d chosen me. I was, am, more than fine with that. I loved when he’d climb on top of me and sit on my chest, purring. I’d love to rub his chin, stroke his fur while he made rrrrrrrrr noises, gently and insistently.

We noticed something was wrong with him a little more than a month ago, and it was quickly diagnosed as a tumor in his mouth that was too big, growing too fast, to do anything about. We were warned he’d likely have only a few weeks left before his quality of life would be impacted, and that we should make plans.

Today, more or less around the time this publishes, there’s an appointment to put Frank to sleep. The only thing I can really say is that I’m heartbroken, and that I’m going to miss my little friend.