Category: Uncategorized

Just as I missed San Diego Comic-Con earlier this year, now it’s time to miss New York Comic Con, a show I’ve been attending since 2016, and one that I’ve come to appreciate not for the show itself — NYCC is a strange, ungainly beast that can be fun, but offers just as much chance of exhaustion with little to show for it — but for the trip to New York every year, at the point where fall is just starting and New York feels that little bit more magical as a result.

I mean, sure; sometimes the weather is just a wet, cold shitshow at this time of year and that’s not really any fun, but still — it’s still New York City! As much as I want to be cynical about the city, as much as I’ve come to disapprove of Times Square and its crowds, as much as I might want to grump or gripe about the place, I can’t. I love New York City for all the tourist-y reasons (well, not Times Square; that place really is a nightmare) and all the reasons that the city isn’t like anywhere else I’ve lived; I love the architecture, the oppressive wonder of the whole place. I love the pace of it, the feel of it. The exploration of it. It’s a city that I genuinely, wholeheartedly, adore.

(It’s a genuinely stupid thing, I know, but I remember walking past 30 Rockefeller Plaza on a nightly basis a couple of years ago; it was on my way from the Javits Center to my hotel, which was out in the middle of nowhere, it felt like. Every single night of my trip, I’d walk past it in the evening, and it was dark, and I’d feel just a little bit like I was living in the TV show of my life. There’s something magical about that, despite everything.)

And I’m not there this year.

The sadness about missing it crept up on me, unlike my feelings about missing San Diego. There, I was sad about not going for weeks in advance, whereas New York didn’t really occur to me until last week, when I realized I’m used to the travel and the eating at weird restaurants and the hustle and the noise and the everything at this time of year. It feels wrong not being there, but how many things this year haven’t felt wrong by this point?

There are times when you get a sinking feeling in your stomach, and your general, vague sense of unease suddenly becomes sharper, more definite in its discomfort. Like, say, a moment when you describe a situation to some financial professionals, they say, that’s impossible, no-one would do that, and you have to tell them that, not only is it not impossible, it’s something that’s already happened to you just a few months ago.

2020 has been, to be blunt, a brutal year for me financially. If 2019 was a year where I found my feet during and after the divorce — and it was, on every level; emotionally, practically, financially— then this has been the year that laughed at all of that and tried to cut my legs off. I lost work, I lost more than half of my income and have found no easy way to replace it as my industry got wrecked by a pandemic that undermined its already shaky foundations.

During all of this, an outstanding debt owed to me magically reappeared and was offered to me in the middle of the year. Something that wasn’t technically due for another few years was, in my hour of need, offered in full: a genuinely unexpected but entirely welcome lifeline to save what little hair I had left. All I needed to do was sign the paperwork and get it notarized and submitted, and everything would be fine.

Except, as it turned out, it wasn’t. I signed,notarized, and submitted the paperwork in July, and nothing happened. In September, weeks after the promised deadline, I found out why: the party owing me the money had ghosted the obligation, but was now offering it a second time through a new third party. So it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut put it. All I needed to do, again, was sign the paperwork and get it notarized and submitted.

That, then, was how I spent part of my birthday this year. After signing, I asked the representatives present what would happen next, and how real everything was. Well, they said, now that you’ve signed this, it’s essentially a done deal. Yes, I told them, but I’ve already signed this paperwork in July and nothing happened. Could that happen again?

Their faces fell, as they asked me to confirm: I’d really signed and notarized and submitted these forms before? And nothing happened? I said yes. That was unheard of, they said, no-one would just abandon the process at that point. But that’s what happened, I repeated, and they frowned, before telling me they now understood my concern. They ushered me out of the office, telling me I could expect a phone call if everything fell apart again, repeating their disbelief that it could have happened before, but refusing to say that it couldn’t happen again.

Happy 2020 birthday: here’s your sinking feeling, stronger than before.

Happy 46 to me, I guess. (Photo actually taken last week; I’m far happier than I seem in this image, I promise.)

It’s a strange thing to say, but I’m not entirely sure what my nationality is  anymore. I mean, I know the answer from a legal perspective: I’m American. As soon as I became a naturalized citizen, I legally became an American and officially renounced my British citizenship. That, at least, is straightforward… kind of. It’s complicated, a little, by the fact that I didn’t actually surrender my United Kingdom passport — in fact, the last time I traveled to the U.K., I actually left the U.S. using my American passport and entered the U.K. using my British one, and vice versa, to make matters worse. My British one has lapsed by now, though.

But beyond the legalities of it, am I British or am I American? I can never quite find a tidy answer for that; I wouldn’t call myself a patriotic person by any stretch of the imagination — indeed, I think patriotism is almost inherently suspicious, to be blunt — but there are, nonetheless, things that get me feeling as if I belong to both countries at different times, for equally ridiculous reasons.

This is on my mind lately because of politics. In terms of British politics, I find myself fascinated and distraught in equal measure, nostalgic for the days when such policies would directly impact me, and also for the days when I had a vote to try and have a say in what was happening. I pay constant attention to the U.K. parliament news and have a strange sense of relief that I’m not there anymore, shamefully.

In the U.S., it’s a very different thing, and not only because I am here. I feel, at once, an outsider to much of what’s happening because I’m made one by a large swath of the electorate and their representatives — I’m an immigrant, and as such, not a “real” American to many. (This, despite being white, which likely legitimizes me in many people’s eyes, sadly.)

But I also feel a great sense of… shame, perhaps…? Disgust…? at what’s happening. I chose this country. I believed in it, despite everything — and everything that’s happening now, at least in terms of those in power, makes me regret that, and makes me feel foolish for ever having bought into the fantasy, or believed that things were getting better, however slowly.

I don’t feel American, entirely, yet I still get to feel the shame that Americans feel. It’s a curious place to be, wherever it is.

I’m worried about the election. I’m trying not to be, and failing utterly.

It might be because, like so many people, I didn’t worry enough about the 2016 election. That isn’t to say that I wasn’t paying attention, or that I wasn’t in quiet, shocked awe at Donald Trump’s ascent ahead of time — my podcast history from that period would quickly put paid to any such suspicions. Like far too many others, though, I was convinced that Trump wouldn’t win because he seemed so obviously unelectable, so clearly unsuited for office. Who in their right minds would vote for him, I’d ask incredulously to people arguing he’d win.

(I remember, still, election night and the slow horror that crept over me as I realized he’d win. The feeling of betrayal, too; we’re supposed to be better than this, you fuckers.)

And this year, watching Trump and his supporters do everything in their power to fix the game in their favor and seemingly get away with it, the fear grows in me. Even though, again, I feel viscerally that there’s no way good people could vote for the guy who’s done everything Trump has — including forced hysterectomies for women detained by ICE, which is breathtakingly horrific and seemingly met by little more than a shrug by the majority of people — I have to remind myself of two things: there are those who think, somehow, that Joe Biden is worse, and that there are a lot of not-good people voting in this election.

The Biden thing is… whatever, really. He’s not my first choice, nor even my third or fourth. He’s old, he’s slow, he’s been complicit in some shitty things in the past. It’s hard to get excited about voting for him… but still; he is in no way as bad as, or worse than, Trump. It’s not even a contest.

That not-good people thing, though — that’s why I’m scared. I’d previously believed that the majority of Americans were, ultimately, decent people with some sense of morality, and after the last four years, I can’t say that with any sense of certainty any more. And that’s the fear, really. This time around, when it’s clear just who Trump is and what he wants to do, when there’s no shred of ignorance left after four years of his behavior, what if it just turns out there’s more bad people than good?

For most of my life, I can remember people referencing the line about, “living in interesting times,” and talking about how it’s clearly a curse; I’m pretty sure I first heard that in my early teens, if not earlier. It was a reading that always felt a little too cynical, a little too on-the-nose and snarkily, “I’m so grizzled, I know that interesting is a euphemism for bad.” And then, 2020 happened.

Really, the strangest thing for me has perhaps been communicating with my sisters in the UK during the whole thing. Every few weeks, there would be a new message asking, essentially, “is this true? Are things that bad?” and I’d have to explain, yes, it’s kind of true, but not exactly as was being reported: yes, there were protests, but it wasn’t full-scale rioting throughout the city, say, or, sure, the skies are filled with smoke and we’re surrounded by wildfires, but it’s not exactly the red skies of Mad Max: Fury Road that the internet and some smart photo filters was making it look like, and least not yet.

Every time I’d send these messages back, I’d fight the urge to ask them similar questions about what was happening there, because I’d seen similarly breathless reporting about the UK. Was Covid rebounding so quickly, so cruelly as the numbers made it seem? Was the country still plunging towards the economic apocalypse of Brexit? Was the Government really admitting publicly that it was breaking the law, but everything was fine because it was only a little bit lawless?

(That last one feels particularly ironic to Americans, perhaps, given our own leader’s relationship with legality.)

Everything just keeps happening. Everything is just so interesting.

I remember watching HBO’s Years and Years last year, and being horrifyingly addicted — or addictively horrified, perhaps — by how quickly things turned convincingly dystopian as the show pushed into the future. But living it now, it’s both funny and tragic that, from today’s point of view, the show underestimated how fast the slide would actually be.

I’m tired. I want to be bored, again.

The other day, I was outside sniffing the air and thinking to myself, this smells smokier than it’s been in the last few days, but it’s been worse. To double check, I looked up for the sun and saw that, sure, it was a little bit orange, but far from the deep red that it had been at times in the past couple weeks. And then I realized just how good I’d accidentally become at normalizing seemingly everything that’s thrown my way in 2020, even the Oregon wildfires and the atmospheric fallout.

When the wildfires started, my reaction had been a mix of fear and frustration; I recognized the way the light was changing very early on — 2017 had very bad smoke in Portland as a result of surrounding wildfires, and the way that it turned sunlight orange isn’t something that is easy to forget — but, beyond the worry of how bad it was going to be this time, there was this unavoidable sense of, really? Wildfires on top of everything else? Of course, why should I expect anything different?

Portland has had a rough year. I mean, everywhere has — 2020 has been cartoonishly cruel in ways that feel surreal when you stop to think about it — but if Portland, Oregon got off relatively easily when it came to the global pandemic (and we did, realistically, despite the deaths and the massive economic costs it’s taken from the city in terms of permanently closed businesses), it got hit harder than most when it came to the federal response to the Black Lives Matter protests downtown. We were, terrifyingly, the first city in the country where protesters were pulled into unmarked vehicles by federal agents who refused to identify themselves, after all. Ground zero! Breaking new ground! The President couldn’t stop talking about us, even if it was all lies!

But, after awhile, even that became the new normal. Life continued. That’s the running theme of the year: life continues. We get on with it.

So the wildfires surrounded us, and the smoke smothered us, and we got on with it. We recognized the good smoke days and the bad smoke days and complained when the smoke didn’t clear when it had been forecast to, over and over again. We’re resilient. I’m just not sure if that’s truly a positive, is all.

I think about getting old a lot.

That’s not entirely surprising, I guess; I’ll be 46 at my next birthday, so my next “big” birthday is the half-century mark, and it’s really not that far away — 2024,  motherfuckers; here’s hoping we all make it there alive. But I am, perhaps, preoccupied with getting old and what it means and questions of how to do so successfully, for want if a better way to put it. It’s been something in my head for years now. The only thing is, my definition of what actually constitutes “old,” has changed dramatically.

I remember, for example, being 10 years old and nearly paralyzed at the idea that I would one day be 20. It’s an astonishingly clear memory even now; I was in the kitchen of my parents’ house and someone had mentioned something — I don’t remember what, sadly — happening in 1994, and the realization that I’d turn 20 that year literally froze me in my tracks. I stood there, unable to move, horrified at the very idea I would one day be twice as old as I was then. That, I thought, was old.

I can also remember my existential anguish when I turned 29, that my next birthday would take me out of my twenties. What horror, to have reached that landmark without the feeling of being a successful adult who deserved to be in their thirties already! In my defense, I was in a relationship with someone whose definition of success involved specific financial benchmarks, and who was unafraid to tell me continuously that I failed to measure up. C’est la vie.

And again, there was a memorable chill when I turned 38. I had officially exited any reasonable definition of being in my “mid-thirties,” I realized, and that could only translate into the depressing fact that I was, unavoidably, “getting old.”

There’s a constant in all of this, noticeably — I am never, in my head, actually old. I’m simply always in danger of becoming old, with the definition of the term constantly revised upwards unintentionally, subconsciously. I read a news report today, and someone mentioned in it was described as 58 years old. “That’s not really that old,” I thought to myself.

Perhaps it’s time to stop thinking about getting old. I’m never going to get there.