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The thought occurred to me, as I was walking to the hotel in Seattle the other day, that I might have forgotten what it’s like to actually visit a city, as opposed to work in it.

This isn’t a new thought by any means; I had a similar feeling when I was in San Francisco earlier this summer, my first non-work-related, non-family-related trip in a decade or so, for one thing, and I’ve repeatedly thought as I head into a work trip what it would be like to go somewhere and not have to rush to a hotel and immediately to work. This Seattle situation felt different, however, simply because of how I’d ended up there.

Traditionally, when I’ve arrived in the city, I’ve jumped in a cab from the train station and gone straight to the hotel; this time around, there was such a line for cabs and such a traffic jam surrounding the area, I thought, fuck it, I’ll walk. It’s not that far. In retrospect, this was a bad idea because I didn’t realize (a) it was all uphill, (b) it was about 30 minutes walk, and (c) I really didn’t know the neighborhood as well as I believed. That last part ended up being a plus, however; it meant that I walked through neighborhoods I haven’t seen in Seattle in more than a decade, and remembered that, hey, I actually like this city a bunch.

The problem had become, I realized, that I go to Seattle at least a couple of times each year now, and it’s always for work and it’s always staying in the same hotel in the same area as the convention center, so Seattle had shrunk down to a five block radius and a car ride to and from the train station. It was as if the rest of the city didn’t even exist, with the exception of the pizza place I always make a point of hitting up when I’m there — I love their potato pizza, what can I say? — and the Work Seattle that I’d created was… well, somewhere that was just filled with work and the related stress. I’d started to dislike Seattle because I couldn’t relax there.

The same is true of New York, where I go every October just for New York Comic Con — a city as amazing as New York shrinking to the area between the hotel and the convention center — and San Diego, too, although in my defense, I’ve always thought that San Diego was a pretty shitty city.

The year I spent a bunch of time in the UK between conventions, I gave myself a day to explore London for the first time in close to 20 years without any agenda or destination. It was a lovely day, and one that reminded me why I really do like that place after all. Maybe I need to start adding buffers to go explore aimlessly into every work trip, before my world gets so small I forget that I like it, deep down and after all.

August proved to be an odd month, moviewise: I started the month exhausted after San Diego Comic-Con and ended it planning for (and then attending!) PAX West, and in between, it was more rewatching — or a lot of television, this past month — than that many new movies this time around.

Of note: I rewatched Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame because I was curious how they’d play out years later, and… ehhhh? Infinity War starts far stronger than I remember, but its back half lags so badly, while Endgame is just a slog from start to finish. (And has genuinely terrible pacing issues.) Meanwhile, The Last Showgirl was absolutely fucking beautiful and made me cry, Netflix’s DEVO documentary was enjoyable if weirdly purposefully limited, and, I have to admit, I really did enjoy The Babysitter and its sequel more than I should confess.

Nonetheless, here’s what I watched this last month!

Something unexpected happened at San Diego Comic-Con that I’ve been mulling over in the back of my head ever since: someone offered me a job, and it’s not a job in a field I’ve ever worked in before. No, I won’t say what it is, nor who offered it to me; I said no almost immediately, responding that I didn’t have the skill set — they disagreed — nor the experience required for the precise position they were offering, and I was at least entirely correct when it came to the experience part. However… I keep thinking about the fact that it was offered, and I immediately turned it down.

I don’t say that because I regret turning it down (I don’t), but because the more I think about it, the more I’m fascinated by the fact that I didn’t at least take longer to think about the possibility. If nothing else, to think about the possibility of doing anything so outside of my comfort zone. (And this very much would have been outside of my comfort zone.)

When I first moved to the US and got my Green Card, I remember meeting with a temp staffing agency purely because I needed money fast and I didn’t feel as if I had any particularly marketable skills. Sure, I’d gone to art school and taught in that same art school for a couple years after, but still: art school, you know? In the meeting, I was asked what kind of work I was looking for, and my reply was, for all intents and purposes, what have you got?

My thinking at the time was, no matter what is offered, I’ll either pick it up as I go along or not, and then I’ll move on to something else. Looking back, this feels supernaturally unlike the me I am now, who’d be daunted at the prospect of starting from scratch and seeing what could happen — but it worked out, even if much of that was due to the kindness and forgiveness of those around me at the time. (Something I have always strived to repay and pass on now that I’m in a more senior position myself.) Still: was I selling myself short by not responding to this new job offer with a do tell me more instead of a no, I’m not the guy, trust me?

I don’t know. Maybe? It’s not as if I’m in a business with any kind of long-term survival strategy, because my business doesn’t have any kind of long-term survival strategy, it becomes increasingly clear. Then again, it’s also not as if the industry I was being offered an entry point to was any more stable in the grand scheme of things. I chose to stay with the Devil I Know, and honestly, I’m glad I did. I actually kind of like this particular Devil, if I have to say it out loud.

And yet, my mind keeps wondering every now and then. And yet.

Like some fading action hero staring into the distance in the dimly-lit room at the midpoint of a movie, I’ve been realizing that I don’t heal as quickly as I used to — although, while the action hero’s moment of awareness would have been heralded by surviving a set piece that likely involved no shortage of gunfire, a shattered window or two and likely a fall of a couple of stories at the very least, mine came about because of a random gardening accident.

It’s been weeks since I accidentally got a stone embedded in my ankle thanks to a weed whacker run amok, and although it was certainly pretty deep in there — the amount of blood that gushed forth when I prized it out was enough of a giveaway about that — I’m still surprised that it hasn’t entirely healed over just yet; I looked down in the shower today to see the scab still formed and wondered how long I’d be stuck with this unlikely addition. It made me think about the fact that I still have the ghosts of scars from the animals clawing at me, too, even though those are even older, and I got to thinking about how the body changes and starts prioritizing what to work on as you get older.

(I can still get out of bed every morning without pain, and my back hasn’t given out on me yet; I’ll take both of those things over more elastic skin any day, I admit.)

At the dinner with the team before San Diego Comic-Con this year, there was a moment where I looked down and realized that my left hand was bleeding. I had (and still have) no idea whatsoever how it had happened — there was nothing that I could have cut myself on anywhere near me, as far as I could see, but there I was, with a big bleeding gash on my hand. I made a joke to everyone else as I wandered away to ask a waiter for a band-aid or two, but even then, I thought to myself, is this just something that happens now? Am I just going to start bleeding for seemingly no reason?

That cut is still on my hand, too, and occasionally it still sends a sting up my arm to remind me of that, out of nowhere. There are things you don’t think about as your body ages, and there’s something almost welcome about that, in a way. It’s nice to still be surprised, 50 years in.

I’ve been getting very self-conscious when it comes to checking out of a hotel room recently. Not the act of checking out itself, I should explain: the whole process of going to the front desk and making small talk to answer the questions of how was your stay and I hope you’ll be coming back again soon? isn’t something that particularly bothers me. (Honestly, I find the small talk at check in more uncomfortable, for some reason; chances are I’m here for work and I don’t really care about the minibar, I promise.) Instead, I’m talking about everything that happens before I actually leave the room for the last time.

There’s an obvious finality to closing that door for the final time that leaves me wracked with doubt: Have I packed everything? Am I sure that I’ve packed everything? Maybe I should check the bathroom one more time, maybe I forgot my toothpaste. The older I get, the longer it takes me to leave a hotel room, because I’m increasingly convinced that in doing so, I’ll leave something of great value behind. Never mind that I rarely have anything of great value in any hotel room I’m in, beyond my work stuff; I become anxious at the idea that anything left behind would suddenly become valuable, retroactively.

All of this was in my head as I checked out of my hotel in San Diego the other week, only for the regular check-out process to be interrupted by a couple literally running into the lobby of the hotel and immediately rush to the elevators, where one of them jumps in and the other runs back to the desk, all-but-yelling “Do our keys still work? Do they?” They’d left something — a vape, as it turned out — in their room and it was apparently of the most upmost importance that they retrieve it, to the point of mania.

I watched the couple’s utter panic with no small sense of amazement, but also relief: no matter how fearful I might be of leaving something in a hotel room, I’d never be that bad, after all. As I’m thinking that, the wife turns to the woman at the front desk and says, conspiratorially, “It’s like this every time. I don’t think we’ve left a hotel without having to rush back in and scream in years.”

Sometimes, all you need is the slightest hint of perspective to set you straight.

I didn’t get to do my traditional, “by the time you’re reading this, I’ll be at San Diego Comic-Con” post this year, mostly because I was busy writing other things and then suddenly it was San Diego Comic-Con and what can be done? I’m still writing this before the show, but literally, just before the show; I got too distracted with work and life to properly plan out blog posts ahead of time for most of July because… well, San Diego Comic-Con requires a lot of planning ahead of time. It’ll just run as I’m traveling back this year, is all.

My relationship with the show changes every year; the longer I’m in the job I’m in, the bigger SDCC becomes in terms of time real estate. By the time the show actually started (starts; I’m writing early, remember?), I’ll have been working on it for weeks, thinking about not just my schedule but all the Popverse writers attending, and sending out emails and messages about whether or not we can get into this panel or that press room, or if embargo X is really intended for time Y, or if we can go with it as soon as it’s mentioned in the room, or some such. What was once just “a convention” becomes a game of intellectual Tetris, trying to make all the pieces fit together without losing sight of the bigger picture.

I also find that the show itself becomes less and less… not important, per se, but central, if that makes sense…? My memories are of the friends I see every year, and of the surrounding areas of the show — the spaces you walk through to get there and back each day. I could walk you through the San Diego Convention Center blindfolded by this point — I’ve been going to SDCC for something like 20 years! — but the actual convention feels like an afterthought more and more with every year. It’s just a job, in a different place, and at a different pace from the rest of the year.

If you’d told me that back when I first attended and felt overwhelmed by it all — even the idea of it all — I wouldn’t have believed you. But then, if you’d told me that I’d have done San Diego Comic-Con for twenty years, I wouldn’t have believed that, either.

There are some sensations that escape language entirely, which is both a welcome and frustrating realization for a professional writer to come to.

Case in point: I’m sitting here with the window open behind me, listening to the sound of the wind as it comes through the trees, hearing it come in waves towards the house from the furthest trees to the ones right immediately behind, and then the wind pushes through the open window and I feel it surround me. Everything goes cool for an instant, and feels at once entirely still and in motion, and then falls away again.

But that’s just a description of the cause and effect, of the facts of the matter; it’s not a description of how it feels physically, or the feelings it evokes internally; I can’t come to anything approaching a way to helping myself share that in any kind of meaningful way without hand gestures, hyperbole and metaphor, and saying things like, you know what I mean, right? on a worryingly regular basis. The experience above is something that can’t be summed up in words, when it’s happening. You had to be there, as the saying goes.

I’m coming to appreciate that a lot more lately. Not just the experience that has to be experienced, although that ideally goes without saying; I mean the shortcoming of language, though, the sense of coming up against a brick wall in my own abilities to write it down and make it understandable to other people in any meaningful way. I read Deborah Levy’s The Cost of Living when I was on my trip to the Bay Area, and couldn’t escape the feeling that she’d written an entire book trying to say things that couldn’t be put into words and failing in the most successful, most beautiful way possible.

It’s good that we can’t translate everything into easily digestible language. It’s good that more talented people than I keep trying, anyway.

I realized, upon seeing the little kid looking around with no small sense of wonder in the bookstore at the SFMOMA, that bookshops have always been oddly safe spaces for me.

I’m not sure that I could claim that I’ve always been a reader, per se; I can remember a teacher at high school pulling me aside at the end of a class to tell me, essentially, that I was too smart for the books I was choosing to read in class and that I needed to challenge myself or else I’d lose the joy of reading for good. But despite that, I always found myself drawn to bookshops at whatever age. There was something comforting about being surrounded by so many books no matter the size of the store, and I’d always go in with the hope of finding something that appealed to my tastes, whatever they may have been in the moment.

More than that, I have always found myself drawn to bookstores as places to kill time, to hang out and just… be. I can remember hours spent in bookshops when I was a teenager, just aimlessly pushing around books on the shelves, hoping to uncover a new favorite based on title, cover, or back blurb alone. (Ideally all three; it’s how I found Jonathan Carroll’s After Silence, which sported a great Dave McKean cover back in… 1991? Something like that, the era when a Dave McKean cover felt like a statement.) Bookshops felt like spaces where you weren’t just invited in, you were invited in to stay awhile. It felt like part of an unspoken, implicit promise from their very existence.

When I first moved to the States, finding a good bookstore was on top of my to-do list, only to discover I lived just a couple minutes walk from a truly great one, Green Apple. (Maybe the first time I’d gotten to visit a genuinely amazing bookshop.) The same when I moved to Portland, and again, there was a Powell’s branch within walking distance from my house. Sometimes I wonder if I’d have been so happy, so ready to settle, if that hadn’t been the case.

All of this came to mind as I watched this small kid navigate the shelves of the SFMOMA store, his eyes wide as he reached for countless books. He gets it, I thought to myself with something approaching pride. He’ll have a life of bookshops if he’s lucky.

When I trace the many people I’ve stolen from in building whatever I have that might be called my “voice” when I write for myself — by which I mean, when I write here, these days; I don’t get a chance to write outside of the professional entertainment journalist voice anywhere else anymore — I go to a collection of well-worn references: Grant Morrison’s Speakeasy columns and letters pages in The Invisibles*, Kurt Vonnegut and Jonathan Carroll books I read at impressionable ages, Bill Drummond’s 1990s writing in things like 45 and the like. A bunch of things I read at the point when I was finding myself writing more and more by mistake and trying to figure out how to present myself on the page that way.

It’s a reminder, in its own way, that I got into writing by mistake. It was the thing I did to give myself something to illustrate in art school, and even before that, in high school — my final year in high school, I failed to do any proper final project for my art class all year and so handed in this comic strip I’d been writing and drawing for myself in desperation; the feedback was more or less, “We don’t get comics, but the writing isn’t bad,” which was probably a sign I didn’t pay attention to at the time. (All of that work was left behind when I moved to the U.S.; it’s probably a good thing. I think I might even have thrown it out, when I think back.)

Writing was a fallback, a means-to-an-end that I didn’t think twice about, until I did. I can remember interviewing to do the Masters degree program in my final year of art school, and them asking me what I’d do if I got accepted into the program. I didn’t have a real answer, beyond “I don’t feel like I’ve finished whatever it is I’m doing now, and I’m too scared to go out there and fail to get a job,” but I offered up a jumble of sentences and ended with something along the lines of, “and I think I should write more, I think there’s something more I can do with writing,” and that was the part of the interview where they seemed to relax and get animated about the prospect of me continuing my education.

At that point, I was in love with language and the potential it had to thrill and amuse and educate, but I couldn’t have told you that at the time. All I knew was that I’d read something occasionally and think to myself, oh, there’s something there I need to remember for some reason, and fold it up and put it into a filing cabinet in my brain. I knew I was studying and storing, I just didn’t know what for. No wonder, given that experience, I find myself fetishizing following gut instinct today. I knew my future career decades too early, even if I didn’t realize it at the time.

Fewer movies than I might have expected for this month, but I got distracted with television — hi, new seasons of UK and US Love Islands — and also by travel, headed back to the Bay Area for five days at the end of the month. That said, that did allow me to watch some movies that otherwise I probably wouldn’t have checked out by myself, thanks to the cinematic influence of Mr. Jeff Lester, which was a good experience not just because the movies were good. (It’s never a bad thing to step outside your preconceptions, after all.)

Anyway, as we head into another weird month — San Diego Comic-Con is going to ensure that I don’t really see anything for a week or so, TV or movies, because I’ll be so busy working — here’s what I watched in June. (Not pictured, purely because I forgot to add it to the list: Final Destination 2.)