The World That's Coming

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.

For whatever reason, I’ve been re-reading comics from my youth lately that could charitably be considered as “mid-level” in terms of both quality and relative importance to the publishing lines to which they belonged when they were release, and it’s left me with less of a nostalgic attachment than I would have expected, but instead a simple question: Whatever happened to shitty, pointless superhero comics?

Don’t get me wrong; we’re still surrounded by shitty superhero comics today. Just go into any comic book store and you’ll see more than you can shake any number of sticks at. I’m not arguing for a second that we’ve stepped into an era where every single superhero comics is inherently good in any real manner (although I’d argue that even the worst have a level of quality that’s somehow above the worst of days gone by, somehow. Don’t ask me why, it doesn’t really make sense if I stop to think about it).

What I really mean is, in re-reading all these comics from the 1990s, I was struck by the number of times I read an issue that didn’t seem to have any kind of intent behind it other than “let’s just try and get through another month together.” Stories in which nothing happens, sure, but also where there’s no actual attempt to tell a story with a beginning, middle, or end — or even some form of continuation of a bigger idea. Stories in which there aren’t really any ideas, in fact, just creators desperately and clearly trying to get to the end of their page count for the month.

And all of this is happening in series where the central character has… no real personality…? This is a particular problem to superhero comics, I feel, and especially superhero comics from the 1980s and ’90s, where central characters were almost intentionally bland copies of the Spider-Man template, because that’s what creators grew up reading and loving; they’re reactive, passive-aggressive quip machines who complain about situations but end up doing the right thing eventually and magically save the day. But there’s nothing to them, beyond that. They’re just… there.

None of this should be taken as condemnations of what were, to be honest, comics that probably should be condemned; I enjoyed them for what they were, relics of another time and another approach to comics that I grew up with but can recognize with some distance now. More than anything, it’s recognition that we’ve lost something in today’s superhero comics: a celebration of mediocrity and hackwork that, in so many words, I kind of wish we could see back to some degree.

It was, in retrospect, a moment of innocent optimism that led me to believe that losing momentum was going to be a good thing when we got home at 2:30am on a Sunday, after just over 24 hours of travel. (Well, a lot of that included an extended layover in JFK airport, but you know what I mean.) My head at the time was exhausted, sure, but also buzzing the way it does after I’ve been on the go for too long, as if it was literally in motion despite what the rest of my body was doing. I felt dizzy and tired, and I remember thinking to myself, finally, we get to stop. I get to stop for awhile.

Turns out, that wasn’t a good thing, after all.

Don’t get me wrong; not traveling has been great — as much as the UK trip was filled with good things and family and a lot that I’m already looking back on fondly, it felt like almost constant motion: even on the rare occasions when it wasn’t a day when I was traveling somewhere or about to, my brain was in the mode of, “okay, but in a couple of days, we have to catch this car to get to this airport” and so on. Not having that in the back of my mind for the last few days as I write has been wonderful.

The problem is, I’ve realized that I’ve also lost the momentum of my everyday life, and that’s a hard one to deal with. It’s not simply the jet lag, which took a couple of days to arrive and then stuck around like a bad smell; it’s that I spent the first week or so back struggling to get through my workday, because I’d lost the weird rhythm that I’ve become used to. That week off — actually just three and a half days, as it turned out, but a lot happened in those three and a half days — broke all the everyday magic spells I’d unthinkingly constructed to travel through the day easily, and everything for those days just felt impossibly, unreasonably hard.

“I’ve lost momentum,” I’d tell anyone who asked, feeling the irony in those words even as they came out my mouth.

Continuing with the confounding of expectations on the UK trip, I embarrassedly confess that I expected the Scottish leg of the visit to have been far less emotional on every single front; I knew, of course, going in that it was a flying visit (literally, if you consider how we arrived and left): we flew in Tuesday afternoon and left Friday morning, which is far shorter than it sounds initially. Realistically, that translates into just two days there with timing a little bit fuzzier around the edges. That was, of course, not that long, but I still figured something was better than nothing, and it’s not like we could have gotten away with extending the trip any longer than the 11 days it was already lasting — there’s a home and a family to tend to back in Portland, after all.

The bit I didn’t expect, honestly, was how much I wouldn’t want to leave by the time Friday rolled around: how painfully short the visit to reconnect with family would feel, and how much I’d want to stay and talk more, hang out more, just be there with them for longer. It’s not just my two sisters I’m talking about, obviously, but their spouses and offspring — all of whom are actual people now as opposed to the babies and kids they were the last time I was there. (More than a decade ago, to put it in context.) We had dinner on Tuesday, and spent all of Thursday together, as well as Friday morning — Wednesday we spent in Glasgow, again catching up with people I hadn’t seen in a decade-plus — but it didn’t feel like enough time.

I left them at the airport, more than slightly heartbroken, and happy that plans are already in place for a November return. (Another work-related UK trip.) We’ll do Zoom calls in the meantime, just as we have done over the past few years while I’ve not been able to visit, but now I know how unlike the real thing that is. I left Scotland with this need to return, with this sadness for stepping away, again.

(And no, my accent genuinely didn’t get any stronger during the visit. Who knew?)