The World That's Coming

I’ve been thinking a lot about comic book conventions recently. Thanks to COVID and lockdown and, I admit, my work situation, it’s been a few years since I’ve been able to participate in the madness and anxiety that is a big convention, and I’ve found that I am increasingly missing it… and yet, at the same time, the idea of returning to one also fills me with its own sense of anxiety and nervousness.

Prior to the world closing down, conventions were part of my annual rhythm. I’d make it to at least two a year, covering both San Diego Comic-Con and New York Comic Con for work. (In 2019, I also did Star Wars Celebration in Chicago and CCXP in São Paulo, Brazil; even just thinking about doing four in one year feels alien to me, now.) The summer wouldn’t feel complete without the visit to Southern California and the compressed socializing that came with the show, and the fall wouldn’t begin without the cross country trip to the East Coast and the overstuffed city that wouldn’t sleep.

I have wonderful memories associated with both shows, and important ones, too; in both cases, I feel like those shows — as packed as they inevitably were, as filled with work and socializing in such a compressed timeframe — gave me space to emotionally process necessary things in a way that was otherwise unavailable to me.

And they’ve been gone for the last few years.

This year, I’m assuming, they’ll be back and it’s more than likely that I’ll be attending at least one again. (None of my current employers have asked directly, but still.) I’m somewhere between being excited at returning, but nervous, too; I’m older now, and out of practice, after all, never mind the pandemic and the masks of it all. It’s a different world, and a different me. Will I still fit in, in that new convention reality?

I’m reading prose again, which is nice. After an impressive January — a prose book a week! I felt very accomplished! — my prose reading trailed off again as evening exhaustion and the demands of a job that requires a lot of comic reading took ahold once again. It wasn’t quite as overwhelming as the past couple of years when my prose reading fell through the floor, but it wasn’t something that I felt particularly proud of, either. After all, as the song goes: here’s more to life than books, you know, but not much more.

(I feel bad for quoting the Smiths, but it’s a fun line, dammit.)

I fell out of the habit of prose reading, I realize, because of COVID and lockdown; it closed the libraries for anything other than pre-scheduled pick-ups of online orders that took weeks, if not months, to arrive, and eventually I just gave up in response. Not only wasn’t I really into the idea of planning out my reading habits so far in advance, the lack of in-library browsing made it difficult for me to know what I’d want to be reading anyway. This is another reason why I love bookstore browsing, which I’m pretty sure I’ve written about before.

Libraries are open again now, thankfully, and with it the ability to browse new releases and see what’s worth reading again. Of course, the book I flew through this weekend — reading the whole thing in one day, practically — wasn’t a browsed discovery, but something I’ve been looking forward to since learning about it: Blood Sweat & Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max: Fury Road. It’s not that Fury Road is even one of my favorite movies as much as it’s one with a ridiculous behind-the-scenes story, and I’m a sucker for a well-done oral history of anything interesting. No wonder I finished it so quickly.

Flushed with this success, I find myself excited to keep going: what else can I read, where am I going to go next? I’m only a couple of library visits away from my next great adventure.

I’ve been revisiting comics from my youth, again. This time, it’s a significant chunk of writer John Smith’s 2000 AD work, which I eagerly and impatiently followed through the late 1980s and early 1990s; he wrote a number of different things for the anthology during that time, both of his own creation — Tyranny Rex, Indigo Prime, Revere, Firekind, Devlin Waugh — and picking up part-time work on other people’s characters and strips. He did some Judge Dredd, a little bit of Rogue Trooper, and even a Robo Hunter at some point, if I remember correctly.

I’m telling you this not to be a fanboy — I think I’ve already established those bona fides simply by being able to list all those strips without having to reference anything in advance, let’s be honest — but to point out that Smith was someone who made a point to keep busy on a number of different projects during this time, with a number of different attitudes on display in each of them. There wasn’t just one “John Smith” flavor, if that makes sense.

And yet, I always knew when Smith was writing something, even as a teen who wasn’t the most adept at understanding the nuances of author’s tics or how to identify recurring themes and obsessions to identify a creator. Revisiting his work en masse as I have been, I realize what clued me in was, of all things, Smith’s language, and the ways in which he’d write things in such a way to be… emotionally centered, rather than practically so, if that makes sense…?

Looking at it today, I can recognize that Smith was using techniques he’d lifted from contemporary poets and literary prose in how he approached language; there would be blocks of purple prose, or sentences in fragments to establish a mood or a feeling, all of which felt brand new and exciting to the me I was back then. I feel as if, in his way, Smith opened up a space in my brain for an appreciation of non-linear writing, and more experimental writing, just by being in that Judge Dredd comic when I was at the right age to learn. I’m forever grateful for that.

Despite the weather shitshow that Portland has seemed intent on delivering lately — it’s April, why are we having to deal with snow showers and the temperature dropping below freezing seemingly every night? — it is, nonetheless, still edging towards summer, and my body is clearly preparing for this eventuality by refusing to keep me asleep past 5:45am.

This isn’t the worst thing in the world, I know; at the very least, I’ve been able to see some genuinely beautiful sunrises, as the sky shifts through colors in order to find the right setting for the day, all soundtracked by insistent and excited birdsong. There’s something about that being the start to your day that feels refreshing and invigorating, as if the world is waking up with you and you’re connected with something larger than yourself. I’m not complaining about that part of it.

I’m also not complaining about the opportunity waking up early has afforded me to both catch up on reading and, in a couple of cases, catch up on or get ahead of writing deadlines. There’s been a lot going on in the last few weeks, and even just that extra hour or so has proven to be a welcome godsend of quiet and brain space that’s been impossibly useful.

No, what I’m complaining about is the price my early wake-ups have taken from me. Now, no matter what, I am entirely done with the day by 10 o’clock at night; 10:30 at the latest. I don’t just mean that I’m sleepy, although I am; I mean that my body just basically makes the choice for me that the day is over, and I realize that I have maybe half an hour to get into bed before I’m out like a light.

It’s not as if I’ve ever really been a night owl, but this feels like next level tiredness, and a reminder that I’m that little bit closer to 50 every single day. Only old people are this tired at night, I think to myself as I start wrapping things up at 9:30 in the evening, and that’s just what I am, now.

Every single year without exception, tax time stresses me out. It’s something I struggle through from the moment I start thinking about taxes — usually somewhere in mid-December, because the year’s ending and oh boy I should start putting together that expenses list again — to the moment everything is filed and I’ve put the checks in the mail. (Yes, I pay the majority of things online; for some reason, though, I always pay Portland’s Arts Tax with a check. It’s the one thing I use my checks for, still. That’s not a joke; literally the last time I used my checkbook was this time last year, to write a check for Arts Tax.)

The stress surrounding taxes comes in waves, in different flavors. Gathering together all the information I need in the first place, and stressing simultaneously about how little money I made in any year and how much of it I spent on things that are literally unavoidable, like rent and groceries. (Honestly, my discretionary spending is shockingly low; I just can’t afford it.) Wondering if I’ve missed some expense, some information that would change all the math. Checking where all my 10-99 forms have gone. (One year, I’ll remember to store them all in one place as they arrive, I promise.)

And then there’s the anxious wait for my CPA to tell me how bad things are, and the feeling of, welp, I guess I didn’t want to save any money after all when I actually get the information back. I didn’t use an accountant for many years, and then the first year that I did, he told me that I’d been missing out on a lot of possible benefits I could have claimed, but also that I’d been failing to pay a freelance tax for years; after that, having a tax guy became a must.

I’ve mailed everything off for the year as I write. But even now, the stress isn’t entirely over: what if this is the year I get audited? What if there’s a mistake in there I didn’t catch? Surely there’s some way I could do this better? Maybe a month from now, I’ll be able to think of something else again.