The World That's Coming

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.)