I was going to continue with the story of my involvement with Boondock Saints and director Troy Duffy, but my boss at my day gig convinced me otherwise. Not directly, mind you; on Friday afternoon I was in his office and I mentioned to him that my buddy Sully was coming over so we could “Throw an Irish wake for WBCN,” when he rolled his eyes and said, “Enough about that fucking radio station! Nobody cares but you. And you only care because you fucking worked there. Besides, if you say one more Goddamned thing about ‘Glasscock‘, Jane from QA is gonna make a hostile workplace complaint against you.”
Indeed… and it made me realize that my Boondock Saints story is no more interesting to anyone who wasn’t there, either. Suffice it to say that being an extra in a movie sucks, particularly when you don’t even get a free donut because you’re not union. Plus, it turns out that it becomes unlikely that a movie director will put footage of you into the release print after you and your fifteen bored and hungry stand-up comedian friends have spent ten hours following every call of “Cut!” by leaping to your feet and bestowing Academy Award wishes on Dave Russo’s hideous sweater vest, or demanding that the director give a raise in salary and billing to said sweater vest, or perhaps suggesting to the writer / director that “Boondock Saints” is a less descriptive title than “Direct to Video”. And considering that was the guts of the story anyway, let’s just leave it at that and get back to the point, shall we?
The point being that the San Diego Comic-Con starts tomorrow, and my girl and I are at ground zero in preparations for attending. We fly out in less than twenty-four hours, which means we are at apogee of a high-speed burn of collecting the media players, laptop computers and 4 milligram nicotine gum I’ll need to keep me stupified enough to avoid being jerked out of the airplane in zip-tie handcuffs by air marshalls for a laundry list of charges including Disabling a Smoke Detector and Attempted Suffocation of an Airline Flight Attendant… which technically is also disabling a smoke detector.
I have an unflappable faith that we will get everything together in time, because being our fourth trip to Comic-Con, we are old hands at this kind of thing. However, I recognize that for every seasoned Comic-Con vet like me and my girl, there are twenty fresh-faced noobs just off the plane for their first visit. And without the proper guidance, those retards will be stumbling around with sensory overload, getting in my way. So here’s The American Jerk guide to surviving Comic-Con; I recognize that there are many other similar guides out there on the Internet, but very few of them were written by, and for, moderately function misanthropic alcoholics.
– DO NOT ATTEMPT TO GET LAID AT COMIC-CON. That girl in the bar who’s really into you? She’s a pro looking to make some dough from lonely geeks with enough bank to fill out their Miracleman collection. That girl on the convention floor who’s really into you? She’s a tween vampire freak all hormonally ganked up from seeing the dude who plays the non-threatening effeminate vampire in Twilight in the Hall H panel. That girl in the Power Girl costume? She can do better than you; you’re a comic book nerd, and she’s trying to meet Nicolas Cage.
– DO NOT TRY TO MEET NICOLAS CAGE. Either he will ask to star in your upcoming comic book movie (Which will be awkward since you don’t have one), or he will ask you if you liked Ghost Rider (Which will be awkward since nobody liked Ghost Rider and he knows it). Either way, life is too short to spend emotionally propping up the man who will be inflicting us with Bad Lieutenent 2.
– SAY IT WITH ME NOW: FUCK HALL H. At any given time, the line to get into Hall H (The big room where the big movies hold panels) is 10,000 morons deep. Meaning that you will be standing in the sun with people in waterproof vinyl costumes dripping sweat into their fungus-ridden codpieces for three hours, all to watch 90 seconds of footage from Iron Man II, which opens in less than ten months. Meaning the DVD will come out in thirteen months… and will include a tape of the fucking Hall H panel. And considering that a) thanks to 3G Internet smartphones, that 90 seconds of “exclusive” footage will be on fifteen YouTube channels before the panel is even over, and b) In three hours you can destroy your liver twice in a shady bar, it’s just not worth it.
– LEAVE YOUR FUCKING CHILDREN AT HOME. You might think it’s cute to dress your kid up like a Jedi on Halloween, but Trick or Treating lasts half an hour or even less if you bother to look to the addresses of registered sex offenders living in your neighborhood. Comic-Con is all day. And you can’t identify the sex offenders; all you can do is steer your kid away from the people with cat ears and pinned-on tails. And for every three Power Girls trolling for celebrity wang, there’s one tucking it back and gleeful at how freeing being at Comic-Con is. So unless you want an exhausted, screeching, gender-confused Padawan on your hands, leave the ankle-biters at home so I only have to look for staggering dipshits to trip over on 2 axes… or more accurately, since I will have been drinking, 4 axes.
– IF YOU’RE GONNA GET DRUNK, STAY DRUNK. The urge to have a couple or four beers at lunch at Dick’s Last Resort sounds attractive, but only to people who drink socially rather than to stop their hands from shaking. Chemically, the body breaks down about one standard-sized drink per hour, and while it is doing so, it will make you want to sleep. This leads to large numbers of amateur drinkers stumbling around the floor with half-lidded eyes, whiny voices and bad attitudes that make even the emotionally stunted man-child in the homemade Spongebob suit want to smack them in the neck. The only way to avoid this is to never stop drinking. Yes, you will find yourself somewhat more rambunctious than usual, and perhaps engaging in behavior that in polite society might command scornful attention. However, this is not polite society, this is Comic-Con. And a dude wandering around giggling and even taking open-mouthed gulps from a pewter hip flask will not attract as much attention as, say, an emotionally stunted man-child in a Spongebob suit kicking a whimpering wanna-be across the floor.
– FINALLY, DO NOT TAKE THE NON-STOP FLIGHT FROM BOSTON TO SAN DIEGO. Because I will be on that flight, and you annoy me.
Speaking of which: got a plane to catch.
[tags]San Diego Comic-Con, Nerd Prom, Comic Books, dark humor, satire[/tags]
