At five this morning, my cell phone shrieked me out of a beautiful dream where I was smoking a Marlboro Red the size of John Holmes job qualifications (Although if that’s the best description I can come up with, it’s probably best it woke me when it did). It was my credit card company’s fraud department, calling to advise me that some depraved spastic had used my card to buy a dozen beers, a bottle and a half of wine, and then hole up in a mid-ranged motel overlooking the Pacific… presumably to make his last stand.
I advised the nice lady in return that the deranged spastic in question was me.
Welcome back to San Diego Comic-Con.
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Christ, look at the fucking dust and cobwebs around this fucking Web site, huh?
Sorry about that. Let’s suffice it to say that things have gone weird on me in 2010; even weirder than usual. When you quit one day job after it “allegedly” defrauded you out of $10,000 in 2009 and was on its way to gleefully upping the ante to $23,000 in 2010, and then have to spend an inordinate mount of time at a new day job convincing them that your kind of behavior is NORMAL, well, you try stamping out dick jokes and coming up with clever ways to call politicians whores.
But if there’s one thing that I’ve forced myself to embrace in the past half decade, it’s to report back from Comic-Con. Oh sure: unlike when I started spitting sporadic and incomprehensible dispatches from this place five years ago, now you can just dial up G4 and watch eight hours of Olivia Munn and That Other Guy making hip-hopish hand gestures and tit-jiggling from the main convention floor. Of course, that assumes you can trust that kind of reporting. After seeing Olivia on The Daily Show, I wouldn’t believe her if she reported she had jugs without some hands-on fact-checking.
However, I still think there’s a place for “reporting” (Quoted because what I do is only journalism in the loosest definition… and only then if your definition includes Blue Law violations) from a man with his boots on the ground, a song in his heart, and most of a distillery’s pride in his brain. A man reporting from the actual Cheez-Nip cholesterol-pumping heart of Comic-Con, using all the tools available to a man on the budget of a modest family vacation minus the coin required for enough beer to prevent him from wanting to lay hands on every Naruto with a children’s stroller.
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But you can’t report back from Comic-Con without getting here. In American history, getting to the Pacific Ocean from Boston took months of crippling sacrificial agony. Now, thanks to modern technology, the journey only takes several hours of crippling sacrificial agony, and you only need to turn to cannibalism if you want to eat on the plane for less than thirty bucks a head plus booze.
If you follow my Twitter feed, you might have noticed that I’ve stopped smoking cigarettes. This is the only reason I’m not in Federal custody right now.
Notice I haven’t said “quit smoking”. I plan to quit smoking the old-fashioned way, by dying. No, instead I’ve switched to an electronic cigarette. Yes, one of those toy-looking things that the cute girls try to sell you at the mall… except some of us are serious people, who understand that if they sell you firecrackers at the mall, you can obtain DYNAMITE on the Internet.
So I carry a little device called a Volcano, which allows me to fill the thing with a goop that tastes like cigarettes, assuming whoever designed the flavor had most of his tongue excised due to smoking-related cancer. It delivers a nicotine load along the lines of a very light cigarette, with none of the pesky little compounds that, well, kill you. And when you exhale, it’s a glorious, habit-tricking cloud… of scentless water vapor. And since nothing burns and there’s no “dangerous” secondhand smoke, it circumvents all current smoking bans, meaning you can use it anywhere you want!
Yeah, tell it to a TSA drone. In Twenty-First Century America, we’ve created a horrible ghetto in every major city where people are driven like cattle, told they have no basic human rights, and are subject to the whims of vigilante-style goons with no legal right to arrest you can toss your belongings, threaten you with jail time, and maybe get a finger snaked into your asshole at will. It’s like District 9, and we are all Prawns… Mmmmm, prawns… sorry; after a day of airport and airline food, the concept of eating something that isn’t processed is captivating. Even filthy alien. Thank God I’m close to Tijuana. But I digress.
So I sat there, stewing through nicotine fits at the gate for two hours since I arrived early like a good domesticated pack animal when they blissfully announced pre-boarding… ten seconds before they muttered something about “mechanical issues” and “updates when they are available” and “No smoking please and water vapor is smoking and we have always been at war with Eastasia” and “I won’t be able to prove to you that two plus two equals five when I have a finger in your rectum.”
Two hours later, they announced that they were ready to board us… at a different gate. In a different part of the terminal. With a different security checkpoint. Which meant we were all frogmarched across the airport and told to remove our shoes and liquids again, only this time we had to take EVERYTHING out of our pockets because this checkpoint had one of those backscatter x-ray scanners that allows TSA screeners to see what you would like if you were naked and mildly radioactive. Just like this!
So, after clearing security and secure in the knowledge that, in the name of my personal safety, some blue-collar government stooge had thoroughly examined my wang, balls and taint, we were boarded onto a new airplane and FINALLY told that they had discovered a hydraulic issue on the original craft… proving that JetBlue is committed to providing leather seats and personal entertainment (Water pressure, information and a timely departure not included in ticket cost)!
(Plus, JetBlue jacked me for an extra $120 to get a seat next to my girl… on a flight that I’d booked six months ago. So yeah; FUCK JetBlue).
But that is in the past. Now, I am gazing upon San Diego bay, “smoking” heavily in my non-smoking room, prepared to hit the street for food and a supply of beer in preparation for Preview Night, which begins at 6:30 local time. Keep an eye on my Twitter feed, and pictures and videos will be uploaded nightly.
But first? Fresh food. I am prepared to start cracking open a few shells and forking out the sweet, sweet virgin meat. After all, it’s Comic-Con, which means that Stormtrooper cosplayers are in season.
[tags]San Diego Comic-Con, Nerd Prom, dark humor, satire[/tags]
Good luck, we’re all counting on you.