In the same way that one may have a dream, or a series of dreams, or single dream which perforates the entirety of one's life about being naked at school (which somehow manages to be horrifying every time), whenever I see the letters SDCC together I can feel my ribs start to squeeze my heart. I understand that these symptoms vary from person to person.

I don't doubt that it is cool to attend it. Well, maybe it's cool. I wouldn't know, because I never have! It seems like everyone else is having fun there. And when they come by the booth I seize a motherfucker and wring them out; I engage in vampirism. I was basically a zoo animal at these things, and not a cool zoo animal, like a great cat: it was like one of those small mammal enclosures, where you can look and look and never entirely know if there is an animal in there. There might not be.

I met so many cool people, though. Jhonen Vasquez(!) used to roll through, and we got along really well, even though he is an amethyst and obsidian sex idol and I am not any of those things. I met the lady who basically carries the modern Transformers mythology on her back; developers from every threshold of the industry were charted as they molted from QA to QA lead to Assistant Whatever and Associate Person, and the last year I went they're showing me the mobile thing they made with a team of fellow exiles. I saw it the other way, too: I saw the veteran knocked sideways by industry trends, showing me no less than six genius level prototypes nobody even wants. I'm not even a person in these stories, I'm the crossroad. I am what they walk by, and through, in the pursuit of their own unassailable humanity.

That's what's worth missing, right? If you came by, and we could shed the personas for a little while. It was fun to act as a repeater station for vital trivia, "big things" absolutely do happen when you're there, and within the walls of the temple they take on mythic stature. But they still happen if you aren't there, they were always going to; you can still hear them at home, and enjoy them, and when you're done you can sleep in your own bed.

(CW)TB