When Nathan told me that he was going to run his three part memoir of Comicon 2011 this week, I said, “Oh, Convention Week.” He responded that he wasn’t too sure that I would have as much to say about the experience. And he may be right. As I’ll explain later, I was very tired that day. I joked that it would be “Chris’s Memories of Comicon” and it would only be the first half of the day. So this is Part One of my memories… maybe. It is if I have enough for a Part Two. As of right now, I have not read any of Nathan’s posts on the subject. I figure that if I can squeeze out two parts from my memories that maybe I can get a third part in commenting on his posts. Note: I am now 1,000 words into my article, and am only at the part where the public was let in to the seller’s room, so I think I’m good for at least two parts.
The convention started around 10:30 am, but for me the convention started at midnight. I was supposed to get off of work at midnight and get as much sleep as I could before Nathan was at my front door early that morning. The problem is that no one showed up at midnight. This became a circumstance where I certainly didn’t want to complain about the opportunity for more hours, but I didn’t exactly want them right at that moment. After a couple of phone calls, my supervisor found someone to come relieve me… the owner of the guard company. For as much as they love me there, I wasn’t about to make the owner of the company come work for me. I said that if they could promise me somebody there by 6:00 am that I would stick around for the extra few hours.
There was a guard there by 5:30 am, and I got to go home to get ready, and nap very briefly until Nathan arrived. I forget what time it was when he actually got there, but I do know that the time between leaving work and Nathan arriving was not as long as it seemed in terms of me getting any sleep, because I had to shower and actually get ready. This is really just par for the course for me sometimes.
The week that we did all the initial shooting for Season Two, Nathan had told me to ask off the entire week, and I did in a way. I asked off from my part time job delivering pizza. I just didn’t ask off from my guard job. At the time, I had an ideal guard post, and I didn’t want to lose it. I didn’t have to be there until midnight, and I was off at 7:00 am. Since Nathan didn’t want to get started until around 10:00 or 11:00 am each day; there was enough time for me to nap. Then there was enough time for me to nap again before work because Nathan goes to bed at 7:00 pm (I figure if I say that enough it’ll become fact eventually). For me that was enough. The night I had off, I slept on Nathan’s couch, and boy did I pass out.
So there we were on our way to the convention with me in my normal state of sleep deprived delirium. Actually, that wasn’t achieved until much later in the day, but I was tired. Nathan put me in charge of the map and directions print out, and aside from not really paying attention to where we were at any point, I did a pretty good job of getting us there. We didn’t miss any turns at least. When we arrived there was a line of cars and there was a line of people from the convention explaining to us where we were to park, ok, there was two people, but they practically said the same thing, like they were both trying out for the same role in a movie.
We finally got into the dock area, and we went about executing Nathan’s unloading plan, which involved one of us taking stuff in, and one of us waiting with the truck. This went pretty smoothly, and we were soon setting up what proved to be a very small table compared to the amount of stuff we had.
We had our dealers tags (which I’m sure is called something else since we aren’t cars) and we joked a bit that we should walk around holding them out like they did in “Wayne’s World.” When Nathan went to the bathroom before the people were let in, he said that you practically had to do that because if you tried to walk in with your very prominent badge around your neck and hanging on your chest, the people at the door acted like they couldn’t see it, and demanded you show them your badge.
Ok, here is my stopping point for the first half. On Thursday, right after I discuss Ameri… oh yeah, I have my Thursdays back. On Thursday, I will tell you about the flood of people, the flood of pus from my nose, the flood of twenties that lined my pockets, and why I didn’t get any nachos.