How The Last Two Days of September Felt Like a Final Act of Some Huge, Ridiculous Chapter in My Life And Now I Really Feel Like a Nap, Thank You Very Much
On the final days of September three different events collided for me: 1.) ‘Day of Caring’ with the United Way, 2.) MICE (the Massachusetts Independent Comics Expo), and 3.) my old apartment had to be cleaned out.
“He had noticed that events were cowards: they didn’t occur singly, but instead they would run in packs and leap out at him all at once.” – Neil Gaiman Neverwhere
1.)
This was our third Day of Caring. I say “our” because I’ve been on the Day of Caring committee all three years; getting involved with the United Way was a surprisingly large part of my Timken employment experience. I really enjoy working with the United Way folks, and we’d hoped this year would be the one that our event broke into the public consciousness and we have some spectacular fall weather like we did our first year. Instead we had to settle for weather that wasn’t as all-out awful as it was our second year (downpour, dreary) and comfort ourselves with the knowledge that we knew how to plan better for rain. Our experience has made us better, and there’s always next year.
We start Day of Caring with a breakfast-time Kick Off Event, and as in previous years I was on the food donation gathering sub-committee. I wasn’t at the top of my game for most of the Day of Caring planning – I was kind of distracted by other life events (re: breakup), but people said it came out fine. I also got to do some cool graphic design work for the United Way (for “the exposure” and because I like these people. Still, I began to understand why professional designers groan whenever someone offers “exposure” in exchange for free work. And it was with people I liked too.). I designed an ad series for them, pulled together a newspaper insert for the campaign, and it felt good, but also was a ton of work. The whole event felt like a ton of work this year. Part of that was, as mentioned, distraction from breaking up with my girlfriend, and part of it was the additional work I took on for them, and part of it was that last year I’d had a partner on the food-getting sub-committee who couldn’t volunteer this year. And I forgot how nice it was to have that help.
2.)
By nothing else but coincidence, this was also the third year MICE happened. Chris and I attended the first MICE, and I had some art in the second MICE show, but this was the first year I’d exhibited there. MICE, in its three short years, has become one of the best new conventions on the east coast and, no, I don’t think I’m being hyperbolic.
MICE and MeCAF in Portland, ME (both started in the same year), are a wonderful new beast as far as comics conventions go. They are not built around retailers bringing in long-boxes full of old superhero comics to sell (as most conventions have been in the past). Instead, they’re focused on displaying cool minicomics, ‘zines, and art by regional artists (MICE was actually born out of the old Boston ‘Zine Fair), focus on the kind of ‘graphic literature’ that sounds dirty when you say it like that but is actually more focused (especially at MeCAF, specifically billed as an “all-ages, child-friendly” event) on the whole family by showing the breadth of comics available these days in a way that also makes them feel like they’re a little microcosm of futurism where people talk about gender and sex and sexuality and funny stories and sad stories and personal stories and art prints of robots – all with equal emphasis and import.
We tabled next to RamPaige Warren, one-woman artist and operator of Busty Girl Comics (work-safe comics about the perks and perils of having boobs, as her excellent summation of her work goes). She had a lot of fans. You should see her comics, too.
These are the artists interested in luring in hip Cambridge, MA kids and children who could be new readers to support comics in the future and non-traditional (again, this is simply code for not a Marvel or DC superhero comics reader… maybe even *gasp* “girls”!) readers. People who’ve seen one-or-maybe-five of those “Comics Aren’t For Kids” articles in Parade magazine or Newsweek or something and wonder what it’s all about. These shows are cheap, but build on love of the medium, not long-box commerce, and its astonishing how there’s little difference on the vendor-experience end. If anything, it’s better! There’s a lot of great programming, usually free admission, and a surprisingly excellent level of management. Especially in comparison to bigger indie comics show like MoCCA or SPX where you’ll pay literally 8-10 times as much to exhibit and have your name mis-spelled in the program (sorry, SPX, but it’s super-true). MeCAF also has a breathtaking location on the wharf right at the edge of the continent. MICE has a cool tradition developing of having artists from the show hang their art in the space, then having a gallery opening the weekend before the show, then the show the next weekend (in what is, I hope, a great marketing/word-of-mouth ploy that also makes for a very cool space for a show). Oh, and free coffee and snacks were provided for vendors! (An unheard of generosity three years ago!)
3.)
The third was that September 30th had to be moving day.
I broke up with my girlfriend of just over nine years this summer. It was bad. I left her with the apartment and the cat, and out of guilt offer to pay the rent until October. On September 14th or so I got an e-mail from her letting me know she was leaving on the 16th. I was happy to get the e-mail because I wanted an end to our ambiguous limbo stage of existence, for us to move on, and to get my furniture back. I went up there on Friday, after getting an e-mail from her on the road apologizing that the place was a bit more of a mess than she meant to leave it.
It was a disaster zone.
The fridge was filled with old take-out, nothing had been cleaned but the tub, and there were piles after ironic piles of organizational bins and things in the living room. I spend the next two weeks cleaning up crap that wasn’t mine. An exercise that culminated in the aforementioned weekend – which started at 6:00 PM Friday until almost midnight. Then I went to bed. I got up at 5:30 AM on Saturday for the 7:00 AM Day of Caring Kick-Off setup. We’d hoped to have a bigger turnout in the community this year, but we still wound up with a huge proportion of our volunteer force being Dartmouth students. That event wrapped up at 8:30 AM. By 9:00 AM I’d picked up a couple of the guys and we were on our way to MICE. Which, as I mentioned, was great. MICE seems to have every aspect of their convention down with the exception of the after-party, which always seems to attract move people than they expect or the venue believes and so the celebration winds up cramped or cut into different rooms. A minor complaint. We all had a great time, even if some of our party wrapped up the evening by getting boisterously (if not belligerently) and annoyingly drunk.
About midnight, Chris and I got to his parents’ house. We passed out. I had almost tried to drive home, but gave into common sense. After the show, I couldn’t stop thinking about all the work I had to do to finally clear out my old apartment. I was strung out on caffeine, tired, and grumpily unable to see past the shit my Sunday was going to be comprised of. Then the subway station had an alarm go off, so we had to walk something like fifteen blocks to the nearest red line station. By the time we got our final stop, I had to agree that sleep sounded good.
We got up the next morning, had breakfast, and drove back to White River. I started transporting the final piles of stuff to my new apartment on the other side of the river. Chris came over with his car and we loaded both cars up with the stuff for the local second-hand shops. It took three or four trips to get everything out. By this time it was nearly four in the afternoon. Chris went home, and I offered to buy him dinner for all his help. We went to Panera since I wanted something good after all my hard work. It was a great respite from the craziness of the day. Then I went back to the apartment and started cleaning… and realized there was one final burden to dispense. The couch. A big ’70s futon that was not going anywhere it didn’t want to. The cushions had long ago lost their covers to age and wear. It wasn’t going to go to the second-hand store like that, and I was running out of time. I called Chris back. He brought his saw and a drill.
“Are you starting to feel like we’re a couple of mob goons from Goodfellas,” Chris asked.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I replied. Then I ripped the arms off the couch and he started sawing the body apart. “Make sure to split it up into small-enough pieces.”
“Right,” he replied. “Pass me the trashbags.”
And then, since the dumpster was full of other crap I had to throw out, we took those trashbags and tossed them in dumpsters around town.
Since then I’ve spent the last week enjoying the Jon Stewart/Bill O’Reilly debate, pot luck dinners, and getting my house literally in order (because it was a mess). Lots to do, but the pressure has eased. October is going to be a nice month.
