Suzie and I met two Chicagoland friends for breakfast. Â During the meal, I found out my surgery was to take place at 6 am the next day. Â It takes 13 hours to get back from Chicago and we wound up leaving around 4pm which made for a somewhat tight window. Â Suzie offered to drive but a combination of snow and back pain prevented her from doing so for long. Â There’s a different feeling to being in the car alone driving over a long distance and being in the car with someone and doing all the driving. Â Switching drivers would have been unsafe so I tried to think of Suzie as a hologram or foreign exchange student and that prevent the emotional part of my brain from being annoyed. Â Suzie offered to come home with me and be there after surgery but I declined. Â My abdomen would be hit with the surgical equivalent of a battering ram. Â I wouldn’t want anyone there.
Today was my last day as a fat man and I lived it up. Â I had sticky buns with breakfast, some toffee with lunch, and when the fasting mark started 8 hours before surgery I celebrated with a large quesadilla from Sheetz. Â When that proved insufficient, Suzie gave me some of her french fries and popcorn chicken.
It was 10pm, I was five hours from home, and I was having mediocre popcorn chicken in a car with my best friend after we drove 1800 miles to go to an anime convention and Chicago. Â This is the life I feel I’ve earned and for the first time I feel proud of it.
<600 miles – Not a road trip, doesn’t even require filling up the tank twice.
2500>x>600 miles – Minimum road trip. Â Have to fill up tank at least once strictly to cover distance but at no point are you more than a day from home.
5000>x>2500 miles – Road trip. Â There’s a point in the trip that if you left at that instant, you wouldn’t be home for at least 16 hours, a full day, of driving.
>5000 miles – Grand road trip. Â At the 5k mile mark, you need to have an oil change at some point. Â Requiring vehicle maintenance on the road ups the stakes a bit.
This weekend, Suzie and I are going to Ohayocon in Columbus, Ohio and this marks our first dip into the category of “minimum road trip” since August. Â We got underway and Suzie was to my right as we began driving West. Â There was a wonderful strangeness to driving to Ohio with her in the car after so many cases where this was the solo leg of the trip. Â The driving was easy and I got a parking spot immediately in front of the Ohayocon venue. Â We walked in and slowly made it to the room where I was participating in a panel Suzie was running. Â The going was slow from the infinitude of people stopping Suzie to say “hello”. Â Here, she was a rock star. Â The closest analog would be me at Ockanickon when I was ecology director and ran the Magic tournaments. Â There I would have a cloud of people following me around. Â A staff member referred to these kids as my “electrons”. Luckily, my electrons never hit on me.
I need to use the bathroom before the panel started so walked to the bathroom. Â On the way back in, a convention staffer moved to stop me but I did what I always do when I don’t have appropriate credentials to be somewhere; I walked with purpose and a certain aloofness at a pace a little bit faster than most people. Â He gave up stopping me after a few strides and going “sir!”. Â Had he gotten in front of me and asked me what I was doing he would have received a “that’s a stupid question”. Â This Star Trek-inspired tactic has about a 50% chance of success but is well worth the effort.
The panel was on survival horror games and involved bringing up unwitting audience members and trying to scare them.  Dim lighting, unfamiliar controls, scary games, and some well placed screaming made the event go well.  The costumes at Ohayocon were not too impressive and some didn’t even show any particular sense of craftsmanship.  Some people seemed to just ape the colors and ideas of their favorite fandom and for me that was unappealing.  Dragon*con had spoiled me.  This was the first convention where I felt exposed to “con folk” and my initial reaction to them was overly strong.  They were unwashed, poorly dressed, and were identifiable by the sound of their knuckles scraping behind themselves, or at least that’s how it was in my head.  On reflection, I’ve encountered the same people in Scouting and at Magic tournaments.  Just like in those other communities, they wanted to be there.  This was their hobby, a way of getting social engagement with people like them, and probably is the foundry of some of their finest memories.  They will grow-up a little, hopefully, and convention culture will have helped them bootstrap themselves into proper society… or they may become furries.  Who knows.
Paul drove down from Northern New Jersey to carpool with Randy, Kelly, and I to a dinner Suzie was hosting. I smile at the implications of that sentence.
*Paul being close enough to drive down.
*Paul enjoying our company enough to drive those two hours.
*Randy and Kelly being together.
*Randy and Kelly getting along with me.
*All of us being friends with Suzie.
*Suzie being in the area.
*Suzie having her own place.
*Each of us being in good enough health and with enough free time to go.
*Wanda still being functional.
I could unpack that statement to further but I think that’s enough.
I have made the sleep-deprived trip from Cincinnati to Philadelphia a number of times before but this time Suzie was in the car as we headed East. We passed the Centennial Barn that marks 76.2 miles having passed and we passed Columbus, OH and the dozens of signs for Zanesville. We passed Wheeling, WV and the last Hardee’s before Philadelphia. We passed Harrisburg and Valley Forge and Willow Grove and eventually we passed my mailbox. In a stupor, we walked into my house and re-collapsed in our respective beds for a nap until noon. We rose at 4 PM, I got a haircut that I didn’t much like. Â We sat in Chipotle to wait out the rain. Despite having driven across the Gulf states it was only Philadelphia that we encountered a deluge.
We picked up miscellaneous items in Walmart and drove to 18th Street in Philadelphia to drop off all of the non-bed things which went quickly. I drove back home, picked up a bed, a night stand, a table, and some Uncrustables and returned for a second round; this time to assemble flat pack furniture and move a bed. The bed didn’t fit. Â Not even, it did not fit. Â Not by a long shot. Today was a long day.
Clocks are not always measurers of hours. In war, the clock is blood and iron and in moving it is steps and sweat. Suzie’s new apartment, her apartment, was on the third floor of a building with narrow steps and every foot placement was laced with a little fear that I’d fall.  Suzie’s clock had recently measured days but now ticks in time with opportunity. There is something lost when saying “hello†to someone becomes easier by at least a factor of 10. The power of “this is what I did just to be here†is lost but it is a small loss, one best mourned fleetingly lest it return. I don’t know what happens now as I’m very used to friends becoming more rather than less distant. I look forward to finding out.
This trip to Chicago was the first for which I took no pictures. I even have pictures from what amounted to long lunch visits there yet this time my visit was for a full day and a half with no pictures. There are two things I missed:
Suzie had a low carb ice cream mostly consisting of heavy cream which Peter’s young cat found very compelling. The cat became less and less hesitant to investigate until it decided to poke its head in while Suzie was eating resulting in a cat vs. person stare-down.
The sun setting over South Chicago while Audrey, Peter, Suzie, and I had our first homemade dinner at Peter’s residence.
Building the momentum to leave the hotel room took a bit after the long previous day. Suzie and I got rolling and arrived at Boondock Farms around 7am.
Zombification started with check in. Here is us in our original state:
Runners went through alternating bouts of obstacles and zombies. Zombies were of two types, chasers and shamblers. Suzie and I were shamblers along with a nice family and we attacked runners for three hours collecting a good number of flags. At the end of the shift, we received some tokens of thanks, got lunch and then returned so Randy and Kelly could run.
The race itself was tightly run and professionally organized. The bands were unremarkable and the vendor area had things that I will call not too unreasonably priced. I hope to do another in the future.
Some notes:
I played cornhole for the first time here. Â I appear to be ok at it.
The make-up did not come off easily and I bruised my face removing it at a truck stop bathroom.
Everyone at the Steak and Shake where we got lunch was incredibly polite about us being dressed as zombies and Kelly looking like a domestic abuse victim.
I turned 28 today and in completely unrelated news had some people over for dinner. Â I don’t think any of them knew it was my birthday and my total birthday haul looked something like this:
I find road trips hard to write about. Sometimes I want to be thorough which is boring, sometimes I want to be brief which is a disservice to those I see. I’ve been told by those I’ve traveled with that they enjoy my after the fact retelling and what I found interesting but I find this trying. Whenever there’s a long break from me writing, it coincides with a trip. My most writing streak stuttered in the run up to this trip which, in retrospect, has proven to be another hammer blow in the annealing of my character. This isn’t to imply that the trip was a bad one, but it was a case where I learned something. Usually I learn things but this was a systemic change to how I viewed the world and those moments are rare and precious. Â People are rich and deep and should be ends and not means if they are at all important to you. Â The ones we love sometimes follow different paths than us but with effort this will result in perspective rather than alienation.
The four of us had a nice lunch before Suzie and I left in the early afternoon. Â I dropped Suzie off around 6 despite my best efforts to get there earlier and I drove back to PA listening to the Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Â Another 1500 miles on my car and another Monday where I will be running on fumes. Â If this be the price of friendship, I pay it gladly.
I’ve only known Peter and Audrey for less than three years but it feels longer. Â I’ve only known Suzie for 18 months but it feels longer. Â Tonight, the four of us had dinner at Deca, the restaurant for the Ritz-Carlton in Chicago. Â It felt like we’d done this a dozen times before despite this being our first. The food and company were delicious.
I like French food, and would probably enjoy it more were it not so pricey but this evening was a treat. Peter covered dinner for Suzie and I in exchange for a pair of SSDs I had conjured up for him to put in he and his wife’s MacBooks.
After dinner, I had fun with my new Apollo softbox that I still have no idea how to use but taking pictures of attractive people certainly reduces the amount of work I need to make someone look good to around 0.
One thing I learned immediately is that I’m terrible at giving directions to people that are simply modeling and not showing an action. At work, I sometimes take pictures of people showcasing test methods and I can spout off commands of where to stand how to hold one’s arms and such but for just taking someone’s picture I’m clueless. Maybe that’s where my love of candids comes from, I don’t need to do anything besides wait and I can prove to be very patient. I made a few other mistakes like not pulling the piano bench further from the window. While the cityscape behind is nicely en-bokeh-ed, the horizontal bar of the window is hideous and takes away from the shot. I should have had a reflector on the other side as you want a one or two stop difference not four of five.
After pictures, I met two of Peter and Audrey’s male friends and took to them quickly. They are philosophy majors at the University of Chicago and that’s a topic I enjoy. We discussed qualia, underdetermination, and empirical sufficiency and I was having a ball. The guests and I embraced at the end of the evening and shortly after their departure Peter began laughing. One of the guests had texted Peter asking if I were gay and available and I was terribly flattered. The other was also interested and I politely declined. Audrey replied with “how do you know? You haven’t even tried”. This event tickled me for two reasons:
1) For once the boys were interested in me, not Suzie
2) I get to cross “get hit on” off my “Reasons I don’t want to be fat” list. This wasn’t how I had thought it’d happen, but I wasn’t specific.
Suzie and I woke up late or at least well rested and packed our things to return home. The weather was faultless in contrast to the two previous days and the ride to my house was unexceptional. Our only calendar item for the day was to meet up with Ben, Kacey, and Mike and have dinner downtown. We changed into fancy pants clothes and our chariot was SEPTA.
Ben in Motion
Ben lives in Philadelphia and his hallmarks are a mix of sagacity and paper folding. Here he passes in a blur.
Dinner was at Buddakan, a Stephen Starr restaurant that was my first big kid dining experience some 12 years ago when Paul Dickler took myself and other students here after an Foreign Policy Research Institute presentation. I had finished that meal with the chocolate pagoda and have spent the time since counting the seconds until I could again eat a tiny chocolate house. I said less than I normally do as the geometry of the table prevented me from dominating the conversation and a small grin kept creeping over my face. It is nice to be nice to nice people. Merry Christmas.
The rest are in photos.
On the way back, I ran into my high school men’s choir coach who asked me to join his choir. I desperately wanted to say “yes”, but not right now, Garry. I have a few things to take care of.
