chase the light

First and last time I go to Comic-Con. These are so not my people. Although Chewbacca and R2-D2 were there. The amount of acne and male virgins that were walking around this place was second to none. Registration was funny in that they just hand wrote my name on the badge. Kinda like “Hello, my name is… Chris” I even had 4 or 5 pairs of booth boobs look at my name tag and say “Hi, Chris”. Weird. “Um, hello”. Sometimes I despise San Diego. It’s not nearly as laid back as everyone thinks it is. Everytime I go I’m sitting in my car going nowhere fast. The downtown area is a gridlocked mess. It took me and hour and half to find a parking spot. I kid you not. I gave up and was headed towards the freeway onramp when I finally found an $8.00 lot with parking. Which is a rip because they charge you less farther away from the convention center so then you have to take the trolley. Which costs 2.50. So, now it’s 10.50 to park, when you could have parked withing walking distance for a flat $10.00. It gets better. The lowest denomination bill I have is a 10. I put it in the ticket machine and the ticket costs $2.50 but the maximum amount of change the ticket machine will give back is $5 bucks. WTF? So the only way to get around this is to buy two round trip tix for $5 dollars so I can at least get $5 bucks back. Some girl showed up at the stop and I tried to just give her the ticket since it’s paid for anyway. She looked at me like I was up to something and she declined because she was going someplace else. Jeez, I give up.

The trolley finally arrived and I got to the convention center two hours after arriving in San Diego. There was a guy dressed up in black duct tape to look like The Matrix or something. I didn’t shoot photos of any attendees because I was to embarrassed for some of them to actually point my camera at them. I did get to meet Eric Joyner [LINK] finally. I’ve been following his work for a few years. Haven’t quite found the right piece by him yet. There were some great displays of “The Corpse Bride” and the “Wallace & Gromit” movie. Can’t wait for either of those. I also stopped by to see Anne Marie at Mad Yak Press [LINK]. I’ve known her for like 10 years and she lives like 200 yards from me yet I never ever get to hang with her. She gave me a free comic [LINK]. That made me happy after all the hassle. After I left, I tried to stop by Balboa Park, but again, couldn’t find parking. So I hit the road only to sit in Sunday night traffic from Del Mar to Irvine. Argh. So in the immortal words of Anchorman: “I’m Ron Burgundy, go fuck yourself, San Diego.” OK, it’s really not that bad, but still.

After I got to Irvine I stopped at a furniture store and bought a $7000 dollar couch. Yeah, you read that right. Only it wasn’t really that much, that’s just the msrp. See they were having this sale and, and… long story short my couch died so I needed one. Basically I bought a sofa I’ll have till I die. A piece of life furniture. None of this Ikea crap you throw away everytime you move. I’m guilty of a few things from there, but I am now the proud owner of a Stickley Mission Style Bow Arm Sofa [LINK]. It’s on order from the Stickley factory in Manlius, New York. It will be hand built and delivered here in about 12 weeks. All quarter-sawn oak with the forest green leather. A good synopsis of the history of the Stickley name [LINK]. They even have funny corporate videos with goofy classical music [LINK].