The road map of this sort of started unfurling in my head, the coils of my brain salivating and unfurling into a tongue looking for a story to tell – an excuse to blab my mouth on some kind of topic in good company almost the moment I got the offer: Now, do as I do here that when an opportunity like this presents itself you don’t curl up into a ball of “I can’t do it” or “I’m not worth it” and stick to the old motto of “fake it till you make it” – so you say yes to late night opportunities without the cash in hand to make them come through on your end, hopeful you’ll get some kind of publishers advance.
Now, unfortunately we’re not working fantasy here – publishers advances are things like fax machines and photocopied dot-matrix stiples of newspaper, a gone-by yesteryear more contemporary to the kinds of worlds that are sandwiched between thick plastic paperback covers with swords on the front and an authors name written in a 22. point gothic font with embossed letters. There’s no need to get fancy about it, though. The offer was simple, how much in my heart cooped up in a Marijuana hangover would I want to venture into the venture-capital heart of the world, that great and glorious San Francisco area to cover the Game Developers Conference, which I will pig-headedly stick to calling the game developers *convention* because It’s in all of our best interests to assume the same kind of raucous drinking, social media platform sharing and sweaty breakdowns in 2am hallways will still occur just like they would in the kind of place where the main convention floor is selling ten foot tall prints of anime hunks, twinks and babes.
I’ll make it work on my end, I assured someone – never having covered something with this much fanfare and conversation about it’s very existence, big enough to inspire its own offshoots the exact same week on the grounds outside. People pitched outside of a lumbering behemoth chucking rocks hoping to bring it down – well, we’ve seen it play out before, but this time it always feels a little more real and the one stone we’re hoping will be enough to put a crack in this monsters skull never quite brings it all the way down to the ground.
I faced a weekend of multiple shifts at the cocktail factory, the place blithe enough to set me up with a temporary two day stay in the wonderful heart of Beverly Hills, the kind of places I usually don’t have any right setting foot in for all kinds of reasons: my income, my general demeanor, my insistence on putting drinks on a bar tab that is not actually mine figuring my day job ALSO charges 18$ a margarita, making sure I get paid 9$ an hour – don’t dwell on wondering where the rest of that money goes. My eyes receed back into my skull far enough to fall out of my asshole – hit with a brain-scan like fan of colors painting my face with an LED keyboard of neon and actually imagining the kind of place that would be called “the cocktail farm”.
I worked myself up enough to write some form of these sentences once already, tell a friend about it and sucessfully lose the file without ever exactly knowing how. They’d appreciate the alternate universe I created where a kind of righteous – because stupor always comes with a type of righteousness, right out of my hands and into the rigged up gaming lap top I carry on the road with me to events like this. I’m perched up in Phoenix, Arizona, the valley of the sun – approximately something like one-hundred-and-thirty-four miles from an area of high desert right now suffering from river flooding, extremely tempermental snowfall that forced me to spend at least two nights in the sweatiest goddamned hotel I’ve ever stayed in wrapped up in a blanked like I washed up on a beach, a tragic victim of my own lifestyle. Now I course back into sinking references to old TV-shows.
Somewhere, somewhere in that stupor was a great line about how I spend most of my day-job floor time hearing the types of people who vacation six, seven, eight times a year from ski towns and florida-towns that they’re just blue collar workers like anybody else, a color of collar so thoroughly died it seems to perniciously float through the heads of every single American today even if they manufacture electric cars for a living. Every single one of us, a temporarily embarrassed example of the boot-straps being just long enough, if you really, really try. I asked strangers on the internet to fund the trip without any other kind of recourse – long hours at the day-job giving me just enough cash to help float a traveller and his two dogs down the road with me and my companion. Something peculiar about the whole affair, the three of us trapped in a Nissan as it cuts its way through the sweltering, dry creature that skulks its way slowly through the desert in freeways and overpasses. Phoenix never quite seems like any of the real appendage-style metaphor fit the limitless grid – at once easy to navigate and something where a minor road closure sends you on a transportation journey that would make a black hearted scoundrel who designs railway lines for suburbans for a living get an erection. It’s been awhile since I got out of any kind of desert, what a selfish goddamned reason for a trip like this.
The traveller is from maine, a road kid once turned stripped and his two massive German Shepard’s. He can rattle off exact facts about both breeds with a cadence that’s exactly the same every time, but no one listening would dare say rehearsed. My companion, an ex-airforce spook who’s seen more countries and states then there are videogames set in, is just content to tag along as co-pilot, pilot and explorer in her own right. Not me, though, I’m clammed up some time passed midnight trying to recreate the similar hangover circumstances that got me in my stupor a few hours ago. Something might wash over me, some great holy spirit or some wicked thing from the desert coated in sand and the blood of travellers, natives, spaniards, fool-hardy cowboys who saw that trickle of blue on the other side of the desert just footsteps away from the California border. One more days hard ride, they’d probably tell themselves before choking on dry air and being pulled apart by all the creatures that’ll keep your last moments company under the sun.
During the day shifts, I distract myself with thoughts of angles and participation levels in the most prestigious annual Game Developers Convention, which I will pig-headedly continue to refer to it as for the next five or six days. Something in me is desperate to bridge a gap between the kinds of Conferences that sell fifteen foot booths of every manner of anime hunk, babe, and twink. The GDC will definitely have talks, presentations, panels by any other name – places giving away art and the ever inescapable Swag until next year, when the junket class can come out and do it all one more time. Will the breakdowns be the same? The 3am hallway rants in the surrounding hotels? I know business-people love a little bit of a hall pass to guilt-free shove things into their body with no guilt, creating the perfect circumstances for a casual weekend get away, some business card swaps and hotel rooms, craven, despicable behavior usually reserved for those of us who have a collection of wigs and posters in our own homes.
Now, the overpasses and freeways again, they kind of float over the first part of the road to california like cobwebs, criss crossing and weaving in and out. A little east-coast chaos to the southwest, to match the midwestern strip-malls and buildings we cover in stucco just in case a tourist remembers half of the state has been burned down or blown up multiple times. Can’t lose the homogeneous feeling of Southwest some places in the valley try to cultivate, when they aren’t spraying a thousand gallons of water a day on some plants in a Business Neighborhood so the 1950’s themed taco shops remind the hotel-travel class everything is safe, and comfortable, and those nasty people living on guttered welfare programs and means testing can’t hurt your or be seen by you.
I’m hoping to be in bed soon….Resident Evil is an antidote, or anything that makes the part of my brain that craves instant reaction itch. Something has got to improve how I feel after spending a night writing down GDC talks I want to go to in a journal. Searching names of people I’ve never heard of online, looking up booth locations, harassing strangers in discords to give up their secret tell if they’ve got a game to share there with vague, threatening messages. Dark roads to California in the next few hours, stuffed in a little red tuna can jetting out of our gentle weather into more rain and sea-breeze, a suitcase, a makeup bag, all of the little things I get to do outside of Working Hours that help reconcile the fact that an odd thirty years ago, some drunken typesetter in a hospital confused the gender column on my birth certificate and labeled me Freak For Life: to be redeemed at a Later Date instead of the standard applicable “Male or Female”. At least one person at the expo will want to load a gun and point it directly at my head over my disagreeing with a piece of paper some quack stuffing speed up his nose saw when he looked between my legs.
Next up:
Gender Discovery on the Road…
Hair or High-Water of the Dog…
Whiskey A Go-Go…
