I Should Be Getting Packed About Now
You see, Thursday was the day I was scheduled to fly to Juneau for Alaska Robotics-sponsored MiniCon and #ComicsCamp. Friday would be spent hanging with the best people in the world, enjoying the ambiance of a world-class coffee shop, ice cream shop, knitting supply shop, state museum, distillery, lingerie emporium built into an old bank building complete with heist target-style vault and/or Italian restaurant. Saturday would be the con, and then the bus ride out to Camp. Ravens would taunt me, and hopefully bears would keep their distance. I’d be home again a week later.
And then the world got its reminder that sickness is never all that far away. Tickets and hotel reservations got refunded, backpack and sleeping bag got put away again. Camp friends got commiserated with. We’ll be back, but it’ll be a while and we’re all very bummed, particularly (I’d imagine) the people chosen to attend for the first time, who have to put off their integration into our weird, welcoming, intentional community until whenever the world gets its collective shit together.
It was the right call; no matter how supportive of the creators it is, no matter how much it helps newbie artists develop their careers, no matter how many people in Alaska would benefit from the public events¹, none of that is worth the risk of immiseration and sickness that just one asymptomatic individual could bring to Juneau² (and visitors could bring back to the corners of the state).
So yeah, little bummed today. Fair warning, I may spend Thursday getting very drunk in order to feel properly sorry for myself about the whole thing. Or maybe I’ll just go back through the 30,000 or so words I’ve already written about Camp, and spend the day texting and calling the people I’m missing.
But even on these blah days — and let’s be realistic, none of us is running more than about 70% of how we should on our best days — there’s encouraging bits to help us navigate. Today, it’s Amulet creator Kazu Kibuishi³, who’s put a long out of print book up for free downloading. The idea was to get Daisy Kutter to a publisher and back into print, but right now he figures it’s more important to get it to people that need to read it than it is to shop it around for eventual re-release. I’m going to keep that lesson about what’s more important in mind for the next while.
Spam of the day:
Using the Covid-19 epidemic to share Jesus
Hail, and I mean this in the most sincere way possible, Satan.
_______________
¹ Not the least being, each year every school in Juneau gets visits from creators. There’s not a lot of author and artist visits that make it up to southeast Alaska (much less the rest of the state), and folks come from all over to participate.
² People with complex health challenges are routinely advised to fly to Seattle for care. It’s not the place you want to stress critical care capabilities.
³ A regular Camp denizen and my cabinmate my first year there; I learned more than a year later that once while sleeping he and Rebecca Mock intercepted and squished a spider that was descending towards my face and so I owe them each a life debt.
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