I Know What You Did Last Halloweekend

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby.

Today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups... I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing.
― Philip K. Dick, "How To Build A Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later"

So I had one day to assemble a panel on how to ground the fiction of fantastic with realistic detail. This proved a moderately stressful development, but it is a first world problem. A peculiar first world problem, but a first world problem nonetheless.

I suppose those of us who have at least some means always seem to be partying while the world burns, at least to the people being singed by the fire. Still, Trump’s decision to throw a soirée based on Gatsby, a book he has clearly neither read nor understood, as he throws his country into chaos and despair, seems a particularly stupid decision. To do so as government benefits ended for those experiencing penury and lacking privilege appears both callous and cruel.

A few days later, some elections in America indicate that the tide may be turning. It will be up to those attempting some semblance of sanity in that country’s politics to prove that they can do more than merely oppose a corrupt and obvious fascist.* New York’s new mayor overcame a number of preconceptions to win, including embedded negative views of Muslims and first-generation immigrants. He’ll now have to show that he can deliver, while facing MAGAmericans who believe that democratic socialism, Soviet communism, Marxism, and, good lord, “National Socialism” are pretty much the same thing. That’s a little like saying that Hamas, the local Orthodox synagogue, and the Salvation Army are all the same, because they all worship a monotheistic deity in the Abrahamic tradition.

But on the weekend, the pro-Family ValuesTM elite gathered at Mar-A-Lago where a young woman of indeterminate age writhed in an oversized champagne glass.

We partied and pursued trifles, too.

Halloween came and went, interrupted by a country hoping to watch the Blue Jays win the World Series. They didn’t, but they came awfully close. The games led me to reflect on their two-year streak more than thirty years ago. I was dating a woman who, at the time, I thought would become my wife. My actual wife I had not yet met. We were young and viewed many of the games in bars with friends, over beer and wings and nachos. She had a friend who had no awareness of baseball. The games of that first series tied so often that her friend thought that players normally went for ten innings.

In those days chaos roiled overseas while, closer to home, people were losing factory jobs to freer trade regulations. I recall that the world felt brighter to us, though, more illuminated than it does now.

That's not the game, though. Not really. Look, I wish that the Jays had won. I think that they played with more heart. The win went to the Dodgers.

The series did draw my wife's interest, the first time she has paid any attention to baseball.

The World Series is a hard-played sideshow, one which ended this year on Halloween night.

A few years ago, the man who ran a charity haunted house on our street experienced a flood that destroyed many of his props and gimmicks. He wasn’t even answering the door this year.

Most kids come down from the other blocks of the street, and then turn abruptly before ours, one way or another, down a longer and busier cross-street. We’re a couple doors from the corner, so we still get some, but too few, for my Halloween-fond mind. The yards run longer on our side of the street, and we have trees that darken the walkway, which may suit the scary season but might also deter the younger kids.

We put a second Jack-o-Lantern lit with artificial light on an overturned and emptied stone planter, right near the end of our walkway. The prime pumpkin had a Dollar Store disco light within that flashed colours from our porch, and we lined the walkway with glow sticks.

These things helped, but sanctioned begging remained strongest on the cross street.**

The costumes continued throughout the weekend.

Forest City Comicon fell on Sunday. (Link leads to my video of the event)

The local comicon moved its time and place. I found the new venue more aesthetically interesting, but it’s on the other side of town, which meant that I can no longer walk to the con. A number of behind-the-scenes concerns led to a bit of organizational issues. They’d approved a panel and a presentation that I’d pitched, but forgot to tell me until twenty-four hours beforehand.

They did, however, go the extra mile to make things work. Due to this lapse, D.S. Barrick had made other plans, and I had to run the cryptid presentation mostly only, though one of the higher-ops people joined to assist me, and Emmanual Guerrero, a behind-the-scenes fixture, ensured on short notice that I had the necessary tech.

He also rubber-stamped the last-minute panelists, the ones that I'd had a day to find.

Most of the writers that I know live about two hours or more from here. I’d met Nathaniel Luscombe at the Fantasy Forum event earlier this autumn, and knew that he hailed from a small town a half-hour away. He joined, and brought some new attendees with him. At the recent Guelph con, I met Kevin Fraser Mutch and his wife, Melissa. Mutch has a kind of cult following in the world of graphic novels, and has recently released a breakthrough work, the all-age adventure The Moon Prince. He lives about an hour from here and, as they had never checked out this con, they decided to drive up and join the panel.

The event may have been chaotic and, honestly, I don’t know how it played from the vendors’ point of view. Certainly, the one time in its history that it ran two days, it looked like a huge success from the floor, but the vendors reported that they couldn’t move enough product to justify two days here. Neither I nor my publisher had a table, but I did manage one sale.

I always carry a few books with me.

A local all-girls robotics club, FRC 4617, had brought their mechanical creation to the con. They allowed volunteers kids to remote-control it. People cosplayed, heroes and villains familiar and unfamiliar. Panellists spoke. A woman in the atrium mixed drinks based on SF and fantasy worlds.

Elsewhere, worlds burned.

*No Godwin’s Law here. If you’re on the side of autocracy, and of violent, unidentifiable, untrained, unbadged thugs taking people off the street to undisclosed locations based on the slightest whiff of suspicion, all with assurances from on high that they will not be answerable for breaking the law, then you’re a fascist.

**Some of the leftover candy went to the local SF group. Some went to a bartender, who was thrilled. She had just spilled beer on her sleeve and saw the candy as a sign that her luck might be changing.