Report from San Diego

Some great stuff, and unfortunatley, this is the sort of thing that you can never help but only get the tip of the iceberg regardless of how much you see. I'm heading to the various comics webpages to see what I missed. One in particular, is a new Vertigo series called Testament.

Here's an excerpted quote by the author from the news story:

“Testament takes place in a world that looks very much like ours — except for the fact that corporate interests run the government, the draft is being reinstated, terrorism is being used as a pretext for population control, the medias has become a highly controlled propaganda space, all university research is funded in one way or another by military interests, citizens are being tracked by RFID implants, money has become a kind of thought virus that people actually believe in and...wait a minute, that is pretty close to the way things really are!"

The guy who's writing this also did the documentary The Merchants of Cool which I saw and was very impressed with in my Anthropology of the Body class. This is going to be one cool puppy. Not sure if I want to pick it up month-to-month or get it in trade as I do with Lucifer (which incidentally, is ending with issue 75 like Sandman and Preacher).

Today I also had lunch with a retired judge who was an old friend of my father's. It was an awkward start when I called him earlier this last week to see if he was available to meet up and he asked "How is your father?" Apparently the court back in my hometown wasn't as thorough with getting the news out about his death three years ago.

Three years. Weird. Not going to get any less weird with each passing day.

Which brings me to another aspect of weirdness. I'd really been stressed about meeting this judge. At first it was a little about calling this guy out of the blue after having last seen him some five years ago, but that passed quickly, especially once I did call. But there was something else that had just been crawling up and down my spine about this encounter, and I couldn't quite put my finger on it until I sat there in the Old Town Mexican Cafe' with him. Here was an aspect of my life that in the past I had only had access to via my dad. I had met this judge multiple times, and out of all the judges my dad had introduced me to, I've always liked him the best. He has a sort of pleasant soft-spoken nature to him, and has always struck me as being incredibly down-to-Earth. So on that front I was very comfortable. I knew he would only be pleasant and wholly nice to me.

To me. Me, I, moi, yo--who had called him up and who had arranged the meeting. This was a distinctly "Dad" aspect of my life that I was encountering for the first time without him--and really was the first time I've had one of those "Dad" aspects since, also. Furthermore, it was really all about turning those aspects into "Andre" aspects. It's the old supplantation and legacy theme you see so often in fiction except at work in my own real life, and it really made me uncomfortable.

Add to that I've really been overly aware of and thinking a lot about my own inevitable mortality as of late (far more than a 21 year old really ought to be) and it was just stressful. At the same time that I enjoyed and was grateful for this lunch, it just felt really weird and like one giant reminder that the crux of social interaction and conversational dynamic was between the judge and myself, and not he and my father with myself as a sort of side party. When I think back to that first trip when I met him, I think back to his daughter and her friends wanting to take 14 year-old me to Tijuana to have some fun for an evening. It's really hard to think of myself as being the primary conversational partner in all of this and there for business, and even harder to think of his daughter now as a mortgage broker with a kid.