Letters From The Loft
Stuff From The Desk Of Chuck Thornton
DAY ONE
THURSDAY; JULY 24; 10:30 PM.
The doors to the Comicon open at 9:30 am, so I stepped up to the bus stop a little bit before 9:00 and joined the other folks in the bus-rider’s favorite activity: staring intently down the street as if pure force of will can teleport a 50 ton vehicle to the horizon.
The bus arrived at about 9 sharp, and it was driven by the same guy I had encountered yesterday. But this morning, he took a slightly different route, apparently driving to the Convention Center via downtown Tokyo. We spent quite a bit of time in the middle of a gridlocked civic center as folks riding in pedal-driven rickshaw devices smugly zipped past us.
So I didn’t actually get to the Con till after 10:00. I took a picture of the front to give you an idea of how many people had decided to greet me:
I was touched and would have shaken everyone’s
hand, but earlier I had received a voicemail from my friend Alan,
advising that he would meet me in the exhibition hall, so I had to run.
I
met up with Alan and we cruised the exhibit hall and filled each other in on all the exciting events that had happened to us since the last time we saw each other. That carried us for about fifty paces; after that we talked about other stuff. The big deal was that within the first few minutes of entering the exhibit hall, Alan had lost his badge. As I’ve mentioned earlier, losing your badge at the Comicon is probably about the worst breach of etiquette you can commit, if you don’t count accidentally decapitating Stan Lee. I was pretty nervous about it, but Alan seemed to be handling it well. I don’t think he realized that at any minute he could be dragged from the room and subjected to a public caning before being given the old heave-ho.But his confidence was well-founded, since we were unmolested in the exhibit hall, at least as far as the badge was concerned. When we exited, we went to the lost-and-found, and though there were plenty of badges there, none of them were Alan’s and the volunteer wasn’t open to some petty identity theft by letting Alan borrow one of the other badges. We were directed upstairs to the registration area, to a specially-designated booth labeled “badge solutions”.
The solution, it turned out, was charging 15 more dollars for a replacement badge. This probably isn’t an unreasonable policy, since it would discourage every Tom, Dick, and Alan from trying to scam a duplicate badge to pin on a friend. But Alan wasn’t really planning on coming back on another day, so he decided to pass on the replacement badge. Instead we moved over to the nearby pre-registration area, where one could buy next year’s admission in advance at a reduced rate.
That’s when I noticed that my credit card was missing from my wallet, and immediately realized that, in the forced close-proximity of the exhibit hall, I must have contracted an addle-headed bacillus from my friend. I was wrong, of course. I had misplaced my credit card well before Alan had lost his badge, so if anything, I had infected Alan. Which, of course, means the whole notion is absurd.