Lyfting to the Con

We decided to forgo traffic and parking hassles at the Oregon Convention Center during the Rose City Comic Con. Instead, we took Lyft, and met these delightful drivers:

Rebecca was a very pale young white woman with light red hair, who told us about the wedding she'd been in earlier in the week, and the fact that she is going to be in her sister's wedding next March. There can be such an issue with bridesmaids' dresses when the women are different sizes! She also told us about the bonuses she was hoping to earn from Lyft based on the number of rides she was expecting to get over the weekend. She wants to make a lot of money, because she's hoping to start a three-month EMT training program in October. She had wanted to be a firefighter, but has asthma, so that wasn't going to work out. She already carries a first aid kit she has customized--for example, she carries many pairs of gloves in case someone wants to help her at an emergency scene but they don't have their own gloves. Just last Sunday she had helped at a freeway scene. A 17-year-old guy had hydroplaned during the heavy rain, hit the middle guardrail, and flipped his car. Although his face was covered with blood, it turned out to be just a bloody nose (not even broken!), but he was in shock, didn’t want to call his mom (it was a new car), didn’t want an ambulance. She got on the phone with his mom and got his mom to convince him to accept the ambulance.

Tiare was a dark-haired white woman with dark-rimmed glasses. She was playing very New Agey music that almost put me to sleep. She loved the new Dark Crystal series so much that it made her cry. She is going to be getting back into the music show production business; she is going to be putting on a cabaret at a local venue. Before she picked us up, she'd had a meeting with the guy who is building the cabaret set and it is all going really well. She has not yet seen Carnival Row but loves that kind of art. She has also not yet see the movie Coco and wasn't sure she wants to because it's animated--she lived in Mexico City for a while and was afraid the movie doesn't show enough respect to the Mexican culture. But between us gushing over it and the fact that it took Pixar seven years to make it (so that they could get it right), we think we convinced her to see it.

Jason was a middle-aged white guy who wore a gray baseball cap. He recognized "Jon" as a repeat passenger, most recently taking Jon to his GCP Professional Data Engineer cert exam at PSU. Luckily, Jon passed that test. Jason had enjoyed his trip up to Seattle to see a Mariners game, and was excited to be going to a Trail Blazers game soon. Jason had taken a day or two off during the week, so was planning to work 14-hour days all weekend to make up for any lost income. On the day he was driving us, he expected to hit his 7,800th ride, and expected to hit his 8,000th by the end of the next week at the latest.

Ammar was a young Middle Eastern guy with a dashing mustache. He was very excited to learn that the Comic Con was on, and was thinking of taking his girlfriend to it the next day. He's been a big manga fan all his life, with old favorites like Gundam and Ghost in the Shell. He kept asking, "Who did you see?" He didn't mean which celebrities; he meant which costumed characters. We told him we'd seen Spider-Man, Doctor Who, Bat Man, Groot, many flavors of Star Wars, a bit of Star Trek, lots of Hobbits. He ooh'd and aah'd through our list. We'd seen many manga characters, too, but we don't know their names. He made a sad noise at that. As for his Lyft career, he works only about four hours a day, and it will be ending soon when he heads back to school. He's a Chem.E major at Oregon State and needs to head back to Corvallis in about a week.

Elaine was a 60-year old white woman with long gray-blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail. She lives in Castle Rock, WA, which is about an hour north of Portland. She gets up at about 3:00 am, and when she gets to Vancouver, WA at around 4:00 am, she turns on her Lyft app to start getting rides throughout the Portland metro area (and somewhere in her morning, she drops off one of her five grandchildren at high school). She was born and raised in Portland, but when her husband died, and with all the changes to Portland in recent years, she fled to the country life. But she still drives down just about every day to do an eight-hour shift, minimum.

Kareem was a young black guy who had classical music blaring from his radio. He used to go to comic cons--he is from Atlanta, so used to attend Dragon Con, a heavy weight of the annual Con schedule--but he feels they are now run by people who don't actually care about what's being created; they are just trying to cash in. He was late getting started on the day he drove us, because he had been watching the Cowboys-Redskins (31-21) and the Patriots-Dolphins (43-0!) games. He's been learning to program and will probably be joining a coding academy soon--he's leaning toward Epicodus, for their program and their job-placement services.

That's it! The weekend is a wrap 🎉

Sunday hodgepodge

On Sunday, we did a little Exhibition Hall, saw a few characters, and attended several panels.

This little boy is trying to remove the dinosaur's Infinity Gauntlet (of Marvel Cinematic Universe fame):

In the Hall, we saw quite a few puppets. This is the Luna's Puppets booth:

And here is Audrey from Little Shop of Horrors at the No Strings Puppetworks ("Building Friends since 2012) booth:

We attended "Best of GeekFest Film Fests," put on by GeekFest LA, and saw nine terrific short sci-fi films:

• CC
• Paleonaut
• Hot N Nerdy
• Narcoleap (Episode 2)
• Star Wars: Dresca
• Star Wars: The Toys Awaken
• The Lightsaber Maker
• Little Man of Steel
• Deadpool The Musical 2 - Ultimate Disney Parody

Out in the hallway, the Joker was surfing:

We attended "Nerds of a Certain Age: You're Never Too Old." Here are Ruth, Sean, Darren, another Ruth, and John:

Not sure what this creature is, but they are very tall:

We were back in the ballroom for "The Wil Wheaton Theory," starring the High Prince of Nerds and Other Misfits, Mr. Wil Wheaton himself:

We finished up the day (and thus the Con) by attending "Greg Rucka's Stumptown--From Comics to TV." Professor Ben Saunders moderated the panel with Stumptown creator Greg Rucka and illustrator Justin Greenwood.

Here is Greg Rucka:

Here are Ben, Greg, and Justin:

Saturday panels

We attended three panels on Saturday.

The first was "Black History and Contemporary Comics: Exploring the Harlem Renaissance." From left to right, this is:

• Professor Ben Saunders, Head of Comics Studies at the University of Oregon (moderator)
• David F. Walker, writer and co-creator of Bitter Root (Image Comics)
• Mat Johnson, writer and co-creator of Inconegro: Renaissance  (Dark Horse)

Next, we attended "Stranger Comics / HBO Asunda Series Panel," with "Stranger Comics CEO Sebastian A. Jones, creator of Niobe and The Untamed, and the Executive Producer and writer of HBO's new World of Asunda series":

At the end of the day, we saw the pilot episode of Stumptown, mentioned in our Friday post. Three screens of it played in the main ballroom:

The opening shot is Portland's famous sign, aka the White Stag sign:

After the pilot aired, some of the producers and cast came on stage to talk about the show and answer questions. Notice the interpreter in the lower left of the screen:

The star of the show, Cobie Smulders, wasn't able to be in Portland for this event, but Michael Ealy and Camryn Manheim were here:

Saturday in the Exhibition Hall

On Saturday, we wandered around the Exhibition Hall again.

Here is a wall o' Funko POP! Vinyls:

Hard to believe, but you can still buy comic books at most Comic Cons:

We met Courtney Hiersche, who buys old paintings at garage sales, thrift stores, and the like, and enhances them. This one shows the aftermath of a war between Power Rangers:

This one shows Kermit the Frog riding his bicycle through a wintry woods:

Lightsabers come in many colors, to please both Jedi and Sith warriors:

Here is Matt buying posters from storyboard artist Jonathan Hallett (aka, StitchToons!), who worked on Lilo & Stitch, the How to Train Your Dragon franchise, and other animated films:

Saturday characters

As is the case with any Comic Con, we saw many characters wandering the halls of the Oregon Convention Center.

Here is a Doctor Who in his TARDIS (Time And Relative Dimension In Space):

Here is a Spider-Man looking for work:

The collective noun for spiders, is "cluster" or "clutter," so here is a Clutter of Spider-People:

An R2-D2, rolling around and playing music:

This is a beneficiary of the charitable foundation Magic Wheelchair, whose mission is to "...[build] epic costumes for kiddos in wheelchairs — at no cost to families." Here we have a very small Darth Vader in his special starfighter, the TIE Advanced x1, and his canine Imperial Officer:

Here is Groot and a princess (Cinderella, perhaps?):

Here is a fairy and her little elf:

Friday warmup

Today we wandered around the Exhibition Hall, talking to artists and writers.

Stumptown is a graphic novel series written by Portland author Greg Rucka. It is now also a TV show, which takes place in--and is partially filmed in--Portland. It will air on ABC starting on September 25, 2019. Here's a booth promoting the books and the show. (BTW, the woman in the foreground is wearing a dress made of Spider-Man fabric.)

Here is Paul Guinan, author (with his wife Anina Bennett) of Boilerplate: History's Mechanical Marvel, and now of Aztec Empire. They are Portlanders who we've been following long before we moved here. Paul gave Matt an autographed copy of Aztec Empire.

Captain America and a Star Trek science officer play quidditch:

A Star Wars droid repair shop:

"Bob Ross" painting a picture of a Jurassic Park made of Legos:

Kids on a climbing wall:

State Farm has a booth here--why?! They wanted to tell me, but I dodged them.

Rose City Comic Con

The Rose City Comic Con runs from September 13 -15 this year, and for the first time in a long time, we will be there! (You could claim this isn't really "traveling," but we beg to differ, as we will be experiencing a completely different reality than the rest of you non-orcs, non-elves, and non-Batmans.)

We were allowed into the Oregon Convention Center last night for early badge pick up:

Andriy Kravchenko © 123RF.com

Hardly anyone was there, in stark contrast to the mob scenes we'll be experiencing all weekend.

Here's the nearly empty badge pickup area:

The nearly empty hallway:

Signs eager to get to work:

Vintage arcade games also ready to go:

Our badges have been obtained! Yes, that's right, premium. We are indeed nerdy 🤣

Slán go fóill

Slán go fóill means "goodbye for now" in Irish (no, we don't know how to pronounce it 😉).

On Thursday, August 8, we started our journey back to the States. We left at 3:45 pm Dublin time, in these uncomfortable seats:

We flew for nine hours to DFW (sleeping as well as we could), arriving at 7:20 pm CDT. We had a three-hour layover, then we flew for nearly four hours to PDX, arriving a little after midnight on Friday, August 9. We were home by 1:15 a.m.

It was hard to leave such a beautiful, friendly, and civilized place for the realities of home. We are already trying to figure out when we can go back.

At least the dogs were excited to see us:

Don't get up, boys!

And at least we live somewhere with literate Godzillas... a good place from which to plan our next adventure:

Roads and hearts

Roads are some of the most permanent human-created things there are. Life travels along them, people and animals, seeking water, food, and shelter from seasonal weather. Paths created by animals may eventually turn into paths, lanes, and streets, but it's mostly people that create roads. There's a place where we live, another place we have to be, yet another place that has what we need to eat, clothe, or feed ourselves. Roads most often reflect how we got from place to place before anything carried us, other than our feet.

Marian talked about the roads of Ireland, their designations by size or use. I was struck by the connections they made to places mostly or long-abandoned. Loughall, Tobercurry, Ferrymount, Frenchpark, Swinford, Foxford, Monasterevin. All connected (eventually) by roads my ancestors walked. Until of course they took the final walk, to a ship that took them to America.

You can't really get a picture of Ireland without thinking about the roads. As I described earlier, there are the organic roads left behind by animals and people moving according to their needs. Then there are the purposefully constructed roads, canals, and bridges that were used to take the goods that Ireland produced and transport them to others for consumption. This is the scar tissue of colonialism—where all roads lead to the capital, and all the wealth of the country pours into the colonizer's coffers.

Two weeks gives you no platform to say what Ireland is, nor what it should be. As people of Irish descent "come home," there is invariably some level of discombobulation. The presuppositions you might have had from the media, from family stories, from your own DNA, all conflict with what you see in a modern country with traffic jams, cellular phones, and charming accents. The only thing you know after two weeks is how you feel, and what little you've found out. You may feel like you did when you came home from college the first time, and found that your bedroom now has a pool table in it and your stuff is in the garage. You may also find that you're pretty good at pool.

Of the places we visited, I know for sure that in Monasterevin and Swinford, I was standing where my people had worked and lived. I lit a candle in Swinford and thought about the connections I had to these places and these people, which is both very little and everything. Very little connects me to shoemaking and being a publican (other than being a customer), and yet everything does. These are the people who created the body I live in, the set of brain chemicals propelling this typing. While it would at first be difficult to describe the life Marian and I lead to the Gallaghers, Husseys, Colemans, Corcorans, Stensons, O'Malias (and O'Malleys?), and McNeeces, by the end of the evening they would all be roaring at the jokes we tell, and be pushing back with (probably much funnier) jokes of their own.

What I found in our travels around this island is that the roads are also engraved in my heart. This made the trip not necessarily a homecoming, but much more than a stamp in the passport.