Wasn’t last night’s article good? With all the thinking and complaining and something even approaching some kind of structure? Wasn’t that neato?

Well, don’t expect any of that crap tonight because I am sick and I feel like shit and I in no way shape or form have the energy to think that hard. I feel very old today, and I greatly resent it.

My chest cold has turned into a head cold, which I hope means it is on the way out and will exit via my scalp. (Is there such a thing as a hair cold? Of course not. Never mind. Forget I asked. )

But like I have said before, for me, the worst part of being sick is feeling sick. The symptoms I can handle. It’s the overall malaise and energy drain that gets me down and makes me feel both anxious and depressed.

Somewhere between anxiety and despair lies…. Depression.

So today has been quite bleh. I have not done much but sleep and eat and sweat gross sticky sick sweat. I appreciate that my body is trying to sweat out the virus, but why does it have to leave me feeling like a glazed donut? I showered really thoroughly last night, and an hour and a half later it was Crispy Kreme all over again.

Oh well. Soon this all will be over. Even though it feels like illness will stretch along forever, it doesn’t, and I imagine that by tomorrow or at the latest Friday I will be more or less over the whole thing and it will just be another chapter in the regular life of an irregular person.

I have never been known for my periodicity.

Oh right, more Vcon stories. Well let’s start at the end (bet ya didn’t see that coming) and talk about the Dead Dog Party.

No, that isn’t the absolutely worst political party ever. for those who don’t know, the Dead Dog Party is the traditional way to end a nerd convention. It is the time honored practice of taking all the leftovers from all the events and all the liquor that people left behind, add in whatever else people feel like contributing, and throw a great big blowout party as the official end to the whole shebang.

And I am quite proud of myself for planning to go to it, going to it, and hanging around for more than a token amount of time. I went there to drink and have fun, and I did. There were some bare patches where I had nobody to talk to and I felt lonely and isolated and seriously considered going back up to the hotel room to sleep for the night. But I hung in there, and the only reason I left was that I knew we had to check out before noon and so I had to get to sleep somewhere between 3 and 5 in the morning in order to leave time to pack up and GTFO of there.

Well, that is not entirely true. I left for another reason, a reason called “very stupid drunk guy who kept trying to participate in a conversation way, way over his head and/or sobriety level. ”

God I wanted him to shut the FUCK UP. Here I was having an extremely stimulating intellectual conversation with Chilam Artist (don’t laugh, that’s his legal name) and some Indian girl whose name I do not recall when this moron, clearly drunk as hell, starts trying to butt in to the conversation with inane, incoherent thoughts that make no sense. And there is Chilam and the Indian girl being good, polite, inclusive Canadians and treating him as an equal part while I simmered and smoked and desperately wanted to yell “Shut UP. You are drunk and stupid and clearly unqualified for this conversation. Go away and leave us alone!”.

Of course, mildly morally untethered by alcohol or not, I didn’t actually say that. I too am a polite Canadian. I just kept my mouth shut and stewed in my own juices.

But when it came time to leave, I picked a moment where I could see that look in the drunk asshole’s eyes that meant he was building up the energy to push through the veil of alcohol and make noises with his face parts, and I took that as a sign that it was time to hit the hay before I said something that someone, possibly even me, would regret.

And yup, I didst drink of the intoxicating liquors. That is a strict no-no for us diabetics, but sometimes in life, you just have to let loose and have fun. I drank, I ate sugary foods, I ate junk food, I had fun.

Basically, I partied. Not something I have ever been very good at because I am just too self-conscious and paranoid. Hard to let your hair down and paint the town reddish when you feel like there is constant social danger.

Also, I learned the hard way that I can become a very loudmouthed and mercurial drunk. If I had been DRUNK drunk and not just a little crispy around the edges, I would have told Stupid Drunk guy exactly what I thought of him, likely at a very high volume, and all kids of bad shit could have come from that.

But no, I partook of the fruit of the vine, but just to the point of feeling more relaxed. I missed the good liquor, though. I only discovered that we did, in fact, have apple juice AFTER the spiced rum ran out, dammit. They make a killer combination. And I sure as well wasn’t going to combine spiced rum with Coke Zero. That stuff already tastes funny.

And there was an empty bottle of Tullamore Dew, which was a shame, because while I do not know much about liquor, that one I recognize from the Callahan’s books by Spider Robinson. So I would have liked to try it just because of that.

And speaking of Spider, I had a brief unexpected encounter with him, and man does he look terrible. It was a real shock to the system for me because I have encountered him at previous conventions and he was this amazingly cool dude. Smart, funny, nice, good looking in a very “musician” way. Now he is skinny and frail and trembling and looks like he is two minutes from death.

I hope he gets better. I knew he had a heart attack last year, and of course life has been very hard for him since the death of his eternal love partner Jeanne, but somehow none of that seemed totally real to me till I saw him briefly at the convention.

Strength, hope, and courage, Spider. Don’t go away just yet.

I will talk to you nice people tomorrow.