Well, here I am, back in the world of reality, where I am depressingly NOT constantly surrounded by my fellow nerds, and where there is NOT a plethora of fascinating and fun panels stretching before me, and where there is a distinct LACK of living in a hotel room where I could, if I wanted to, get fresh bedding whenever the fuck I wanted it.

But I had a ton o’ fun at the convention.

I noted which panels I went to, and that should be enough for me to to reconstruct the weekend and thus write a con report for publication in BCSFAzine, or really in any periodical that asks.

I’m that desperate for validation.

I don’t quite feel up to writing said con report right now. I have been home all day (more on that in a bit) and I have no Diet Coke to drink to give me artificial motivation/anxiety (there’s sort of the same thing with me), so I am not exactly at my most mentally active right now. The idea of pulling all my thoughts and memories together into a coherent and linear narrative seemed downright insane right now.

Besides, I have another thing to get done : I need to write my 20 desk jokes. They’re an assignment from Sketch class, and the idea was that I was supposed to be doing 5 a week for the last four weeks, but that… didn’t end up happening.

So instead, I am going to write them all today and polish them up tomorrow afternoon, when I will be home from school and able to devote some time to turning my raw jokes into finely machined comedic masterpieces.

At least, that’s the idea.

So far, I have written 10. So I am halfway done. I have been using Facebook and Fark as sources for news stories to riff upon. So far, only 2 of my 10 jokes are Donald Trump jokes, because I figure everyone will be making Trump jokes and I will be better off riffing off less mainstream news, like scientific discoveries or funny news stories about someone doing something dumb.

Like, there was this one story I can’t use because it would be fat-shaming, but this pretty obese lady in the UK climbed up into her shopping trolley (cart) and sat down in/on the child seat, then got her ass stuck there and they had to call the police, who called the firefighters, who got her out of there.

Nowhere in the story was there the slightest hint of an answer as to WHY she did it. Was it a bet? Did she dream of being able to shop without having to use her legs? Was she trying to reach something on a high shelf and slipped? Did she have an emotional crisis that caused her to regress in age?

We may never know, because nobody knew the woman’s name, which is probably just as well in the long run.

Still, I am both fat and kind of insane,  so I certainly can’t say that I can’t imagine ever being in that poor woman’s situation. I have done some pretty crazy things when my depression was biting very hard and I entered a kind of slap-happy kind of dazed state as my body fought the depression by flooding my mind with endorphins.

Things like shoplifting outrageously, urinating places where I knew people in the surrounding office buildings could see me, laughing like a maniac for no reason, and deciding to climb over a fence and damn near kill myself because it was a more direct route to my destination.

Yes, depression can even take the fun out of moments of whimsy.

Anyhow, so… yeah. Convention. The peak moment for me was when I was attending a Beatles Sing-A-Long panel where one of the musicians was none other than Spider Robinson. Getting to sing along to Beatles tunes would have been awesome enough. Having Spider Robinson there made it even better.

But the truly peak moment came when, during a Beatles song that usually ends with a flute playing, another congoer surprised us all by filling in for the flute via whistling so expertly that it sounded like birdsong.

After the song finished, I said “That’s the version they did with the Byrds, right? ”

And everyone laughed. But most importantly, Spider laughed like hell, and that maakes me feel so damned good.

Because not only did I make an author whose books have both made me laugh and touched me on a personal level LAUGH…. but I did it with a PUN.

Those of you who are familiar with his Callahan’s books will appreciate just how much that means to me.

Plus, I networked for the first time! And it went very well!

See, I went to a panel to where one fo the guests, a guy named Kieth Merrill, introduced himself as being from the movie business and that he had won an Academy Award..

Well, I decided, this seems like a very good person to know for a  budding writer like me. Granted, I am going into TV, not film, but still. I Know Someone now.

So I approached him once the panel was over, and introduced myself as a film school student of the writing sort, and he was kind enough to talk to me, even take me aside for a few minutes after the panel and talk to me.

But that, as it turned out, was only Level One.

See, the next day, I was at a panel about religion in science fiction, and I got up to talk about how secular scientism can’t replace religion because religion does so much more for people than merely provide a cosmology. This quite frankly bewildered some of the panelists, who looked at me like I was speaking some kind of moon language.

But another of the panelists was Kieth Merrill, who, as it turns out, is a rare Christian conservative in the movie biz, and he was very impressed by my passionate defense of faith. He actually said to me, “You’re obviously a man of faith and passion…”

I had to disabuse him of that notion. I am not yet such a shark that I could lie, even passively, about a thing like that.

But I nevertheless think I made a very good impression on him. Such a good impression  that I am thinking of emailing him (I just HAPPENED to note his email addy when he was giving it to someone else) and thanking him for his kind attention.

And who knows where that might lead?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.