Each year about this time, I find myself dividing my life into B.C. and A.C., which are abbreviations for Before Comic-Con and After Comic-Con. I have to get my hair cut Before Comic-Con. I'll reorganize that drawer of my filing cabinet After Comic-Con. Sleeping for an entire night — which for me is only about six hours — is moving into the A.C. category.
And I begin steeling myself for the drive. In a sense, what I like least about Comic-Con is the part of it that isn't Comic-Con: Getting prepped and packed and ready to go, plus all that time on the freeway going there, getting home, etc.
As I get older and roads get more crowded, I like driving less and less, and I put more effort into planning. When I have to go to the market — which is only five minutes away — I think (a) when can I go and hit the least amount of traffic? And (b) is there anywhere else I can stop on the way, thereby getting out of another trip I might have to make somewhere? Can I also stop at Office Depot on the way to the market and not have to drive to Office Depot tomorrow?
The problem, of course, is that the easiest time to go to the market is at 1 AM or thereabouts…and Office Depot ain't open at 1 AM. Also, when you go to the market at 1 AM, they don't have any fresh rotisserie chickens and the other shoppers all look one way or the other like George Zimmerman.
I have friends who love to drive. When I worked at Hanna-Barbera in the eighties, there were about four guys in the building named Bob Johnson. One of them, the guy who headed the accounting department, lived down in San Clemente. I don't know where exactly he was in San Clemente but I just Googled and from Richard Nixon's old place down there to where the H-B Studios were in 1980 is 73 miles.
Google says that "in current traffic," it would take one hour and 17 minutes so figure a good two hours. In rush hour periods, which is when Bob would have been making that commute, I'm guessing three. At least.
He allowed three. He got up each weekday morning in time to hit the road at 6 AM. That got him to H-B (usually) at 9:00, and he left at 5 PM to be home at 8:00…and he did this every day, five days a week. Happily. There is no job on this planet that could get me to spend six hours a day on a freeway. If someone called and said, "We've got this gig available performing sexual services on supermodels and it pays real well but it's a three-hour daily commute," I'd say, "I'd rather work at the Subway sandwiches place three blocks from here." Hell, my commute to H-B then was about a half an hour and at least two days a week, I'd opt to work at home.
But Bob loved spending six hours a day (one fourth of his life!!!) in this big Chrysler convertible he owned. Unless it was monsooning, he'd have the top and windows down with his left arm on the driver's side door. He wore short sleeves so though he was a white guy, his left arm was tanned to well beyond Negroid.
Every time I drive down to San Diego, which I increasingly don't like to do, I think about him. San Clemente is close to the halfway point for me. The whole drive is 131 miles and around Dana Point when I'm getting weary, I think, "Jeez, I haven't even gotten to San Clemente, where Bob Johnson lived and he made this drive twice a day."
Once I get to the con, okay, great. The drive was worth it. And I enjoy the con a lot until about halfway through the second Cartoon Voices panel on Sunday when I start thinking about the drive home.
I had a friend who used to commute from L.A. to San Diego each day for the con. He weighed the cost of a hotel room down there against the price of gas and decided he could spend more money on old comic books if he slept back in L.A. in his own bed. It's guys like that who make you wonder if there wasn't something to those claims that reading comics rots your mind.