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The Ad-Man made you feel sorry for your washing machine (2001-6-26 )

When weirdos get together

Summary: The kind of shenanigans a buncha weirdos get up to when they converge on a hotel for the weekend could make your eyes bleed. Or warm the cockles of your heart.

The three day party was over and the gallery displays had all been torn down. In the near darkness of an underlit hotel exhibition center I found a hundred discarded paper flyers littering the dealers' tables which still stood, quick price calculations scribbled on scraps, cardboard boxes slumbering on the patterned carpet, and the remnants of lunches and snacks. These were all that populated this modern, quiet, and air-conditioned cavern. Sunday night had tip-toed gently into early monday morning and the people floating through the lobbies were going to bed. They had travel arrangements or get-togethers to prepare for, to ceremoniously end their participation of the conference with. And these people were all weirdos.

When weirdos get together they can colorize a hotel and mock its conservative choice of wallpaper and abstract paintings with their own brand of art that's as easily shocking and offensive as it is silly and childish. They'll wear costumes that hurt your eyes, or make you loose your appetite, or - on the cute and fluffy end of their wide scale - make you wish you had your grandson and a camera with you.

When weirdos get together they frequently tote sketchbooks around with them. Over the course of the weekend they'll collect art that could get you arrested in some states and turned around at the borders of others. Mill around in the lobbies and you'll trip over bodies draped across the floor, propped up on an elbow, drawing something in a sketchbook that might confuse you, or disgust you, or make you wait in line to request a copy after it has been scanned.

When weirdos get together they'll pack a Grand Ballroom to watch a couple of hand puppets mime to easy-listening tunes for three solid hours. And if you scanned the audience, you'd see nobody under the age of 18.

When weirdos get together you'll see two separate groups - the consumers and the dealers. The consumers wander, the dealers sit down and wait. And what gets traded will frequently come from small and independent comic book publishers - three fellas working out of a garage, or some poor jerk with a day job who puts out one or two titles a year when he can get around to it. Pin down a dealer who's also an artist and you can get him to run something off in your sketchbook, draw your "character" on your ID badge, maybe arrange a more serious comission, all for rates that could buy you lunch at McDonalds or (if you're splurging) the cost of a double-CD album.

When weirdos get together there'll be caffiene and sugar consumed aplenty. If you intend to hit one of these shindigs yourself then plan on giving up nutritional values for the weekend. Your body won't miss vitamins for the mere handfull of days that you'll maintain wakefullness with stimulants and noise. You'll be staying up until 2am to hang out, then waking up at six because your room-mates make it impossible to sleep longer. You'll drag your knuckles all morning, but by the afternoon you'll be wired.

When weirdos get together they bring the traditional staples of snack foods with them. Find the con suite and you'll never go hungry for pretzels, cheese puffs, Chex mix, veggies-n-dip, and supermarket-brand soda (which you'll find in the bath tub). There'll be somewhere to sit down, some fellow weirdos to talk to, and if it's on the top floor of the hotel you'll also have a spectacular view to carefully ignore while you watch a bad dub of Meet the Feebles on TV.

When weirdos get together they talk about their computers, their day-jobs, their girlfriends and boyfriends, their cars, their hobbies, their music, their favorite food, their web sites, and maybe - if the topic just happens to come up - the fandom they all share and what the whole conference was supposed to be about in the first place.

When weirdos get together they order pineapple pizza.

When weirdos get together they fear and anticipate the media. A crew from the TV station across the street is the last thing they want to see, and the one thing they're all on the lookout for. As an obscure and misunderstood group they want some recognition, but they know the TV people would also find exactly what they came looking for - a freak show.

When weirdos get together and express their weirdness they are happy, healthy, and mentally stable enough to babysit your kids. Oh sure, some of them are transvestites, transexuals, homosexuals, goths, that kind of scary bunch. But neither of these ills are threatening to anybody as long as they remain unsuppressed. The most well adjusted person I know is someone who had the guts to tell her dad and get on with it.

When weirdos get together it's to escape from the need to explain a very complicated affinity. If your affinity isn't sexual you'll have to labor to make that clear. If it's also sexual - even mildly - then you'll fear that nobody will understand why it's still normal. Sometimes that's just too much work.

And if they're like me then - come the last night of the party - it won't be the puppet show, comic books, costumes, guests of honor, art gallery or sketchbooks which they'll miss, but rather that omnipresent hum of fourteen hundred other people who didn't need a lengthy exposition to understand why you thought Maid Marion was kinda hot in Disney's Robin Hood.

And if they're like me then - come the last night of the party - they'll disappear into the large, cold, dark and silent exhibition hall that's still littered with tablecloths and plastic soda-sixpack rings, find the shadow-cast spot where the art show used to stand, kick around a discarded scrap of paper, and hate Monday with seething passion.

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