Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: I launched this wee blog on April 28, 2012, three weeks before my 40th birthday as a means of charting the effects of the aging process on my opinions of, enthusiasm for, offense at, and/or detailed nitpicking of various works of art, expression, humanity, inhumanity, glory, love, idolatry, inspiration, hollowness, geek lifestyles, food, and Deep Thoughts. MCC has also served as a digital scrapbook for our annual road trips, comic cons, birthday expeditions, and other modest travels. It’s a general repository for any other content that comes to mind and feels worth the time and effort to type up, proofread, and release unto a world-at-large that rarely visits websites anymore unless social media points them there.

I commemorate MCC’s every anniversary here, but this year my wife Anne and I were busy that weekend, preoccupied by the geek gala that was C2E2 2024. We spent the site’s 12th anniversary not really thinking about it — much like the rest of the world, really. Rather than dwell on my dozen years of toiling in obscure hermitage on this tiny, mostly unpaid quasi-boutique hobby-job, we can instead center our closet-sized soiree on two of our favorite topics that come up whenever time and experience permit: travel and food.

We almost never stay in a given convention’s host hotels because those are where all the parties are. We’re middle-age squares who don’t drink, don’t stay up late (well, at least Anne doesn’t), and need our rest before we show up the next morning two hours before showtime ahead of thousands of hungover attendees who’ll end up with terrible parking spots and lousy line positions the rest of the day. We’re square that way, apropos of the common perception of bloggers today.

(Admittedly it’s been heartening to see sporadic social-media comments about how blogs might be poised for a retro comeback, kinda like my once-beloved cassettes. This nostalgic groundswell for 15-years-ago internet life is so far anthill-sized, but it also coincides with the rising disdain for podcasters as the new dime-a-dozen loser du jour. The day of the blog may be nigh once more! All of this has happened before and will happen again.)

Friday night we stayed a couple miles up north of McCormick Place, away from the hubbub. We have no favorite Chicago hotel per se. We hop around a bit, though lately we’ve stuck with Marriott brands because we’re collecting points for a future dream vacation sequel. Driving through downtown Chicago is not my favorite video game, but I’ve developed the necessary survival skills over two decades of cross-country road-tripping and fifteen years of Chicago cons. In recent years commuters back home in Indianapolis have devolved into lawless rage-monsters, so the difference between the two cities’ ambiance isn’t as jarring as it used to be. They even both have awful points of road construction — in this case, the part where Michigan Avenue was bottlenecked down to one lane at the Chicago River bridge, which endeared no one during rush hour.

(It’s kinda like how Bluesky used to be more peaceful than Twitter, but entropy has overtaken many feeds ever since they went open-admission, threatening to morph the whole thing into Twitter III. When its seemingly inevitable transmogrification is complete, maybe there’ll once again be a use for remote hideaways such as this very blog.)

Incessant rains muted our exploratory mood, so for dinner we stuck to the hotel’s own restaurant, Copper Fox Gastropub. I nearly wrote “settled for”, which is technically accurate but implies it was merely adequate. The meal was leagues above the con’s concessions, to say the very least. The place was elegantly decorated, though it clashed with the loudmouth goombahs who were sitting in opposite sides of the room in separate parties, each boisterously chattering and boasting with their respective female dinner companions at nonstop volume-11 from the moment we were seated to well after our exit. We tried to ignore them and focus only on each other, our food, and our extreme fatigue from hours of exhibit-hall walking. It was challenging for our introverted minority who aren’t creatures of the nightlife.

The hotel’s parking garage was unnervingly narrow, but that’s pretty much every Chicago garage ever. The hotel was otherwise exactly what we needed if we choose to forget the party that erupted somewhere within earshot ’round 2 a.m. Comic-cons aren’t the only source of Friday night hotel parties, but at least our removed location minimized the number of parties we had to sleep through.

Coming as we did from the Eastern time zone, and as middle-age day-jobbers, we had no trouble arising Saturday morning before 6 a.m. Central. Our only criteria for a breakfast spot were (1) it had to be someplace in or near the Streeterville neighborhood that (2) would open and feed us early enough that we could still get to McCormick Place by 8 a.m, (3) wouldn’t charge us fifteen bucks for eggs and toast, and (4) wasn’t the Dunkin across the street. We have more than enough of those back home and on every other roadside. We’ll resort to them in our weaker moments or our stopovers in smaller towns with fewer options, but this time we refused to settle.

Our wants were met two short blocks away at a Stan’s Donuts and Coffee, a California chain that established its Lake Michigan beachhead in 2014. Last time we visited a Stan’s back in 2018 (on the dual occasion of Anne’s birthday weekend and Ace Comic Con Midwest) I counted ten locations in the Chicagoland area, including our stop in Oak Brook. As of today they number around two dozen, though the ubiquitous Dunkin still dwarfs them a thousand to one. Stan’s hasn’t come to Indy yet, so they’re out of the ordinary to us. And sometimes it’s okay for a blogger to repeat themselves, especially if the audience missed the first time around anyway.

Inside at 6:30 a.m. were a single employee and two customers. The donut racks in the display case were half bare, but the full ones were loaded with temptations. After we ordered and ate at a table for a bit, a second employee arrived. Within minutes the display was filled and we saw even more flavors that called to us like the Sirens of old. The more contents, the merrier.

Also in our haul but not pictured: a simple croissant, a bacon/egg/cheese croissant sandwich, and a tiramisu latte. This round of fuel would boost us through the opening hours of C2E2 as we emerged from isolation and rejoined the geek community horde at large.

We happily enjoyed each other’s company throughout the rest of the show, where we flew under the world’s radar until we got home and posted cosplay pics. Cosplayers came, they saw, they left, then we fell off the radar again.

We’re the Goldens. It’s who we are and what we do.

Thanks for checking out MCC entry #2,707 on our 12-year-old site! Lord willing, maybe we’ll see you around again if you see us first.