Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: we took our first plane ride and arrived unharmed. While my wife spent the week working in Colorado, I spending the week as a bonus vacation in Colorado Springs, trying to find new things to do that we didn’t already do on our 2012 road trip. Short, on-location MCC entries have consequently been this week’s theme.
Tonight we flew home from Denver, and boy, are my everythings tired.
This week my wife and I have been taking advantage of our hotel’s complimentary breakfasts to save as much money as possible (their modest, cook-to-order omelet bar is a nice touch), but sometimes a guy needs a change of pace. For lunch today I drove an hour north to check out the Denver Biscuit Company, part of a restaurant triumvirate that was featured in a 2013 episode of Guy Fieri’s Diners, Drive-Ins & Dives. That’s not a show we usually consult for travel reference (thanks to a 2012 disappointment in Topeka), but this particular joint had other incentives to lure me away from Colorado Springs.
Pictured above is the Dahlia — sausage, egg over-easy, apple butter, and maple syrup on “biscuit French toast”. It’s one of several creative biscuit sandwiches they serve for breakfast and lunch. For that “Triple-D” episode the esteemed Mr. Fieri sampled their “Elmer”, topped with pulled pork, barbecue sauce, coleslaw, onions, and homemade pickles. For him I imagine it was the only logical option. But I’m a big fan of imaginative breakfasts and knew I had to try it once I confirmed it was real.
The other incentive for my mini-road trip was an invitation from an old friend.
When your humble Midlife Crisis Crossover narrator was a kid, Hickory Farms ruled the gift-set market with their carefully arranged and packaged snack assortments that were perfect for holidays, birthdays, and weddings for couples who forgot to register anywhere. The big HF put presents inside their presents so you could gift while you gift. They’re still in business today, but their marketing is more selective than it used to be in those halcyon shopping days when we could drive to the nearest mall and stock up on summer sausage anytime we felt like it.
In recent years the burgeoning geek-demographic market has taken the idea in a different direction. For those who’d rather buy hodgepodges for themselves and keep them rolling in like clockwork, Loot Crate offers a monthly subscription service that fills fans’ mailboxes with bobbleheads, remaindered toys, unpopular overstock, weird reading matter, and more bobbleheads. Sensing a possible fad in the offing, Wizard World launched its own copycat club called ComicConBox, which does much the same for more than twice the price. If you want your house filled with random knickknacks and characters you’ve never heard of, either service is a fine way to accumulate future Goodwill donations.
I recently exchanged words with a rep at a company called Man Crates, which returns the gift-set idea to its roots as a single-package special event, but expands the paradigm beyond the old meats-and-cheeses domain. Mind you, those are still on the table, in sets with names like “Cow-pocalypse”, “Pit-Master”, and one that sells itself with the one-word name “Bacon” (kinda like “Madonna” or “Thunderlips”). As befitting the name, several Man Crate options focus on other manly-man pursuits such as golfing, grilling, tools, shaving, large dogs, hot sauce, and zombie defense (because YOU NEVER KNOW).
For other not-manly-man folks like me, they have gift sets for gaming, coffee, baby care, and Asian snacks (my son would love this). When thinking of me, the Man Crate rep thought of their nostalgia-riffic “Old School” crate, which teams up classic playthings like Rubik’s Cubes and Pez dispensers with an array of candies as seen in the drive-ins, drugstores, and corner convenience stores of my youth. If you or your loved ones have the means to open an actual wooden crate, they have a Man Crate in mind.
The rep posed a question to me: what would I pack in an “Old School” crate?
That brings us to a little spinoff invention I’d have to call…the MCC Swag Box!
Spend five minutes peeking at Midlife Crisis Crossover and you’ll notice my wife and I do enjoy a bit of travel. We have our annual week-long road trips to other states and time zones, where we can discover new environments and attractions, such as the New Orleans establishment shown above. From time to time we head off to our sometimes annoying neighbor Illinois for geek conventions, and we’ve discussed expanding our scope in other directions. We like spending our respective birthdays visiting other parts of Indiana and seeing other Hoosiers like or unlike us. We may devote a lot of time to screens with entertainment on them, but we place a certain importance on getting out of the house and seeing the world beyond our front door.
However, our family, friends, and longtime MCC followers know our expeditions come with a limitation: we don’t fly. We’ve never bought a plane ticket, we’ve never soared in or above the clouds, we’ve never been across the oceans or even to California, even though we have friends living there we simply must meet before we all die of oldness. By our standards air travel is expensive; the boarding requirements are invasive; you miss all the interesting sights and stops between points A and B; and it doesn’t help that the news outlets love to tell us about all the crashes but they never celebrate the hundreds of successful non-crashing flights that I’m told are theoretically possible and maybe even real.
We’re well aware Superman loves to tell everyone who’ll listen that, statistically speaking, flying is the safest way to travel, but that’s easy to say when you’re so invulnerable that not even actual dying keeps you down for long. For all these reasons and more, we’ve never been in a position to give planes a chance.
Until now.
If you’re pressed for time, please feel free to pretend this photo of our dog Lucky wearing a bandanna is today’s entire MCC entry, toss him a happy “Like”, and read no further. He’s used to that kind of fleeting attention from strangers.
Welcome to Midlife Crisis Crossover’s 1100th entry! In the grand tradition of comic books and The Simpsons, every 100 entries we mark the occasion as a sort of accomplishment and sometimes celebrate it. Those 1100 moments have been an interesting way to spend the last 3½ years of my internet time, but odds are it’ll take another two or three hundred years of consistent blogging before I stand a chance at becoming a household name. By then I’ll be more renowned for my refusal to die than for any paragraph I’ve ever written.
Every blogger who somehow makes a living off it has their official list of blogging tips that you’re supposed to follow in order to achieve fame, success, impact, and/or income. I’m happy for them and I wish them well as they make lasting contributions to the world at large and change the course of mighty rivers. Meanwhile at the other end of the spectrum, stubborn folks like me keep plugging away at their sites without regard for conventional wisdom, official procedures, or dime-a-dozen “Blogging for Dummies” articles. My approach to the game can be summed up in two words: “low-key” and “counterintuitive”.
Wanna blog like me? Here’s ten tips for how it works in my world, through happy times or blah:
Photo swiped from a relative on Facebook, date unknown. I have no pics of him on hand. Shots of the two of us together exist but are rarer than mint copies of Action #1.
After I arrived at work this morning, I learned their estimate was off by about forty hours and that he’d passed away shortly before midnight.
The last time I saw him alive was on the morning of our wedding day in 2004. He’d arrived hours before anyone else, including us, because he wanted to congratulate us in private. We spoke for less than five minutes before he took his leave.
We spoke on the phone once every couple years after that, mostly about medical updates. We share a first name, and it’s entirely possible I’ll be sharing some of his conditions in the years ahead.
My preferred method of working through unique events (better or worse, good guy or bad) is to ponder at length in this space, but for dozens of reasons this moment doesn’t feel like the right time for new essays. The first time I tried to string any clauses together this evening, an ostensibly simple, fourteen-word Facebook status took me twenty-five minutes to write, including an extended thesaurus consultation and an editorial review by Anne at my repeated insistence.
Between this and other little signs throughout the day, I strongly believe God’s been trying to tell me to be still and spend more time listening, reading, thinking, and praying for a good while.
The funeral is Friday, but I’ve no idea how the next two days will go, either offline or here on the site. More introspection? Extended radio silence? Deep diving into Scripture? Off-topic distraction? Wish I knew.
Apologies for the disjointed fragments. For now I’m putting my inadequate words away, shutting up, standing by, and waiting to see what comes next.
DC Comics house ad from The Flash #339, cover-dated November 1984. A lot of ’80s characters are no longer around, and it’s been decades since fans begged DC to bring back “legends” like these.
We live in an entertainment culture where we take it as given that all the best ideas were conceived before we were born, so trying to forge new universes seems like too much effort. Reboots used to be a desperation move, but anymore they’re the norm for luring in new fans — not just for work-for-hire companies with an intellectual property catalog to keep fertile and growing, but for artists, writers, and filmmakers all too happy to make a lifelong career out of perpetuating the lives and histories of worlds and heroes they didn’t invent themselves. It’s a living.
It’s easy to scoff at reboots when they’re happening to characters that don’t matter to you. If you’re a geek for long enough, though, sooner or later they’ll get to a universe you do care about.
I’ve been there. I remember the first time I had a universe yanked out from under me.
Right this way for memories and lessons about two universes with a lot in common…
Teaser image from our 2015 road trip, Day 5. Coming soon!
[Hey, all! The following special presentation is the all-new Page added tonight to MCC that merges and replaces the previous individual “Our Road Trip” checklists that were taking up too much real estate in the desktop header and the mobile menu. This handy Big Picture checklist summarizes all the trips we’ve taken to date for full historical context, with links to everything that’s been exclusively posted here since 2012, a few years’ worth that have been reprinted here on special occasions, and capsule summaries of other trips and vacations we previously shared on other sites in years past that, sooner or later, Lord willing, will all be re-chronicled on MCC someday as part of the continuing story of one geek couple and their annual quests to find new things to see and do.
Or if you totally hate domestic travel, skip down to the 2013-2014 checklists and pretend this is a different new entry called “A Salute to MCC Post Titles”. I’d understand if you did, really. I do like titling stuff.]
Right this way for lists within lists, which I also really like!
C2E2 semi-finalists, left to right: a Warhammer 40K Inquisitor; Takuto Tsunashi from Star Driver; an original Norse Valkyrie; the Khorne Marauder, also from Warhammer 40K; and I believe you’ve met Groot.
Each time my wife and I attend a convention, we love coming home with dozens upon dozens of photos to save for posterity once we’ve turned elderly and forgotten everything we ever did, to show to friends and family interested in what we do, and to share with followers and passing strangers here on Midlife Crisis Crossover. To us it’s all a part of the geek experience, a sort of community service for those who couldn’t be there, or for those who were there but are looking for more shots, different perspectives, or simply proof of their existence when they were unable to take or locate any pics of themselves.
On a related note, for better or for worse, MCC’s highest single-day traffic figures every year are nearly always from cosplay photo galleries. Longtime readers who have no use for cons may wonder why I devote multiple entries to each con, but for me the math is easy: cons provide plenty of new content, anecdotes, and visual wonders to share with the world; and we usually see a traffic spike with each miniseries, especially when it comes to reporting costume contest results. Everybody loves winners, and even runners-up in such showdowns are impressive in their own right.
The grandest of them all is Gen Con, which we’ve been attending since before the recent boom in the Indianapolis con scene. Anne and I aren’t even tabletop or TCG gamers, but their exhibit hall contains scintillating multitudes and their costume contest attracts some of the most imaginative, hard-working, dedicated fans around with a penchant for representing characters and concepts far from the mainstream norms. I come away from each Gen Con a little more wowed and schooled at the same time. I’ve made no secret that the costume contest is the primary reason I attend Gen Con.
After our recent con experiences and no small amount of self-examination on my part, I think I need to let the whole costume-contest thing go.
Our very special MCC extended interlude continues!
Four out of every five business days I bring a home-assembly turkey-‘n’-cheese sandwich to work for lunch. It’s one of the little ways we cut budget corners so we can set aside more disposable income for conventions, vacations, comics, movie tickets, and so on. Spending eight or ten bucks a day on lunch works out to $40-$50/week, or $160-$250/ month, or $1,920-$3,000/year. That’s an awful lot of geek merchandise and travel frills to leave behind. So cheap sack lunches are the rule of my routine.
Once a week I do lunch out with a coworker. On extremely rare occasions, when I’m absolutely sick and tired of Oscar Meyer, and we didn’t have any leftovers in the fridge that I could bring to work and nuke, then I might go out alone for a bite. Pictured above from one such outing is a burrito topped with chili sauce and chili con queso, garnished by a small sidekick of salad, all from a Mexican place called Acapulco Joe’s. I’d been wanting to try it for years, but I kept forgetting it was there. From the dingy decor and rustic exterior, I hadn’t expected an arty presentation that looks like something Two-Face would order from his personal crime chef.
Thank you all for coming. I’ve gathered my wits today to say a few words about the losses my wife and I suffered in the Great Hard Drive Crash of July 1, 2015.
We’ve had the same PC since at least 2009, maybe even longer. It was neither top-of-the-line Alienware nor an eMachines glorified calculator when I bonded with it at Fry’s Electronics and brought it home to join our household. I spent more than I could afford at the time, but it served us well in the long run and more than made up the difference to us on a number of levels. It was terrible for gaming and I let that dream go early, but it served all our modest needs with an efficiency and speed that its predecessors could never touch. We were one big happy family.
Not my favorite bed.
It’s that magical time again! Once or twice a year the recurring lower back pain that strikes when I least expect it chooses the worst possible time to come at me, ruin a few days, and keep me some combination of humble and humiliated.
Rarasaur’s husband Dave, a.k.a. “Grayson Queen”.
As of this writing she’s still serving the remaining time on her sentence. We asked for your prayers, thoughts, and other forms of benevolence on her behalf. The happy dinosaur button in the lower-right corner of this page remains in place as tribute. Before The MAN sent her up the river, she was among the neatest of the coolest of the awesomest ’round these parts.
In her absence, her husband continued his own blog and self-publishing efforts under the name Grayson Queen. It goes without saying that times were tough for him throughout her initial months away, but a series of entries earlier this year had indicated an upswing in his fortunes, new employment opportunities, and a renewed dedication to the pursuit of his creative endeavors.
Up until last week, anyway. In the two most recent entries he reported signs of physical issues that to me sounded downright frightening at the time. His subdued writing style conveyed some slight urgency, but not really panic. Maybe he downplayed the symptoms. Maybe he did have them under control. Maybe they were wholly unrelated to what happened next.
Last night the WordPress community received word from the couple’s loyal friend DJ Matticus that he passed away this week at age 35.
At the moment few details are available, but the gracious Mr. Matticus, who’s already been immensely generous in helping to relay Rara’s ongoing behind-bars journals to her fans where possible, has provided what little is known, and he’s provided contact info for anyone who’d like to mail condolences, prayers, thoughts, or other direly needed supportive expressions of love to Rara during this absolutely tragic worst-case scenario.
I’m fumbling for words on this inconceivable occasion, but that last link has the important details and an outpouring of heartfelt words in their honor.
Thanks sincerely for your consideration.
#RawrLove
An outtake from our Awesome Con 2014 lunch at Dick’s Last Resort. Our waitress made us each a hat. The last words you can’t read are “BACK HAIR”. And that’s why Nikola Tesla (probably) invented the concept of the “outtake”.
April 28, 2015, marked Midlife Crisis Crossover’s third birthday. Our preceding nine-episode C2E2 miniseries comprised MCC entries #991-999. Here we are, two blogging milestones in a single week, and no celebrity endorsements or twelve-book contracts or “Participant” ribbons to show for it.
Three years of personal expression, idea-vetting, photo-sharing, “think” pieces, geek-outs, lists, outbursts, road trips, memories, punchlines, political eye-rolling, awestruck husbandry, pop-culture references, faith-based exploration attempts, movie trailers, movie “reviews”, MS Paint doodles, old man’s pains, middle-age tantrums, family gatherings, home improvement disasters, live-tweeting jags, oddly colored scans, Kickstarter grudges, late-night mood swings, holiday cheer, overlong miniseries, zeitgeist misdiagnoses, gratuitous mentions of The Wire, and more, more, more, more, more.
1,000 ways to be me.
To those I thanked at the previous MCC milestones, consider your thanks hereby extended — doubly so if you’re my saintly, patient wife and put up with a heck of a lot from me for such a questionable return on your investment.
To those I’ve never thanked before, or to those I already thanked but insist I owe them even more gratitude: if you’ve ever genuinely read and enjoyed an MCC entry, and provided sincere feedback in a detectable method, even if it was just the one time and you think I’ve been going downhill ever since…thank you from the bottom of my heart for being part of the solution.
As always, thanks for reading. Here’s to the next 1000 entries and all the goofy hats yet to come.
Whenever we drive home to Indianapolis on Saturday night after C2E2 or Wizard World Chicago, our last stop before returning to Indiana is nearly always for late supper at this tiny, grungy McDonald’s in the middle of the Chicago Skyway. The drive-thru serves the westbound lanes, while a handful of parking spaces are available on the eastbound side. Pedestrians have to mind the mild danger of trying to enter or exit their cars while other drivers pull in and hopefully slow down from 80 to 5 so they can pick up one of those famous Extra Values Meals that’ll provide them just enough pep to reach their hometown awake and alive.
At first we used to stop there each time because it’s the most convenient pit stop on I-90 — you literally just veer left and there it is, no languorous entrance/exit ramps to add minutes to your long night’s driving — but in recent years it’s earned the cachet of tradition. The above photo was taken from its parking lot after Wizard World Chicago 2013, one of those rare times we stayed too late for the Costume Contest and found ourselves ravenous by the time we got to “our” supper dive.
…
On a related note, we are now officially home from C2E2 in the middle of the night and ready to collapse. Stories to share, photos to post, exhaustion to overcome, memories to treasure, achievements to celebrate, and discussions to be had about procedural changes for future convention experiences.
Later for all that. Photo parades begin tomorrow. Bedtime now.
Today’s lunch: hot tea and meds.
The day after we finished up with Indiana Comic Con 2015, I could already feel “con crud” creeping into my system. I’m no stranger to the notorious cold/flu that strikes at convention attendees after they’ve hung around a few thousand fans too many, but I’d hoped to dodge a bullet this time. Between the cool temps and Friday’s nonstop rains, my good health wasn’t meant to last.
I held out for as long as I could. I lasted three business days before I surrendered and took a sick day so I retreat into defensive hibernation. After last night proved disastrously unhelpful, today I slept till noon, took more countermeasures, and tried to keep distracted with news and hobbies and such.
No editor can stop him from posting Christmas photos in March. He is…The Most Irrelevant Man in the World!
His favorite musicians are eligible for AARP membership.
He was once this close to live-tweeting A Passage to India.
He thinks #TheDress is all the colors of the rainbow. He is…The Most Irrelevant Man in the World!
Happy New Year, internet! Here’s hoping 2015 personally comes to your house, pushes 2014 down a staircase, pushes a piano down the stairs after it, blames it on 2013, and works double overtime to be a vastly better year for you. I won’t tell on 2015 if you won’t.
As in years past, those all-knowing stats overseers at WordPress.com have compiled an automated 2014 Annual Report for each and every blogger on their roster, complete with New Year’s fireworks that you can pretend is a handy screensaver by leaving your computer on and your browser open 24/7.
Right this way for the link to the report, and a rundown of unique MCC entries you may have missed!
This outtake from Indy Pop Con captures some of the brighter parts of my 2014: LEGO, conventions, new T-shirts, Star Wars, and my wife. Not in that order.
Hey there, supporters and strangers! Welcome to the third annual Midlife Crisis Crossover year-in-review. This modest site was launched on April 28, 2012, as a nervous experiment in writing whatever came to mind in a space to call my own, and so far it’s been a much more fulfilling pastime than lurking around message boards and tapping my foot impatiently while waiting for other fun people to discuss things I wanted to discuss. Last week saw the release of MCC’s 900th post, and so far I’m at a loss to explain exactly how that happened. I dreaded 2014 would be the year I ran out of anecdotes and opinions and jokes, but in hindsight I can’t think of a reason to let that stop me now. If this happened months ago, everybody do me a favor and don’t tell me, because the longer you let me ramble on like this, the funnier it’ll be to watch my eventual horrified epiphany.
MCC’s 2012 was a slow rise from nothingness to quantifiable somethingness. Our 2013 was about steady upward trending as I kept exploring my limitations and horizons. 2014, on the other hand, saw largely flatlined traffic except around a few key events. This peaceful plateau may be in part because 2014 was MCC’s first year without a single entry achieving the much-vaunted WordPress.com “Freshly Pressed” status, that prized occasion in which the WordPress staff shares a well-regarded work of yours with a much wider audience of fellow WordPress users. Without such a generous boost to accelerate audience growth this year, it meant trying to hold your attention with old-school methods — by keeping the content coming, by appreciating the greatest audience of all times, by digging into topics that might interest other humans besides myself, by trying not to suck, and by wishing really hard that magic search-engine genies would do all my marketing for me.
Midlife Crisis Crossover! 