So it’s been a wild couple of days.
Yesterday sucked. Found out that morning that my Dad had been in a car accident the afternoon before. Head-on collision, going 50 when someone turned in front of him. Thankfully, he didn’t have to be hospitalized, although the air-bag did bang him around a whole bunch and knocked out one of his teeth. The car was totaled, which means they’re carless for a bit. That’ll get fixed, I’m sure, but it was a rough morning thinking about the fact that the last time I saw Dad was at Kenzie and I’s wedding, and if things had happened differently that could’ve been the last time I’d seen him.
That’s hard. I’ve seen what loosing a parent does, watching Tony go through all the motions of it this year. I don’t know what would be better; the slow, lingering loss that you know is coming, or the sudden, tragic, unexpected loss. It’s hard and I don’t want to think about it, but there it was in my guts all morning. I did not care for it. I can’t talk more about it.
Just when I thought I’d gotten myself back on an even keel, I got knocked back again. I was working at the computer at the front counter, and I looked up at the door and saw a guy leaning square against it, talking on a cellphone. It was raining, and he obviously was looking for a place to talk and be dry, but against a door? Really? I figured I’d go over and do something about it. I went over and opened the door, and he shuffled a couple of steps over, still talking and still mostly blocking the door.
“Excuse me?” I said, leaning half in, half out, of the door. He just kind of nodded. I stood there, still looking at him, and then said into the phone. “Yeah, lemme call you back honey.” He closed the phone and looked at me.
“What?”
“You were blocking my door.”
“Yeah. I moved, didn’t I?”
“Well, you were still blocking it.”
Dude exploded. “What the fuck do you want? It’s fucking raining, what the fuck do you want me do, huh? No one’s going in there, goddammit! What the fuck is your problem?”
“My problem was you on my door, that’s what.” I was flabbergasted. I was every kind of -gasted.
He moved right in front of me, less than an inch from my face. “And what the fuck are you gonna do if I don’t move, huh? What about that?” He pushed the door into me. I got more -gasted.
“Well I’ll call the fucking cops, is what I’ll do.” Or something to that effect.
“Yeah, you call the cops you fucking pussy! That’s all you would do, motherfucker!”
“Get the fuck out of here!” I said, or something milder. I closed the door, and he stood there shouting at the door for a couple of seconds, yelling “pussy” and “motherfucker” at me through the glass. Tony had been up at the front the whole time, and he had the phone and actually had dialed the cops, but by the time someone answered the guy had wandered off. Tony stuck his head out and saw him going into the bar two doors down (which soon will be one door down, yay). He told them that we’d had a belligerent customer, but they had left.
It still tastes like garbage in my mouth. Really and truly, the guy pulled my bitch card and I blinked. You can dress it up any way you want, but that’s what happened. Yeah, I shouldn’t let him get to me, and yeah, he’s inconsiderate redneck white trash, but the buck stops with me and what I did. Which was nothing. In dude code, that’s your bitch card and that guy has mine now. That kind of thing puts me back into very unhappy places in my childhood, where my bitch card was passed around more than scrap paper.
I couldn’t even really think straight during the whole thing, and when things escalated, all I could thing about were my glasses and my fancy phone in my shirt pocket (yes, my front shirt pocket. Clearly, this kind of thing was going to happen eventually). If our friends Travis or Gavin were there, Jesus, forget about it. I’d probably be bailing them out right now. But no, it was me, so I’m writing about it and fantasizing what I’d do to him in a consequences-free society.
Y’know, chicken-shit stuff.
Yes, it’s not lost on me that I wrote more about my school-flashback then my Dad’s accident, but one of those is very easy to talk about and one of them isn’t. That’s just the way it is. Almost fighting makes me feel foolish and embarrassed. My Dad’s accident affected me suddenly and deeply. I’ve worked through it, but that just me.
Can we get to the good news. Okay?
So we started getting regular visits to the shop by a guy named Bill Gladman, who writes a column on a site called Comic Related. He wrote some about the store when we first opened, and then some more later on. We ran into him at Mid-Ohio-Con and he’s come in quote a bit since then. I told him about the old “It’s Only Comics” videos we did, and he got it in his head that Tony and I would be good to star in a movie he’s writing about nerds, disc golf and Kevin Smith. He also picked up a copy of the preview book that Lee and I did for “Gifted,” and wrote a nice review of it in his column.
Apparently he’s working with a small start-up publisher, and they are putting out a horror anthology next October, and they want the Gifted preview in it. It’s going to be a 80 to 150 page graphic novel, done out Tales from the Crypt style, and they are going through book distribution, and are going to be paying people to be in it.
So yeah, I’m getting published. It’s small, it’s not for a while, but it’s published for money. It gives Lee a chance to re-do the inking on the book (which he really wants to do since were really rushed at the end there) and do another cover, and maybe finish up the whole issue so we can get a line on getting the whole thing published by the time the anthology comes out, so we can use it to point people towards the comic.
So yeah. It’s been a wild couple of days. And like most things, it ends on a high note.
