Disconnect me from my bones

So I posted those pictures from the first night of Readercon and I went to bed at a nicely self-protective hour and at six in the morning I woke with food poisoning, because even if I have so far managed to stave off the opium addiction, apparently my life as a classically educated, chronically ill poet is incomplete if I am not nigh dying in a garret somewhere. I blame the salad. Which I ate at the hotel restaurant. I crawled out of my room in time for my reading and drifted greenly around the dealer's room and then I crawled back. I am fairly confident that I ran a fever for the rest of the day; even after the icy vertiginous nausea had mostly passed off, the racking chills and the skin-ache and joint-ache stuck around and I was told charmingly after the fact that I looked sort of grey. I managed to eat some tomato soup in the evening via the good offices of rushthatspeaks and ashnistrike and had a lovely interaction with phi and their foster son that mostly involved me lying on my bed listening to folktales. I took a shower and kind of fainted. I went to bed at midnight.

Fortunately for my programming, both the nausea and the fever were gone by the time I got up today: I was exhausted, but not ridiculously unwell. The panel on poetry and comedy was really about five panels packed into the same spring-loaded can and exploded appropriately in all directions once we took the cap off, including impromptu singing, quoting of Shakespeare, reading of poetry, and technical analysis of standup from the panelists and composing of limericks by the audience; the Ig Nobel dramatic readings were conjoinedly funny and horrifying, also included singing now that you mention it, and I got to walk around precariously gesturing with a plastic cup full of water while reading from a paper about coffee spills. I did not manage dinner per se, but I have eaten two fruit cups and a large handful of crunchy things, plus some highly salted corn chips that Michael Cisco wasn't getting around to fast enough. Nice conversation in a sort of casual round-robin as people came and went through the lobby. Wandered through the halls and ran into more people in an enjoyable brief-comet kind of way.

But I have books, which is the other point of attending a convention: Iain McIntyre's On the Fly! Hobo Literature and Songs, 1879–1941 (2018) and Barbara Krasnoff's The History of Soul 2065 (2019), whose launch party I ducked in and out of (everyone was having fun and it was loud). I have a new stack of DVDs from handful_ofdust. And I have a pendant of labradorite from Elise Matthesen, enclosed within billows of silver wire and called "Was Ice, Am Ocean"; it has a shipwreck in its berg-blue, gold-washed iridescence and I am afraid that I associate it strongly with the Franklin expedition, which may or may not work out to anything. Admittedly I might have associated it with more general polar themes if I had not spent damn near all of yesterday feeling like an extra in some really weird AU of The Terror (2018), the lead-poisoned freezing hallucinatory bit near the end. Alternately, blame Jared Harris.

I have two more panels tomorrow and should really be asleep. But today was so much better than Friday.

Put all the things on that you believe in

Was this Readercon cursed? I made my nice post about my much improved Saturday and took a shower and went to bed and I yawned and an excruciatingly gristly thing occurred in the hinge of my jaw that prevented me from sleeping more than two hours for the rest of the night because it took three hours lying in the semi-dark with a makeshift ice pack melting down the side of my face just to get the pain to calm down from crying point. I walked into my panel on Lloyd Alexander and existentialism in one of those crystalline states that is sort of the ten percent visible of an iceberg of collapse and lampshaded: "A Fflam is never hungover."

It was a great panel. We had people who'd read Alexander at deeply formative ages; we had an existentialist who'd read him first for this panel; we could have gone another hour, easy. We barely even got outside the scope of the Chronicles of Prydain and the Westmark trilogy. We did manage to name some other existentialist fantasies, but I'd honestly love to see a sequel panel delve into them more deeply. A lot of talk about responsibility, about absurdism, about the theme of reckoning with the world as it is. About what happens after the end of the fairy tale—magically, politically. Seriously, we could have just kept talking. As for the panel on horror and marginalization and being disbelieved, I don't quite want to say it was refreshing that the panelists were all AFAB, chronically ill, and variously marginalized after that, since we comprised a terrible indictment of the American healthcare system, but we really bonded over Gwynne Garfinkle's description of the scene in The Exorcist (1973) where a mansplaining doctor gets demonically slapped across a room. The discussion went real-world a lot faster than it went toward fictional recommendations, but it was very satisfying as such. Intergenerational trauma, gaslighting on the interpersonal and social scales, disbelieving yourself, learning to listen. I did manage to talk about The Naked Kiss (1964).

I saw so many people this convention whom I did not get to do much more than wave at or hug or mutually enthuse in a hallway. A totally incomplete list would include Sherwood Smith, Amal El-Mohtar, Rob Cameron, Mike and Anita Allen, Jim Freund and Barbara Krasnoff, Farah Rose Smith, Rose Fox, Marissa Lingen, Romie Stott and Ciro Faienza, Gwynne Garfinkle, C. S. E. Cooney and Carlos Hernandez, and teri.zin, with slightly more featured time from Michael Cisco, Fiona Maeve Geist, Gemma Files, Ruthanna and Sarah Emrys, Greer Gilman, Erik Amundsen, Elise Matthesen, and Lila Garrott. I think I just sort of shouted at Nibedita Sen about how much I love her short fiction, but it seemed to go over well. Marc Abrahams got sung at, but he's already heard me read very fast from some very strange papers. I think I actually ran out of social skills by Friday and just kept going on theater.

And in the considered opinion of the urgent care doctor whose office I finally walked into this evening when by half an hour from close of business they still hadn't called me back from this morning, I probably subluxed my jaw last night. Which is why it still hurts and I'm supposed to eat a lot of soups and custards over the next few days. (I've had a milkshake today.) I will be calling my physical therapist first thing tomorrow and in the meantime I am trying to figure out if it's the Quincy Marriott or me. I never got food poisoning or anaphylaxis or partially dislocated bones in Burlington. I mean, I got stalked, but at least my skeleton didn't fall down on the job.

I still think I had a very good convention. All of my panels went well. I had a good time at my readings. People kept asking me to sign books (even if my collection could not in fact be gotten in the dealer's room except for this one copy that mysteriously manifested halfway through) and saying nice things about programming they had seen me on. I added copies of Michael Cisco's Unlanguage (2018) and Gwynne Garfinkle's People Change (2018) to my book-hoard. All of my fellow panelists were great, which puts me ahead of a couple of un-dodged bullets I heard about from friends. Emotionally, it was a fun and fulfilling experience! Physically, we're pushing the boundaries of irony here.

And of course I cannot actually collapse because I have deadlines. But I am going to sit on this couch with Autolycus for half an hour and breathe. A cat is a good decompression. This was a dramatically variable weekend.