Welcome back to If You Can Make It Here, a diary about New York and new beginnings.
And hello from the cafe car on a train from Boston, Massachusetts, back to Penn Station, New York. We are — well, we are indulging a little time conceit here, because we all know this letter is late. I meant to write this on the way home, Sunday night, to grace inboxes on Monday as per.
And yet here we are. But we’re still here. Make yourself comfortable.
This one was meant to be easy. On Saturday morning, a colleague, her partner and I travelled to Boston to take in Day 3 of PAX, or Penny Arcade Expo, a huge gaming convention that grew from and now thoroughly overshadows the webcomic of the same name.
When I was at Saatchi & Saatchi London, a joke we used to make around the table I sat at was the refrain: “I am the protagonist!” Imagine the tone as halfway between I’m Spartacus, and an eight year-old saying it’s not fair. It was funny because it wasn’t true. And it was funny because it was true — we all sort of think we are, right?
If You Can Make It foregrounds that identity, a bit. It might even feed it. I got on the Boston train with a merry feeling that here I was, a sort of Louis Theroux / Jack Kerouac / GK Chesterton figure, off on the human safari to gawp at the strangers, snare a story and get caught up in a hilarious anecdote for the benefit of those back home. Which is quite literally self-centering.
That you didn’t get this letter until now is partly down to no such story showing up for me. It is always tempting to turn up to a place and silently declaim “Here I am, world! At last, your main character has arrived.” But when we arrived, PAX wasn’t waiting:
A tent-city of stands, in the grid pattern I now know so well, flowing with colourful traffic. It was noon, and I’d got up at 5am. Boston is the home of Dunkin’ — née Donuts, but the chain has emancipated itself from its health-triggering surname. We’d promised ourselves a pick-me-up, but once inside we didn’t see one, only a Dunkin’ branded gamelike experience. There was a branded gamelike experience on every corner, in fact, and as we wandered the intersections and lost and found each other, I struggled to keep my bearings: meet me at the vintage figurine stand, East of the Pokémon Play Lab. If you hit the artisanal d20 maker, you’ve gone too far.
The famous names with the big stands were shoaled around by indie developers: twos, threes and fours of people in matching merch asking passers-by to spare two minutes to wishlist their game on steam. Then the controller refurbishers, the fan-art t-shirt stalls, the “Dragon’s Breath: Smells of Adventure” candle maker. It gave way to a central arena: four huge screens suspended above us, showing professional bouts of Tekken 8. And beyond that, as much again stretched away down this aircraft hangar of a hall: the card games. I’d played Magic: The Gathering between the ages of 11 and 18. I can still smell freshly opened packs, and still feel the reassuring finger-prick of a protective card sleeve.
But this is all architecture. The real intensity came from the rush of people. People surged as friend groups, couples, families with children and babies in prams. And, best of all, were all the people dressed up as characters. I’m not brave enough to take good cosplay pictures (even though those people are often doing it because they want you to) but I’ll tell you this. No picture I ever took would capture the energy that flows around a great piece of cosplay as they walk along the hall. It’s the passage of a tiny royal, an emissary from the special world of ideas. It was their scene; I was the extra.
Exhausted - and yes, still in pain from the sciatica - I flopped down in chair under the giant Tekken screens. A screen said this was still the knockout round of 48 - most people watching were taking a break, like me. But you could hear the real Tekken fans by the noise they made whenever a tricky combo connected. One combatant came out, and a tiny pocket of the crowd erupted: five friends, with a cardboard banner, making enough noise for twenty. The guy won, and of course we all cheered for him, because we were cheering for his friends. We wanted them to have another chance to show their love.
Maybe I just needed to drift off after my 5am wakeup, but sitting there at the periphery of the periphery, spectating spectators, I felt a kind of peace that hadn’t reached me in weeks. These people were already so interesting — to each other. And interested so wholeheartedly in all the different things they loved. Is that the cure for self-interest: interest? I remembered the way blind interest had led me to the World Science Fiction Convention in 2014, simply because it was to be in London for the third time in 75 years, and Iain Banks was meant to be Guest of Honour. That was five days long, and I went alone, but I never felt particularly alone. I wandered the halls and exhibits, took notes in the panel sessions, and one night, as the London Philharmonic played the theme tune to Star Trek: The Next Generation, I wept. I still don’t know why.
But I remember not feeling out of place. I remember that oneness. Being just one, alone, safe, as well as being part of the Big One, the Convention, the Con. A con without its members is just the logistics. And as Tekken raged on around me I remembered, or perhaps I just membered:
Everyone is different. Everyone is the same. Nobody is here for us, but we are all here for each other.
And time does not exist.
(And so… maybe this newsletter wasn’t late, really.)
Game Over
☞ Thanks for bearing with me on this one. They are fun to do - and they always take longer that I think. PAX was a blast but it swallowed the weekend and truthfully, it took a long time to work out what I made of it. It’s a welcoming environment, but an intense one. Sometimes I wonder: what would the me that let himself fall all the way into it be like?
☞ I don’t think this footnote is interesting to anyone but me, but I can’t not mention that while the LonCon committee chose Iain Banks as their Guest of Honour, he died of cancer before the convention could go ahead. The organisers committed to running the con as though he were there. “We want to make his presence felt,” they said. Admirably, they did.
☞ This inauspicious edition marks the end of the Winter Volume of this letter; we are officially one quarter done. What a journey so far! I was thinking of printing it into a little paper zine, and putting some around the neighbourhood… but hell if I know when I would do that.
Issue #8: the 8th of April. Well, how about that? Until then, find a place you feel comfortable.
James
From Ridgewood, Queens.
Maybe Curiosity brings Connection and that is an antidote to Centring self. But also maybe the act of knowing that you’re centring yourself kind of suggests you’re not. Xx