-{At the Tumbleweed Anime Convention, Santomas, Estacado, 1999}-

As I was talking to the bartender, I thought of a shirt that was filed away in my clothes drawer back at home. It was a take-off of a shirt from a series called Neon Genesis Evangelion, which had a red leaf, the letters NERV, and the series motto “God is in His Heaven and all is right with the world”. My shirt said NERD, with a calculator in place of the leaf, and the words “Teenage girls in tight suits, My God this is heaven.”

The shirt isn’t funny if you haven’t been to a convention before because you don’t know what the heck it’s talking about. It isn’t funny after the second or third convention because you start noticing certain behavior and it becomes more than a little creepy.

The oddest thing about these conventions, I told the bartender, is the abundance of inappropriate sexual energy. You have a bunch of thirteen year old girls dressed up in Sailor Moon outfits and a bunch of hefty, poorly groomed thirty year olds that have never been kissed. And if you ever actually stand between any two of them, you can feel the sexual energy and almost immediately want to take a shower. And put away your NERD shirt.

The bartender commented that it didn’t appear that many of the guests felt that they needed a shower. Ever.

I laughed. I didn’t know what was funnier: that the conventions had to emphasize and re-emphasize the need of convention-goers to take a shower… or that the convention goers consistently thought that they were only kidding. About an hour before my conversation with the bartender I remember listening to this obese guy on a pay phone say, with a resigned and defeated tone, “okay, I guess I’m just going to go take a shower.” Presumably he was feeling down about something unrelated, but I like the visual of a guy being told over the phone how bad he smells and only relucantly agreeing to take a shower, so I choose that interpretation.

Make of this what you will, but until I worked at a phonebank job in Deseret that employed a lot of very heavy people, seven of the ten heaviest guys I’d ever seen in my life I’d seen at anime conventions.

But the good news about all of these conventions is that it’s easy to stand out as a guy and look good in comparison. Despite the 4-to-1 male/female ration, most of the guys in my clan managed to meet someone at a convention at some point, sometimes more than once. We’re less socially adept than most people, but compared to the competition we were practically Pierce Brosnan.

Because of an amateur production company I was involved in, I was going to these conventions long after I had enough to do. They had taken me to Florida, Texas, Kingsland, and in this case, Estacado. I was too old for the young fans and too well-adjusted for the older fans. Not that there weren’t plenty of people my age, there, but we comprised of less than a quarter of conventions where attendance ran somewhere in the thousands and walking amongst the general population would become, after a while, very de-energizing.

The first oasis that I had was the smoker’s balcony. As with many other places, you can meet the more interested subset of a group at the smoker’s den. It helped that there existed an age limit of 18. Unfortunately, the smoker’s den would get invaded by some onbnoxious types. Particularly annoying young woman that often dominated the smoking den that for some reason thought that I cared to hear her resentment towards the rest of the world and her frustration with her hen-pecked boyfriend.

It was then that I found the best escape I could possibly ask for: the hotel bar. The young were too young and the old were generally too poor for $5 beer. I’m not a particularly heavy drinker, but I drink at conventions if only so that I can get a ticket to the bar.

A lot of people dress up for conventions. A lot of people use this as an example of how stupid conventions are, but honestly I think it adds charm. A lot of people put a whole lot of time and effort into their costumes and it’s really quite neat to see personal representations of characters that you otherwise only see in anime form. But it also adds a sense of surreality to the affair. One guy you’re talking to is wearing a black T-shirt expressing his support for anarchy, another is wearing a polo shirt, and another is a flashy blue robe with white trim and a turbin with pig-tails.

One night I was at the bar on my nigh-hourly escape and I was talking to the bartender. He asked me what exactly the convention was for. I explained to him about anime and the conventions and what they were for. I told him that it must appear odd to him to see all these people in such strange costumes. He said that it wasn’t that abnormal. A couple weeks ago, to the shock and dismay of the other guests, they’d had an S&M conventions and so they had guys walking around the lobby in leather costumers with zipper-mouths with their date on a leash and collar.

Until that moment I had not realized that there was anything that could make anime conventions look normal by comparison.

-{The above picture brought to you by my then-new digital camera. The picture was taken at the Tumbleweed Convention here in Estacado about seven years before I ended up moving here. The hotel where the convention took place is actually within walking distance of where I live now. You can get a full-size, unfiltered image by clicking on it. I found the site of a young girl sitting on the lawn reading amidst all the abnormality going on around her to be an interesting image. At first, I didn’t want the wizard in the picture but then decided that it worked and actually shifted my position to get him visible.}-

-{This blog brought to you by the Letter X, which always Marks The Spot}-