(Required reading: World: Fucked (Otakon 2006))

The dust has finally settled on Baltimore, and the sea has given up the dead. If the stench of 20,000 sweaty otaku isn’t enough to make you wish you’d never eaten a meal in your life, then the sight will. It’s urban warfare out there, folks; I’m not really sure if I’m even alive, but every time I’ve submerged myself in Charm City long enough, I feel closer to death, anyhow. They come every year, and they don’t stick around to pick up the trash afterwards; adorned as clowns, ravers, twin plumbers and sword-wielding sadists, they are the so-called “Otaku Generation,” and quite frankly they’re scaring the shit out of people who have probably witnessed murder. My journalistic integrity in full bloom, I donned an unremarkable, plain t-shirt and hit the streets, camera in hand, and held my breath – and my prayers – during this year’s Otakon, which is effectively Otakon 2008; I don’t care enough to research how many years this godforsaken convention has graced an otherwise dormant harbor town; that its existence continues as a locomotion at full speed, barreling down the tracks on fire and maybe worse, showing absolutely no indication of its immediate or eventual departure, well, it’s frightening; no, this thing is here to stay, and hell, I might as well go to it every year – uninvited, no less – until our Lord Jesus Christ sees fit to endow me with eternal slumber in the midst of his probably-aching hands. Deliver me from evil, whatever: Otakon 2008 feels exactly like it did when I went two years ago, although I must admit that the convention had previously nullified and obliterated my desire and ability to love another being, so what are you going to do.

In case you missed that small, delicious morsel of information, I’ll go ahead and say it again: I went uninvited. Yes, that’s right – in the midst of tens of thousands of people I figured hey, I don’t really feel like throwing down 60 dollars to lower my sperm count and push myself ever-closer to ending my own existence, so I’m going to embrace the onslaught for free. I slipped through the doors incognito, so to speak. I wasn’t dressed up as some obscure character from a probably-retarded Japanese cartoon, but rather an unsuspecting, look-straight-ahead type of guy. There’s no fuss here, gentle reader. I analyzed my surroundings thoroughly and adapted to the environment instantly. You see, these security guards, they don’t work for the convention; no, they work for the convention center. In other words: They don’t give a shit if I paid for a tacky necklace that “confirms” my membership to this sinking ship of a “cultural event”.

Before I’d be doing any strategic breaking and entering, however, I wanted to get a feel for the fine denizens of Otakon 2008; nope, nothing’s changed here. Everyone is still fat, sweaty and ready to rave at any given moment; and rave they did, folks. It would be a disservice to life if I attempted, in words, to describe the insurgence of bile and hatred that crept up from somewhere dark in me – that feeling which is correlated with watching literally 400 very over or underweight members of the so-called “Otaku Generation” scream, scamper, thrust, grind, salivate and bore into me a sin so convoluted and contrived in its creation and continued existence that I would clip my own wings to make the fall from grace a thunderous, intoxicating mystery that no one could solve. So I won’t.

Without the photographic guidance of a certain former roommate of mine, and the . . . uh, whatever it is Ryan Butler did at Otakon 2006 backing us up, I ventured forth with my close acquaintance and local asshole, Eric Scott Lane. We decided to be responsible that day; we took the Light Rail. The Light Rail is a slapdash attempt at public transportation in the greater Maryland area; it is, by all means, a laughable, redundant sort of train, if calling it a train isn’t a serious injustice to trains the world over. Usually no more than 2 or 3 cars long, the compartments are connected by rubber and run on tracks that have not seen service in many years (and knowing Maryland, perhaps ever); whenever going around one of the frequent sharp turns – yes, this train runs on winding tracks – the sound it made was simply horrendous. What is Otakon 2008 going to be like – EHHHHHRRRRRRRRSSSSCCCHHHHHHH - I would wonder as the sound of an iron golem choke-vomiting on incandescent light bulbs would ring out into the stagnant air of the train compartment; we were not alone, however. Accompanied by some of Maryland’s most seasoned white trash veterans, we endured a good 15 minutes of yokel speak, bellyaching, pig-snort laughter and anticlimactic discussions on creamed corn. All for the greater good, we may have lavished our ailing minds with.

“Why is it,” I began, “that in the white trash society is it almost universal for a woman three times the size of a buffalo to be with a man standing six feet tall and weighing in at a whopping 80 pounds?”

Eric thought for several minutes, and then went on about how it balances out the universe or something. Behind us, the bemused and misunderstood watched with somber eyes at the creatures that dwell within the crevices of Maryland’s bizarre social structure; they are the ones who seek only to exist. And we watch them with hatred and bewilderment on poorly designed trains.

EHHHHHRRRRRRRRSSSSCCCHHHHHHH

Around another shaky corner and into the bowels of the city, the train rambled on, powered by unforeseen forces and governing the dead. Or maybe it just ran on electricity.

I felt my heart pop like a latex glove when the cityscape become bloated and unavoidable in my immediate eyesight. The marsh yokels would get off at the stadium to watch a group of very boring individuals play a very boring game. Throw the ball, hit the ball, watch the ball, guzzle. They exited the train without fanfare, and I sat in waiting. Eric was silent; we didn’t speak. The conductor said something unintelligible and probably vital to our adventure over a garbled mess of static and numbness. We didn’t have to listen. When the doors opened, we would leave.

Next stop: Otakon 2008. Please proceed to the nearest exit in a safe and timely manner, and prepare to be bumrushed by a flash flood of the begrudged and their kin.

And there they are, circling the grid in fat, sweaty swarms, armed with swords made from boxes and hair from straw. The Super Mario brothers jump and skip down the boulevard. There goes Pryamid Head, and he (she?) is slamming an oversized sword into the back of some heavily-fake-tattooed kid’s head, nearly knocking his white, spiky wig off – an embarrassment of the highest degree, I am certain. I walk almost automatically down city streets I could traverse blind in a wheelchair, contorting my face in bewilderment, sadness and disgust. The ignore me, and they ignore Eric; we’re in plain clothes.

We slouch along the street instead of strutting down the block. The vicinity of the convention center to the nameless business buildings opposite made for a plastic disturbance; the street had gotten quite loud. We passed a girl who looked familiar. If you’ve been keeping up, you’ll know that we’ve met a girl in a banana suit at some dark moment in our lives. That point was Otakon 2006, an event that, for the life of me, doesn’t seem all that different than Otakon 2008. I guess that’s sort of the whole idea behind it. But there she was, freed from the fruit costume that we still don’t understand. She was dressed as a steampunk something. Maybe a pilot. I really can’t say. However, I would offer to say something cruel here, but I guess I just don’t have it in me anymore; she’s too nice of a person, really. I approached her: “You’re the banana girl, right?”

“Yeah! Two years ago. You guys remembered.”

“Do you remember us?”

“N-n-no. . . ahhh-uh, yeah! You two quizzed me about anime erotica!”

I didn’t know whether to be embarrassed or be embarrassed for her. She just sort of said it, right there in the open. The words hung there for several full minutes. Her friends, much to my horror, made no change in their facial expressions or behavior. They just stood there, as if that sort of thing might be something you’d discuss with your father right before he beats you with a Bible. They were overweight and far too short; their stature that of an upright hippopotamus in a compression tank. One of them probably even grunted, I don’t know. I asked to snap a picture; she said sure, of course and immediately lunged into what had to have been a premeditated pose; I’d noticed this sort of thing before. See, everyone who dresses up at Otakon (most people do) are prone to getting photographed by strange people who, for whatever reason, want photographs of people dressed up like cartoon characters; I haven’t a clue as to who these people are or why they feel they need to take pictures of every single fucking iteration of Solid Snake they see, although I suspect the most important question is what do they even do with these pictures? You can count me among the folks I’ve just described if you must, considering I’m posting a picture of that very same girl I’d met two years earlier (though now sans banana costume). But do note that I had a purpose in taking that picture, and that purpose was to accompany this paragraph.

Well.

We clambered up the stone walls and stairs that line the monolithic building that we’d spend most of the night in; it was time to submerge ourselves in filth, and appear on the other side as men who despise men despising women. At the top of those stairs we stood exhausted and demoralized and yet awake in the midst of human waste. Riding on the wave of something aggressively miserable, the two of us didn’t really have a whole lot to say to the world, much less to each other. The air was filled with sighs and moans, and I watched in great loathing and fury at the city and its unwelcome visitors traverse the thicket. Once it had been communicated to me without words that “this thing right here is done”, we quietly resumed Being Alive and forcibly shuffled ourselves through doors that opened automatically. The security guard’s resume and job experience immediately burst in to flames, and there we were: nonpaying “customers” in the stock market of eternity, sifting wearily through blockades of fake people dressed as the entertainment we perhaps adore more than reality itself.

It was then, perhaps, that I really, truly questioned what it is that this convention I dutifully attend actually stands for or even means. There isn’t much to do there, quite frankly. On the third level I witnessed in grotesque bewilderment at a handful of 20-something-year-olds dressed as cartoon characters playing Duck Duck Goose. Why? I have always found Duck Duck Goose to be about as fun as pacing back and forth or counting coins, even as a child. Never mind the fact that the seething racism behind the whole game really turns me off. If you’re not a duck, you’re a goose, but you should be a duck, et cetera. And right in front of me is a scrawny white kid chasing an obese, paler-than-the-Devil’s-dick witch of a girl, adorned in some sort of homemade frock with matching hood. On the other side of the grease-slicked railings were panels of Japanese translators discussing the process of translating a comic book which, don’t get me wrong, I’m sure is the most thrilling way of spending your time and well worth traveling across the country to attend and all, but man, I just don’t get it. These people travel to Baltimore of all places to feel something unique and usual, and possibly to feel like themselves, however far removed from the truth though that may be. They subscribe to stitching themselves to Japanese cartoons and videogames, creating a bizarre subculture around idol worship and pretending to be people who don’t actually exist. At Otakon 2006 (hereby known as “the span of 3 days in which my ability to do anything not destructive was surgically removed from my asshole”), I witnessed a shirtless man in his early twenties eat out a teddy bear. Yes, you’ve read correctly, but I’ll begrudgingly elaborate, if only a little: he borrowed a teddy bear from this person who was probably a girl, spread its furry, plushy bear legs and went to town on its imaginary bear genitalia. He was wearing black angel wings, a spiky wig and leather pants so tight that I’m pretty sure I envisioned Jim Morrison dying for the second time. The girls around him – each of them varying in waistline, mental stability and rate of social sickness – watched him with an envious penislust in their unnaturally-colored-contact eyes. I just sort of sat there and watched, wishing I hadn’t been. This was maybe 2 years ago, and I don’t think the incident hasn’t been the story arc of my nightmares since. This was something to do, I figured, and this is what these girls wanted. Something in their minds said this was right, that this was attractive, of all things. I snapped back to the present and continued to watch that childhood game from yesteryear, concluding that escapism is pretending like you’re having fun, even when you’re not.

What began as an experiment in journalism and a morbid curiosity two years prior had devolved into a hobby. Even kneeling before the throne of point-and-laugh skepticism, I felt perhaps insane, and closely guarded my feelings for this convention and its people so that no one would ever have to hear what I’d come to admit in my mind. I like Otakon coming to Baltimore, but I don’t like Otakon. There is something to be said about the electricity that hums in the minds and souls – however tarnished though they may be – of these pedestrians of normalcy. You’ve got to respect them, I guess, even if you don’t necessarily want to play a schoolyard game with them. Walking down the crystal corridors of a building that sees little action throughout the year – smelling that smell that these self-proclaimed otakus seem to emit from their cardboard armor – there is something to be said about their complete and utter confidence in themselves and what they believe in, which is, let’s face it, videogames and cartoons. What they may not realize is that most Japanese people don’t like anime. Maybe they cling to this ideology that because they like “all things” Japanese, well, the Japanese would surely accept them. I don’t think this is necessarily true by any stretch of the imagination. In every corner on every floor you will find someone who is largely overweight eating Pocky sticks because Pocky is from Japan. I am not making broad assumptions so much as dictating what it is I have witnessed. This is some sort of bizarre renaissance, I imagine, and they perhaps eagerly anticipate its annual arrive with great joy. I sometimes wonder how it is they select the character they are going to pretend to be for 3 days. Do some people arrive with the intent of portraying one person, or selecting a different costume to wear for each of the 3 days? So much work must go into these costumes, and I am sad to report that some of them are downright impressive on strictly an ingenuity level. But what fuels this sort of thing? Some of those costumes appear to have been crafted over a long stretch of time, perhaps consisting of a great deal of money, effort and skill. All of this flows into a convention which is rapidly inflating and ballooning outward. This is evidenced by the boom of activity in Baltimore, a town which only sees action when the firefighters decide to hold their yearly convention, or when ten elementary schools decide to visit the National Aquarium on the same goddamned day.

So as I said, it’s become a hobby. If you’ve been to a mall in a small town, you’ll notice older people (or elderly folk, I guess) sitting on benches under fake trees. They sit and they watch people, because they’re curious or haven’t anything else to do. They spend most of their lives indoors, I figure, and what better way to spend a Sunday afternoon than watching those you do not and can not understand. In their case, it’s a younger generation milling about an “indoor outside”. This best illustrates my continued participation in something I am so readily able to detest. A lot of people ask me why I keep going, and I guess that’s the only reason I can offer. I’m curious, and I often feel that after long droughts of not being around anyone (some call this “loneliness”), it’s feeling something to be around other people, even if they do smell worse than the Inner Harbor, and even if my plain clothes and vicious facial expression render me invisible and unapproachable to them. I perhaps falsely confirm my involvement as better appreciating something great by witnessing something horrible.

But we’re back now: here, in this narrative; here, in the twilight of dissidence and loathing. Standing above the streets, which may as well have been the world, I listened to the silence of noise; it became relative. Although all around me everyone was talking about things that don’t and never will matter, it was silent. My partner at my bootstrap, we focused our elastic eyes at the epilepsy of city lights. Everything is always yellow, because if it were white, it would be cold, but it is warm because it is yellow. This can’t be a mistake; urban planning can and will allow for heart and warmth to slip through the cracks, guided by preference for “natural lighting” in the unnatural phenomenon that is a hive human of activity. There were fountains on my right and left that were far too beautiful for the venue; real red-blooded adults carelessly tossed cigarettes and paper weapons into the water, which was lit up by underwater florescent lights. People were eating and pointing plastic guns at unsuspecting Baltimorians who likely wield real guns. It was a strange time and place to be alive. I felt like a guest at a dinner party populated by ghoulish, sloppy losers. After doing what it is we do at this sorts of things – watching people with a suspicion not easily whitewashed – we wearily descended empty staircases, breathlessly avoiding security guards and gently staring into the face of inevitable disappointment. We would end up finding ourselves in some sort of game lounge; it was identical to the setup I’d witnessed 2 years prior, much as everything there is to witness at Otakon. Time stands still, and there you are, walking through it with your eyes half-opened, or perhaps half-closed. In this massive hall I saw a large number of people, all different and yet the very same; their eyes were glazed and dripped in translucent honey and their mouths were opened and oval-shaped, breathing in the dust of their comrades. It was a LAN party to end all LAN parties, if such a thing exists. On a hundred television sets or maybe more they played the games they would be playing at home, surrounded by people who either understand them or can’t be bothered to care. It was a heavily-guarded room, and for good reason; I couldn’t shake the mental image of someone running down the streets of Baltimore with a 50-inch plasma TV in their hands. Hell, maybe I even considered doing it, if only for a laugh. Such a thing would ultimately end with me being stabbed with a katana carved out of an apple box, and I guess I’m not really intent on putting that on my resume. I left that room feeling preoccupied with my escape, which ended up being a shrug and a waltz out of the front door, a feat which would render me within perilously close range to a security guard. At that point I made my conclusion of the festivities, if such a word can even equate to the pervading nothingness the convention had rendered; it was a lonely sort of retirement to the streets, and the humidity held my breath captive for several seconds. We walked under yellow lights that reflected dimly on cracked pavement. Several explosions erupted from the sky, and in the mirrored surfaces of every building on the block I walked I saw several tens of fireworks pop and snap in the air. It was a Friday, so there must have been an Orioles game ending just a few blocks away; I assume they celebrated their ailing score with colorful explosions, much as they do every Friday night. This was a foreign thing to the denizens of Otakon; they didn’t stand in awe of the free nighttime show, but instead laughably prepared themselves for an aerial terrorist assault, as I heard one man say very loudly. As the explosions continued to ripple and echo amongst the buildings, we took an elevator to the top floor of a very tall parking garage. I stood at the top of that building and let my arms dangle over the heated banister. Once again, we didn’t say a whole lot. There wasn’t much to say. Our eyes peered downward at the sidewalks, guided by street lamps and bullied by dark alleys that plotted themselves at every turn. I considered it closing time in a city that actually sleeps, and traced the footprints of steps I would eventually make far below. In the midst of some haunted hour I can’t be bothered to remember, a lone man dressed as a samurai treaded timidly on those same sidewalks. I couldn’t figure out where he was going or why. In the middle of a fever dream I silently watched him dart into an alleyway that I was sure he’d never been down before, and let the sweat from my brow drip down to where he’d just walked. The sea gave up the dead that were in it, and there I was. Not a soul was saved; no, not one.