GDC: The Home Stretch

By Steven Crews | March 27, 2009 | | Filed under: Editorials | Tags: GDC 09

Conventions are funny things. I look forward to the big ones for months, thinking of all the people I only get to meet in person at them a few times a year. I spend a week beforehand packing, repacking, and then re-repacking with all the things I forgot to pack the first two times.

The initial hours after arrival are always the smoothest. The strains of walking for miles with 30lbs of camera and computer equipment strapped to my back have not yet begun to sink in. I’m well rested, my energy levels are high. My mind is sharp, and witticisms flow easily from my lips.

By the second day cracks are starting to appear in my facade of professionalism. I begin slipping up in conversations, making remarks that no respectable journalist (which is what I try to pass myself off as, often unsuccessfully) would ever say.

“Mark my words: That game is going down faster than a two dollar whore on Broadway.”

The 30lbs of equipment suddenly starts to feel more like a hundred and thirty. My body somehow manages to age fifty years in three days.

I return to where I’m staying each subsequent night more drenched in sweat than the last; hair ragged, skin flushed, not so much walking as lurching across the threshold.

I throw my bags down on the floor with a relieved groan, shed my clothing, and promptly take a half dozen pills before crawling beneath the covers, wishing there were twelve extra hours in the day and that I could sleep through all of them.

The pills never work. I wake at 3AM and toss and turn until dawn. Insomnia begins to take its toll, and lack of sleep leads to increasing incoherence.

“So uh… um… do you feel that uh…. you know, I… I lost my train of thought!”

By the final day of the con I have trouble determining waking dreams from reality. I develop tunnel vision, and the world begins to consist of nothing more than the face of the person I am supposed to be interviewing and the booming report of their voice in my migraine-addled ears.

I occasionally try to smile and nod in the right places to make it seem to them like I’m following along, but all I’m thinking of at that point is the sweet journey home, to my own bed, where I plan to spend the next several days in a state of total unconsciousness which is rivaled only by the grave.

The last day of GDC is tomorrow. We’re heading into the home stretch now.