Yes sirree–I will be a guest at this year’s Toronto Comic Arts Festival, located at the Toronto Reference Library in downtown Toronto, Ontario, Canada.  The show is free, which is well within your price range, and is only held once every two years, so you’ll have plenty of time to recharge your batteries before the next one.  You and I are going to have such a good time together!  I’ll be tabling with my buddies Joe Lambert, Chuck Forsman, and Alexis Frederick-Frost, plus a couple hundred other people nearby, including chums like Scott Campbell, Bryan Lee O’Malley and Hope Larson, and Paul Pope.  The whole massive guest list can be easily accessed at this friendly fuschia hotlink.  I wonder how come no one says “hotlink” anymore?  Because, I mean, that’s awesome, right?  “Hotlink”?

Anyway.  I love Toronto.  Toronto is the only non-American city I’ve traveled to, twice before.  And a beautiful city it is, situated on its Great Lake.  It’s like New York City with less people, much cleaner, and with a ton more Indian restaurants.  DELICIOUS!  I can’t wait to eat all of the food the city is even now preparing for me.  I am thankful in advance for your bounty, Toronto!

The downside of going to Toronto is having to get a passport.  The last two times I just sort of talked my way over the border, submitting to a real chewing out by customs agents who seemed appalled that an American citizen would so shame their country as to leave it without proud proof of citizenship.  So this time I’m getting a passport.  So far I’ve been to the passport office 5 times, and have yet to even get to the point where I’m talking to an agent, except for “Baby, that’s a copy.  You got to have a certified birth certificate or they ain’t gonna take it.”

It costs around $125 to get an expedited passport–basically, you pay the government extra to do its job in less than six weeks, so that you may be allowed to leave the country if you want to.  It cost me $42 to get a certified copy of my birth certificate overnighted from California, and involved a Goldbergian combination of Internet, fax machine, and notary public technology to obtain.  On my first trip to the passport office, it was closed at 4.30.  Second trip–closed on Fridays.  Third trip:  “Baby that’s a copy.”  Fourth trip:  learned that office closes Monday through Thursday at 3pm (discovered at 3.30).  That one’s my fault–I should have noted the hours at trip 1.  Fifth trip:  discovered office takes its lunch between 1 and 2.  Because the 6 hour shift is so grueling that an hour lunch is necessary to keep passport officials from dropping dead right there in front of us. 

So now I’m circling the passport office like a hungry shark, waiting for the perfect chance to dart in and… stand in line with the disconsolate future travellers, present visa seekers, and the rest just people with 2 or 3 crying children who like to stand in lines I’m in. 

But hey.  I’m not complaining.

Also, and unrelated:  as I was drawing the above picture in my sketchbook, I was listening to this old radio program I have on my computer, one of literally hundreds of old radio programs I picked up somewhere.  The show is called “X Minus One,” which I’d never heard of, and it’s pretty fascinating.  Usually I just fast forward through 80% of these radio shows–there’s a reason that radio is mostly dead–but check out the first few seconds of this one: 

[theremin-produced science-whine ascends the scale, as an announcer's voice goes through a liftoff countdown; "X Minus Five, X Minus Four, et cetera.  And then:]

“From the far horizons of the unknown come transcribed tales of new dimensions in time and space.  These are stories of the future; adventures in which you’ll live in a million could-be years, on a thousand may-be worlds…

The National Broadcasting Company presents:

X! x x x x

MINUS! minus minus minus

ONE! one one one!”

How could you not go on listening.  The title of the episode is “Mars Is HEAVEN!”  Another notable point is that this Mars landing occurs on… April 20, 1987.  I was 12!  I actually found something on YouTube that seems to point to it being a Ray Bradbury story–but instead of this radio recording, it’s a kinda lame 3D adaptation.  So no linkee.

Anyway!  Come and see me at TCAF!  I’ll certainly say more about it between now and then, but I wanted to let you know so you could get excited like I am.  Also, in the minus column this week, it looks like I’ll be unable to attend FLUKE down south of me in Athens, Georgia.  Which sucks, because I had a great time last year.  But I’ve got like eight irons in the fire, AND things are heating up for the convention I work for, so my time is dwindling every week…  But listen:  YOU should still go to FLUKE!