Oof. I got home from Seattle around midnight last night and it was a bit hard to fall asleep after the three hour time change, and then I woke up at 6:30 this morning to help my kids get ready for school. I am presently that emoji with the swirly eyes, but let’s write this regardless.

PAX West! Yes, PAX West. Once again, I was working. We caught a reasonably early flight out Wednesday morning. Wednesday, because PAX West runs from Friday through Monday to take advantage of the holiday weekend (in theory, more on that later), and reasonably early because we had extra work to do but I didn’t want to wake up at 4 am to catch the earliest flight to do it (more on that to follow as well).

I mostly read on the plane despite the temptation of Furiosa and the most recent Planet of the Apes movie. Delta flights have wifi now, and I’m not sure if this is a good thing. Yes, I can text my wife in distress from 30,000 feet when some horrible person is using the anonymity of the tightly-packed crowd to get away with making bad smells (as I did on the way home. The texting, not the smells), but sometimes, I think we should be able to properly unplug. There’s a strange, boring dystopian quality to checking Discord in a tube hurtling across the continent in defiance of our earthbound nature, and it’s matched by the isolation work booths for rent in the airport. In contrast, I was thrilled to walk my dog this morning. What was I talking about?

I brought a sandwich and my usual morning shake concoction to eat on the plane. I took some of those desert-dry Biscoff cookies and regretted it. I should have gone with the almonds. Life goes on.

Let the day begin! PAX West used to be entirely contained in the Seattle Convention Center building on Arch St. They finished construction on the Summit building a couple years ago and the show has been split between the two ever since. The Summit building… Upstairs is great, with its skylights and floor-to-ceiling windows. The basement is quite grim in comparison, all industrial surfaces, white walls and grey floor paint. Fortunately, we were upstairs! And this time around, the downstairs area housed console free play and organized RPG games. I’m not sure what was on the third floor this time, I never made it up there. In 2023, a group had a room set up exclusively for Steel Battalion, with its memorably massive controller. I hope they returned so that more people could experience piloting a mech with forty-some levers and switches. Other than that, the Arch St building houses the video game events and presentations.

Now, the trick about the Summit building is that the parking garage has an 8’ 4” clearance. This matters to me (and surely you, as my vicarious witness) because we opted to truck our freight in ourselves in lieu of paying a multi-thousand dollar material handling charge. I made a rental reservation with Penske and called twice to verify that we would have the shorter panel van rather than the high roof van they normally offer. Predictably, this was a waste of time, as on arrival it became immediately clear that they only had the taller option on site. Sigh.

And so I ended up sitting in the parking lot of a nearby pho restaurant making an impromptu U-Hail rental. I try to stay away from U-Haul after being burned by them enough times in the ‘90s while doing band trips, but this time, with their online system, they came through. The vans are beat up with visible grit inside and out and illuminated check engine lights, but all of our stuff fit and we avoided the trouble we saw someone else having. They drove their tall van into the garage, unloaded their merchandise, and the then-relieved van stood an inch taller, scraping the ceiling on the way out. Oops.

This all cost us a precious hour, so we scarfed down the traditional first day Dough Zone meal (because you can’t possibly get in there during the con) and I returned the van while my coworker checked into our AirBNB. I made a mistake with our booking at last year’s PAX West and we ended up with a twenty minute hike through Seattle’s open air drug use zone (more on that later as well). This time I set us up in the queer-er and wealthier Capitol Hill neighborhood, across the street from a park and two blocks from the gym I like to go to. It was nice! Even if the couch I slept on was just a smidge small, and the airplanes roared overhead from six in the morning until ten at night. Such is life in the big city. We hit Trader Joe’s for supplies and called it a night.

Setup. Not much to say here, really. I woke up at 5am with the time change and went to the gym, and then we worked from eight until four, maybe? We set up our structures and placed the products and that was that. I got Piroshky Piroshky for lunch. I liked the vegan chipotle one better than the more traditional potato and mushroom. Nothing exciting happened that night either, I stayed in and watched the first Hobbit movie. Seattle would be a great place to go if you had loads of money to spend on food and drink, but I’m there to work in order to pay for my kids’ ballet lessons and dirt bike track time, so it’s not as thrilling when you’re trying to be frugal.

The show. Four days of retail, hooray. It’s fine, really. We had sunlight and the light crowd was a stark contrast to the crush of GenCon just a few short weeks ago, but the crush also helped make the time fly by. I gambled and lost the first day at lunch with Just Poké. Normally it’s quite good, but I tried to make the easy choice of going with the menu Crispy Tofu bowl rather than making my own. I left the creamy-looking sauce off and that was probably what threw the flavor off. The chili onion looked like it either had bonito or pencil shavings in it. The rest was fine. Oh well. I got a salad from Trader Joe’s for dinner. I like how their salads rely heavily on cabbage. Cheap and shelf stable!

Friday was light compared to the previous year and I was a bit concerned, but Saturday made up for it and then some. And then Sunday was weak, but Monday was up! An impressive sounding sixty percent up over last year’s Labor Day, which sounds great until I point out that one hundred sixty percent of next-to-nothing still isn’t much. Convention sales normally follow a predictable line upwards from Thursday’s slow start to Saturday’s peak, and then Sunday falls off, but at PAX West, you get a Sunday drop-off and a Monday drop-even-further. It’s a much more casual crowd than GenCon’s hardcore consumers, and I have to imagine a lot of video gamers never even make it to the Summit building.

More food. I anticipated this might be my last trip to Seattle for the foreseeable future (foreshadowing!), so I wanted to hit a couple spots. Kati Vegan Thai was my big splurge. I had a Thai ice tea float, two appetizers, and some more coconut ice cream. It was expensive but so, so good. I think I was the only person there who wasn’t on a fancy date, but I’m worth it. The next night we went to Razzi’s Pizza which has an absurdly long vegan menu. Again, so good. I had an oddball NW Mexican pizza and it was great. I made it to Life on Mars, a vegan bar and vinyl record library of sorts, for brunch on Sunday and I’m glad I did. Biang Biang Noodles was interesting but not really worth the price. The Field Roast hot dog from Pike’s downstairs was as good or better. Oh well, can’t win them all.

Get out of Denver, baby! And so on Sunday I left the booth midday to pick up our rental van. The show ended, we set a new record for tear down speed, loaded the van, and left it in the parking garage overnight. Expensive, but convenient. We set out bright and early Tuesday morning, drove the van to the freight terminal, and loaded all of our stuff back onto our pallets. I dropped my coworker at the airport, returned the van, caught the train back to the airport, overpaid for a tofu and sweet potato burrito, and finally got on the plane to head home. I finished the beginner sword quest in Breath of the Wild (maximum stress, you get sent back to the start if you fail at any point), read some Elric, Spider-Man 2099, and Outcast Silver Raiders, and finally, finally, got home late last night. My little dog was very happy to see me, and I, him.

Soundtrack. I kept up my dig into New Model Army from GenCon and listened to Thunder and Consolation quite a few times, as well as the bonus tracks from the Ghost of Cain. Truly exceptional stuff. At some point I got cranky and switched over to Sepultura Arise and a few tracks from Chaos AD. I love the Cthulhoid cover from Arise, it really stands out.

So, yeah. It was alright. I got to see a couple friends, but not as many as at Midwest or east coast shows. My local Seattle friends were busy, so that was disappointing but understandable. Apparently the D&D games downstairs were packed and people were excited about the new Players Handbook. I got a pair of big spiffy twenty-sided dice for my kids to misplace, and I helped some friends get the convention-exclusive Star Wars Unlimited set. Definitely saw some outdoor drug use and crossed the street to avoid a guy who was yelling at a closed ramen shop’s window Sunday morning. Seattle is rough like that. It doesn’t seem like the tolerance of open drug use and homelessness really helps anyone, but of course, they’re complicated issues, and it’s nigh-on impossible to force someone off street drugs or to take their meds (“not those drugs, these drugs!”), but it’s cast in a particularly harsh light by the wealth disparity on display. I probably couldn’t afford to regularly eat at that ramen shop if it was here at home with those prices. I don’t know, it’s all rough to witness.

So long, Seattle. So that might be my last trip there in this capacity. When I started doing convention management, my wife had a travel job too, but she worked from home most of the time. It was pretty easy for one of us to take care of the kids while the other parent was away. She has since gone back to on-site work at the hospital and it isn’t nearly as easy to wrangle the kids as it used to be. I still enjoy the road, but I want to be home too. I was only home for fifteen days in August and it wore me out somewhat. I want to lift in my garage and make my own meals and paint minis, and more than anything, I want to be here for the people in my life. I’m not sure if I’ll go to PAX Unplugged, and I’m not sure what my next step will be if I don’t. I guess we’ll see!