My Postmodern Organizer Big Design Conference Recap

Thursday

While the conference doesn't start until Friday, Thursday, Thursday is the day to be there. The loading and unloading of so-called "swag" and the French mimes with their constant voices telling me to put the books for the bookstore into Ballroom West. So I moved the boxes. All of them. Volunteers telling me something I can't hear like death of a microphone.

Vendors with their giant signage building around me. Handshakes all around. Why do they know my name? There's something about "exhibit coordinator" exhaled lifelessly from the vendor with the nice hair. Alfonzo. Userzoom. The company with nice hair. I wish I had nice hair.

More trips to and from cars with signs, boxes, and other awkwardness. Brian Sullivan's borrowed Hummer is at capacity and so is Brian. I'm bleeding inside from the death grip of hunger. Eating my soul and my Twitter stream.

Thursday night mixer with speakers. Oh there goes Jared Spool walking by. I'm taller than him but his passing crushes my spirit and I collapse into another room only to find Russ Unger staring away from me. Maybe I'm invisible or just really fat.

There is beer in this place. It is the beer of acceptance, the beer of peer pressure. The beer of unobtainable intellect swirling and fizzing. Thoughts abound. Phillip Hunter finds me and I hide inside.

Chris Hester is about, easily talking about design with the micro-celebrities of this plane. There is laughter. Cackling laughter. Adobe people are there. They laugh too. So much laughing.

Friday

I'm late. I'm early. But late.

More vendors. So. Many. Vendors. We've turned SMU into a trade show and no one seems to care. Not one bird falls from the sky. Dead.

Susan Weinschenk speaks and people gather and listen. Heads nod. Tweets tweet. Future books sell. Big Design becomes a blur of activity. Donuts with orange icing mock other donuts with their Aquent sponsored superiority and their heavy-handed yumminess. And Aquent collects people, like a harvester robot. I don't know how many but so many were collected. So many.

It's a day of meet and greet. Some speakers don't show. But fortunately a sub-woofer steps up.

At 1:00 pm, I find myself on a stage. They stare at me. People staring. I talk about ideas I have and it makes attendees argue with each other and I feel bad. But really I don't. Only later do I realize Giovanni Gallucci will mock me, openly and without mercy. Curse him and his western capitalist jackhole persona. I'm only a hippie and am afraid to rush the stage.

B.J. Allen is rushing around getting stuff done. I decide I don't like marathon men both real and in my head.

Mad*Pow after party lets me down because I was hoping to see infected cattle. I think my hearing needs to be checked. But I stay anyway.

Later, Giovanni and I eat dinner together and his monster is turned off. I no longer fear him, but I'm still fat. Ben Smithee watches us both with superior thinness.

Later that night I meet Darren Hall who wears his life on his arms. He connects with me and steals my mojo. I want to curl up into an alien baby fetus. Then I meet Brad Venable. He does voices. Voices. Lots of them. More than the ones in my head.

Saturday

Chris Bernard speaks about John Hughes. Why is everyone so focused on death? Chris finds the Christ figure in all of John Hughes' movies. I am moved. A little. I'm still not sure Maizy is Uncle Buck's Judas.

Can't attend sessions as work needs to be done. I'm jealous of the attendees drinking from the knowledge pouring from the heads of intellects who share at goats. Joshua Bright runs around me making stuff happen. How I loathe his energy and I try to trip him. It doesn't work. Damn.

Like surreal melting clocks, I get pats on the back from people I don't know. But I remain fat.

Lara Becker plans to put a body in the ice chest. She's always thinking behind those glasses. Thinking thoughts.

Jared Spool closes and brings the house down. Literally. Somewhere someone is homeless and wailing about their house.

After party: Jared wears a toga. I become infatuated with Jeremy Johnson's hair. I think he hides things in it like Sweet Lou from the Super Globtrotters. One minute he has all of this camera gear and the next it's gone. I will call him Gizmo from now on.

Beer is poured. Nathan Shedroff is too nice. Something must be wrong with him like he was hatched from a pod. He must be stopped.

Some whacked-out beer commercial is played followed by awkward silence.

Sunday

Nothing.

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Tagged as: Big Design Conference, Humor, postmodern crap