Todd Terwilliger

I spent most of last night ensconced at the Brooklyn Public House which is, depending on who you talk to, either the best or worst new edition to my home turf of Fort Greene/Clinton Hill in Brooklyn. That it is a sign of the times for the neighborhood, no one questions. What it means, on the other hand, is up for debate, fierce debate. This is the chief problem with divination, ever since the first disheveled Homeric sage squinted his eyes into a muddle of thrown bones or a strange bird formation: one man’s vision of a divine face is another man’s vision of a lumpy Abe Vigoda. What the devil does it all mean? Everybody sees something different. This only is beyond a doubt: the neighborhood, it is a’ changing. You don’t have to venture inside the latest gastropub to see it, it’s there in the street. Just look at the cabs.

I realized that yesterday, I went into very little specifics about what I saw at the con. This is not due to some blindness or memory lapse on my part but rather the nature of my particular interest. For me, the con was less a fact-finding mission to glean secrets profound about anything than it was all about the journey, the experience mentally, physically, and metaphysically, in the con itself.

A Facebook comment inspired my mind to wander in the direction of ’80s session super-group Toto, specifically the song Africa. Yet, somewhere along the way, I found myself confronted by the lyrics to that other ’80s group, Asia and In the Heat of the Moment. I must confess that I dig the tune but [...]