collababortion

Oh, and one more thing

So, Wolverine and the X-Men was in my pulls at Secret Headquarters.

And I never got last month’s issue (#26)

When I was bagging and boarding at home over the weekend, I noticed that my issues skipped from 25 to 27.  I thought that was odd. Tweeted about it.

Brian at Secret Headquarters responded - said that Diamond had shorted him some issues, and that they were backordered.

Well, there are a few things going on here that piss me right the fuck off:

1. When I went to Cosmic Cat yesterday, they had PLENTY of copies of 26. They get distro through Diamond, too, so I don’t understand how Bri Bri was shorted (or why he didn’t maybe make a friendly call and offer to buy some from CC, so he could at least fulfill his loyal customers’ pulls).
2. Why didn’t he say anything about it the week I was shorted? I come in every Wednesday, he KNOWS I’m not going to miss a week. Just say, “Dude, my order was shorted, your copy’s on the way.”
3. On that same note, why didn’t he make sure I had one in my pull and maybe take it out of one of the other customers whose shit just sits and sits (like he bitches about)?
4. I DON’T WANT A REPRINT. That’s part of the reason I subbed in the first place.
5. Brian KNOWS that one of the reasons I stopped buying comics when I was younger was for EXACTLY this reason.  The shop I was going to in Phoenix at the time shorted me some of the final issues of New Mutants, because they were selling really well and they prioritized other customers over the awkward fat teenage girl who came in regularly.  So they sold my copy.  

Welp.

etonia:

I make no secret of my mental illness.

First of all, it’s hard to hide. The times when I go into my shell are obvious. The frustration and anger at not being left alone (as alone as I feel I want to be, that is) ramp up. I lash out. I get angry. I also fear people and hide. I can sit here and rationally explain all of these things to you in text. I can sit and tell you about it and try to give words to how it feels not to want to be around humans, even humans I like.

Of how weird it is to be an extrovert with an illness that keeps me from expressing that part of my personality 75% of the time.

It’s with this knowledge that I want to start the story of why I parted ways with my LCS, Secret Headquarters in Tallahassee, FL.

Unlike other stories you’ll hear of people parting ways with this shop, it doesn’t actually have anything to do with its owner being terrified of men touching one another’s peepees. (Though I’ll be absolutely CLEAR with you right fucking now: If this hadn’t happened first, IT WOULD HAVE HAD EVERYTHING TO DO WITH THAT.)

So my brain started going more unstable than usual in the fall. I started going into full-on hermit mode, which meant that I no longer would attend Wednesday night comics and games time because FUCK YOU HUMANS YOU SCARY. I went to my healthcare provider—the local low income clinic—and the ARNP I see doubled my dosage of buspirone. With the new dosage, due to a different pill size, my monthly cost for this jumped from around $15 to $55. 

Yeah. Sucks to be uninsured. It also…well, it helped some, but not enough. I’m still on this dosage. The clinic has a pharmacy and now that they have income verification for me, I get it for much less, but that is now. Then, it was $55. At the holidays. I work hourly, and the holidays are full of things like days off work. 

No money for comics for Jen. And because people terrify me when I’m down, it was worse because I didn’t want to email the shop and say to just close my file. It wasn’t the right thing to do, I know that, but I didn’t manage to do that until January. I tried to explain via the email, and this is the response I got.

“Your file is permanently closed.”

That’s it. It was exactly the kind of response that I had been prepared for, the kind that told me that while I knew I wasn’t Brian’s friend, we also weren’t friendly acquaintances like I had thought. I was pretty sure he hated me, and expressed this to some friends who were still going to the shop. One of these third parties asked him about it and he said that it was just a “business decision” and that he was apparently worried about me?

Because when you know someone is dealing with severe unipolar depression, a panic disorder, and loads of self-worth issues, the way you deal with things is a terse sentence. I started getting angry. Then I got angrier. I tried to calm down. I sat on it and tried to think rational thoughts but goddamn I was angry. So I called his ass out on Twitter, as I noticed I was no longer following him—a sign, in my mind’s eye, that I had been blocked. 

So I went on a rant. It was childish, but felt GOOD. He said that I had left months worth of merch in that pull box. My bank account said otherwise, that it had been no more than six weeks since the last time I ran debit in there (for $50+). His reply was that it was $137 worth of stuff.

Okay.

It was shitty of me, guys. I know it. I do dumb shit like this and I deserve to be called out on it. What I don’t deserve is to have to provoke it into happening. He apparently banned me from the shop at that point, but by that point I had him blocked because no. No. I did some dumb shit, though I would like to say in my defense that that $137? It was such hard to move titles as Hawkeye, Captain Marvel, and Saga (heh). Maybe there were a couple of volumes of Sailor Moon? That’s real hard to move, too.

So I was banned for $137, the illusion I held that I was worth more to the owner than just a debit card on legs, and my inability to keep my temper when I feel slighted.

Let me now talk about $137. In my time as a patron of the shop, I volunteered on three major occasions: The first Unicorn Party, where I acted as a gofer and generally helped out wherever I could, Free Comic Book Day where I was gofering again, and on the day of the store’s move. I was pretty useless that day thanks to stupid anxiety not letting me sleep, but my father’s Toyota Tundra sure wasn’t useless. Between the free labor and the free use (and gasoline that I paid for, tyvm) of a full-sized pickup truck, I sort of feel like he got his money worth out of me even if he couldn’t move the merch I abandoned.

May I remind you, I abandoned it not because of some trivial bullshit stuff. I abandoned it because my minimum wage-earning ass had to pay for the drugs that help keep me functional enough to work. 

Others who have parted ways with the shop have been more politic about this than I. I can’t. I can’t because to me, this isn’t about Brian’s terror of one dude merrily fellating another on an image the size of a postage stamp. This is about me, and how I was treated. Before this whole Saga thing blew up, I had emailed to apologize for my behavior while things happened. I never got a reply, but for what it’s worth? I did it. I don’t regret apologizing for my bad behavior. 

I’m kind of glad that it happened before now, though.