The Water Street District isn’t much to look at, and doesn’t have much to do … right now. What it does have — much like Fremont Street in downtown Las Vegas about a decade ago — is a rich history and a small number of individuals invested in its future. It also has a city redevelopment agency that’s learned from its hasty decisions made pre-recession, carefully weighing promises by wide-eyed developers while providing a nurturing, welcoming, supportive environment for small business owners.

One of the best coffee shops in town is there (as I’ve written about before), one of the valley’s favorite bakeries, and the area’s only candy making supplier. The Gold Mine Tavern is a local drinking hole AND live music destination (throwing its first full-day festival just a few weeks ago). There’s a farmers market. There are free concerts and art events. So what’s missing?

Guess you’ll have to read my cover story to find out. I spent the last half-year researching it, getting to know a lot of new faces along the way. I also illustrated both the cover for this issue and the editorial comic that accompanies the article inside. While it’s not my first cover story for Seven, it IS my first cover illustration, and I’m pretty happy with the way it turned out. Hope you agree.

I plan to continue keeping an eye on Henderson’s own Main Street, U.S.A., and while my article was written objectively, the underdog-lover in me is rooting for Water Street. It could be the quiet, friendly, small-town alternative to the crazy boom and drama bubbling up in downtown Vegas. But only if people want it.

It’s been a while since the last system reboot (I actually think it was my half-hearted attempt at an all-protein diet back in December 2011), and I’ve been feeling kinda blergh lately, so I decided to try and squeeze in a four-or-five-day detox between weekends. But while shopping for groceries for this week, I noticed something different from previous instances: My diet didn’t really require that much adjustment.

See, I’ve already changed my regular diet (and I use the word “diet” the way it should be used, akin to “climate,” as opposed to “weather,” if that analogy makes sense) to eliminate most (but not all) processed, sugary foods, especially “refined” starches. Where I used to eat sandwiches several days a week, I eat salads instead. Where I used to have waffles or toast for breakfast, I have Greek yogurt and fruit instead (that being the rare dairy I take in). I take my peanut butter (ingredients: peanuts, salt) with celery or apples. I drink tea instead of soda. You get the idea. Now, I do splurge once or twice a week on pasta or pizza (and liquor, sweet, sweet liquor), but by making those the exceptions, not the rules, I’m back down to an appropriate weight for my build and my face is no longer puffy like it was in the driver’s license photo no one seems to believe is me.

So, the only major change this week is eschewing yogurt, fish and soy products from my regular diet (and liquor, my old friend liquor), when you get right down to it. And I cheated a little by stocking up on raw, vegan prepared meals and snacks from Go Raw Cafe. But they’re DELICIOUS, and by default abide by my guidelines.*

I won’t likely be doing a daily blog as I have before, because, well, it’s not that interesting. Besides, I’ll have more exciting things about which to blog, hopefully. In the meantime, I’m gonna go make a vegetable curry.

*Seriously, crazy delicious. Especially the deserts. All of the flavor, barely any of the guilt.

This weekend, I attended the funeral of a friend who I hadn’t seen or really talked to much at all in the last 20 years. Stacey was, unarguably, my best friend during my sophomore year of high school. She was one of the first people to befriend me as a new student at Bonanza High School (my family had just moved back to Las Vegas after about a year-and-a-half in Pennsylvania), and it was through her that I met almost every other friend that year, as well as a few girlfriends and, indirectly through geography, my brother from another mother Jason (then known only as Jason Blackhair, not to confuse him with Jason Blondhair, who both lived in the same apartment complex).

Stacey and the whole gang that comprised kids living both at Summerhill Pointe and Canyon Lake apartments near the Lakes neighborhood of Las Vegas became the cast in the movie of my life at the time. We all shared the same adventures and experiences, whether it was playing softball in the empty lot next to Summerhill Pointe, spotting Corey Feldman during a trip to the Wet ‘n’ Wild water park, or getting drunk on New Year’s Eve at Stacey’s apartment — a place where we all spent a lot of time, her mom, dad and two brothers adopting us all as honorary family members.

By my junior year, however, my interests had started to diversify and my attentions wandered. I was working full-time, meeting new people through that job, and getting exposed to a whole different side (literally) of Las Vegas thanks to Jason and the new friends I’d gotten to know through him. This new crowd was mostly older or attending other schools, made up of a lot of punks and goths and sexually diverse kids, and for the most part, the old gang up at the Lakes was, well, not really gelling with these new factions in my life. Both the girl I dated steadily for most of my sophomore and junior years (Teresa) and Stacey (along with many others) ended up transferring to a new high school the next year, essentially putting the final nail in the coffin of our friendship at the time.

I went many years without seeing or talking to most of those people, including Stacey. But as we all know too well, the advent of sites such as MySpace and Facebook changed the way we connect/reconnect with the people in our lives. Stacey joined Facebook a few years ago, but she didn’t really use it. It was only through trading messages with Teresa that I learned Stacey’s entire family — first, her younger brother, Pete, then her older brother, Paul, then both her parents — all died within a few years. Stacey — who had three children of her own — was also dealing with her own poor health (she always had really bad asthma) and a divorce on top of it. It was again through Facebook last December when another mutual friend from the old ‘hood let me know that Stacey was in the hospital with advanced lung disease, failing organs, and likely would not make it much longer, and strongly suggested I should see her before it was too late.

I heard a story on NPR a few weeks ago about the negative effect of these digital connections we make. How they’re extending people’s grief both by exposing them longer to the active digital memory of a lost loved one, but also by exposing a greater number of people to those who pass to whom we’d normally not still be connected. The latter was happening to me first-hand. I hadn’t thought about Stacey or her family much at all in the last two decades, except for running across a photo while cleaning out files. We hadn’t talked — not even via social network. And yet, here was the reality: My once-best friend was on her death bed, and suddenly the past was present and had to be dealt with.

Slightly lower on my discomfort list, but definitely in the top 10, are hospitals. I mean, I know most people don’t like hospitals, but for me, it’s even weirder, because there have been so very few times in my life I’ve been in one, aside from a few births and (sadly) a few deaths. I’ve personally only gone to a hospital for my own health needs ONCE, and it was Boulder City Hospital, so it was more like a medical center. I know it makes the person you’re coming to see feel better or whatever, but to me, hospitals are a place you go to have a service provided. A behind-closed-doors kind of place. I wouldn’t want anyone to visit me at home when I’m sick; why would I want to do that in a hospital?

Plus — and this is self-damning — my own personal discomfort with death is entirely rational; that is, I don’t really have an emotional reaction to it, at least not an apparently sympathetic one. I’m a guy who’s full of hope and joy, and I feel pain and fear and all that stuff, but I’m not really good at relating to other people when it comes to sadness. I guess I’m just not good at empathy, really; sympathy I can at least muster up.

Anyway, I wrestled with the decision to go see Stacey in the hospital. I was told she was barely conscious, and when she was, she wasn’t lucid. I didn’t see the point in being there “for her” if she wasn’t aware I was there. But I ultimately decided no matter what, the “right” thing to do was to go see her. And all of my worst assumptions were true. Stacey was drugged up and unable to speak due to breathing tubes. Even if she was aware of who was this person entering her tiny ICU room, she was too far out of it to even write a message on a board. And worst, Stacey didn’t look like Stacey. It wasn’t just the sort-of “this person gained weight/went bald/got a sex change” cognitive dissonance you typically expect from seeing someone for the first time in 20 years. Stacey was barely recognizable as a human being at that point. She was a mass of flesh held together by wires and tubes, a shocking and sad sight that, honestly, I think does no service to my or anyone else’s memory of the vibrant, joyful person she once was.

Stacey never got better. She finally passed on April 19. Stacey Dyane (Brown) Schenck was 36. She is survived by her three children, Carissa, Cody, and Cannon.

Writing about something that doesn’t exist yet is always tricky. Same goes for writing about a show without seeing it, or a band without interviewing its members. I’ve managed to pull all of these off — hell, at VEGAS.com, that was practically in the job description — but it doesn’t make a writer’s life any easier. However, even though the new restaurant/nightclub/entertainment complex Hakkasan Las Vegas wasn’t open (or even finished construction) when I filed my most recent M Life Magazine cover story on its star DJ, Tiësto, I did spend a good amount of time talking to both the acclaimed dance music producer and Neil Moffitt, the man behind Angel Management Group, which helped bring global brand Hakkasan to the MGM Grand Resort & Casino.

An event I did attend and wrote about in the same issue, however, was MGM Resorts International’s “Inspiring Our World” musical spectacular (way back in December), which was basically the world’s coolest human resources diversity training event … on steroids. Seriously, after spending 90 minutes watching MGM Resorts employees get pumped up about corporate initiatives through song, dance and insanely heartfelt storytelling, I was close to asking for an employment application. But I’ll settle for just being tangentially employee-like in my 1099-filing glory.

Photo by Geoff Carter, from the 2010 Emerald City Comicon.

The last time I tabled at Emerald City Comicon in Seattle was 2010. The show was relatively new, and only ran Saturday-Sunday. I was also relatively new (to the comic scene), and as you can see by the lack of items on my table, only had a few comics there to shill, and not much else. I had just entered the fray in 2009 with my lil’ publishing start-up, Pop! Goes the Icon, and although I’d done well locally with the first print collection of my own webcomic, The Utopian, the first issue of Omega Comics Presents, Pop!’s flagship anthology series, went over like a lead balloon … and almost had me throwing in the towel.

Well, it’s 2013, and in one week from today, I’ll be back in the City that Spawned Grunge for my first return to Emerald City Comicon since then. The show is now a three-day event spanning multiple levels and wings of the Washington State Convention Center, with a projected attendance of more than 80,000 comic-loving people. In the interim years, The Utopian went on to see four print comics, a collected trade paperback, and a sequel webcomic, The Utopian Foundation, that I really should be working on right now. Pop! Goes the Icon has put out four more issues of Omega Comics Presents, our first color one last year. We’ve published two anthologies, in 2010 and 2011, benefitting the Las Vegas-Clark County Library District Foundation, with another on the way this year. We’re developing new and exciting properties on the publishing end, and personally, I’m collaborating with new talents to produce all-new comics such as Eastsiders.

So, if you visit Artist Alley table J-09 at ECCC on March 1, 2 or 3, there’ll be plenty to peruse and purchase, but mainly I hope you just stop by to say “hi” and chat for a few minutes. I don’t spend hundreds of dollars on travel to these conventions to sell a few books. It’s nice if it pays for the table or hotel, but for me, a successful comic book convention is one in which I make new friends, see old ones, and forge stronger relationships with the comic creator community in general. Plus, I like to travel, to see new (and old) places, and to meet face-to-face and beer-to-beer with people who are otherwise little more than organized pixels on a computer screen. Here’s a handy map to help find me:

Emerald City is a great show that, despite its growth, is still primarily about comic books, the people who make them, and the people who love to read them. If you live in the area, I highly recommend you attend (assuming tickets are still available). Hope to see you next weekend!

Spread the word, if you would: I’ve put out a call for Las Vegas-based artists/illustrators/cartoonists a few weeks ago to be featured in the next edition of the “Tales From” comic book series, which I’ve been editing/publishing/contributing to for the last few years to raise money for the Vegas Valley Comic Book Festival — more than $2,500 since 2010.

This year’s edition, “Tales from Lost Vegas,” will tell the story of three friends who discover strengths they never knew existed as they face strange characters and terrifying perils inside a secret city buried beneath the streets of Las Vegas. It’s being written by Ed Hawkins, who also developed the concept behind 2011’s “Tales from Fremont Street.” “Tales from Lost Vegas” will be the first full-color, all-ages-friendly entry in the series.

If you or someone you know is interested in being considered for inclusion in this comic, there are two ways to “apply”: submit five to 10 pages of sequential art (not just pin-ups or sketches) digitally via email to editor @ popgoestheicon.com, or — and this is why I’m posting this here — bring said art samples to the in-person, open portfolio review I’m lording over this Saturday, Feb. 16 from noon to 3 p.m. inside Alternate Reality Comics (4110 S. Maryland Parkway, Suite 8). There will be snacks and libations. And me. ME ME ME ME.

But, seriously, please broadcast this out to your networks. We’re looking to get some new blood into this year’s book. And they’ll get PAID … a little bit. Hey, this is a nonprofit thing, man!

Or just come hang out on Saturday and buy some comics. Whatevs.

I realized I’ve been writing for M Life for about two years now. It’s a fun gig, the editors are easy to work with, and I get to dip into topics I otherwise wouldn’t know anything about. But in general, that’s kind-of the bonus to being a journalist of any sort. You don’t have to be an expert on anything, but you kind of become a journeyman on a lot of things. And for people with short attention spans like me, that’s a perfect fit.

I’m working on a few stories for their next issue, one of which will be of particular interest to you nightclub dwellers out there, so stay tuned.

I don’t watch much TV, aside from old episodes of my favorite scripted shows on DVD, and don’t usually pay much attention to any sort of mainstream media, but for some reason, when this show was first announced a month or two back, I had a very visceral reaction. I wanted to do something to counter the negative depiction of both women and my city that this show was putting out (apparently, unsuccessfully) into the world. So I decided to make my own promo video for a “reality” show that would feature the real women of Las Vegas who are contributing to our community in real, positive ways. People whose names are actually known because they’ve been intrenched within their respective industries and have become part of the rich fabric of the actual metropolis in which we live and work, not the imaginary one cooked up by throwing five strangers in front of a camera and playing to their basest emotions.

Here’s the result:

A big thanks goes out to Xania Woodman of Vegas Seven, Kari Haskell of Retro Bakery, Amy Finchem of COLAB Las Vegas, and Ginger Bruner of OurLasVegas for their participation in this. Please, I encourage you to share this on your Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Tumblr or whatever feeds. Go forth and put some positivity out there — some REALITY out there.

And to the producers of Sin City Rules: Thank you for the inspiration. Better luck next time?

If things have seemed quiet around here, it’s because I’ve been working on a lot of projects that are either long-form, or produced way ahead of their publishing dates. So this is the beginning of you seeing the results of work I did in the fall. Plus, there were those holidays things. And, just this week, I’ve fallen victim to The Crud, which sucks, but as one friend pointed out, at least I made it through the holidays relatively healthy. Although, I’m pretty sure it was the excess celebrating during the last month that weakened by immune system in the first place. But either way, I think the worst few days of the cold are behind me, but now I just have to deal with my nose filling up with stuff every 10 minutes.