By the time I get to Arizona: or How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love Wi-Fi

9:00pm Austin: I mentioned I'm at the show free of charge right? Well when my friend Felicia comes through with a score...she comes through hard core. Turns out the Harangatang was sitting on EIGHT more THREE DAY PASSES!. Obviously when I heard this $ signs when off in my eyes like Scrooge McDuck.

Me in Cartoon form.

Felicia was just going to sit on them. I couldn't allow this. The Gods of karma have taught me a few things, so I didn't shoot for the moon. Get humble w/ your asking price and move on. I posted a quick Craigslist ad offering eight tix at $100 a pop. That is an absolute STEAL for the full three day festival show.

Felicia was ready for her Indecent Proposal moment..but she had a extreme fear of paper cuts.

After that we headed out for a Good ol' Austin home cooked dinner. That's when the floodgates opened up. My blackberry blew up with hundreds of requests. We set up shop on the outside patio and waited for our scalpees. Truth be told it was both exciting and exhausting. With the price so low I felt like I had to act my way into making them trust me...and trust the validity of the the tickets. One woman took twenty minutes AND asked to see my ID. I should have told her the deal was off...but I was lazy, and my chicken rib eye** was getting cold. All in all we pulled in $800 and I was able to pull of an impromptu survey with the buyers: Who are you going to see? Muse or Arcade Fire. 100% of the people responded, rather quickly I might add, w/ Muse. You heard it here first, Austin loves Muse. The worst part was I did a poor job of keeping track of my oral agreement for the tickets and had to watch from the restaurant's patio as some dude texted me that he was waiting to get his ticket. I wrote back "Sorry bro, we just left and all the tickets are gone!" I watched him read the text and immediately hang is head in sadness and shuffle away into the night. I was dying to take a picture...but Felicia thought it would be in poor taste. Yeah...like she knows anything about poor taste.
Might I submit exhibit A:

Felicia getting ready to"make it rain" on some Austin strippers.

My only regret is I earmarked a ticket for "Amy Maples" and I somehow ended up short one. I earmarked it for her because I liked her name when she emailed me. Amy, if you're out there, I'm sorry. I blame the heat...or maybe the chicken. Next time you're my 1st person!

With the recap I'm closing my blogging out for day one. Now on to spending our ill gotten money.

**Chicken Rib Eye = All dark meat deep fried. If you ever have to eat the dark meat, which I'm NOT a fan of, this is the way to go.

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11:30am Phoenix: That's right you worker drones I'm off...and what am I doing with my spare time? Yep, sitting on the airport floor ready to begin Blogfest 2007. You can thank the good people at US Airways and their shitty ass routes for this. LA to Phoenix? What a useless flight. Just send me directly to Austin you jackasses. On the plus side, Phoenix does offer free wifi, which is just about the coolest public service anyone can offer. Cons: EVERYONE is VERY old here. The cart people are everywhere!

The poor old man could not catch up to the Seat Cart Driver.

I'd love to go on about this guy, and some other things, but I'm gonna board now...time to keep my Cal Ripken-esque streak alive. I ALWAYS get seated next to the elderly or foreign people. ALWAYS! If I'm REALLY lucky I might get an elderly foreign couple. Wish me luck.

Update: Call me "The Iron Horse" because my streak is alive.

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LAX 7:30 am: My father instilled in me the Travel Day panic at an early age. Any one who has had the misfortune of traveling with me knows I suggest, correction: I demand that we be at the airport super early. I’m a mess until I’ve gotten through security then everything is Zen. I’d much rather be forced to kill time at LAX then deal with the possibility of actually missing a flight and having to reschedule. Why deal with that nightmare. To me that seems like calculus and people who choose to own cats: Things I just can’t understand and things I just don’t want to understand. Being at the airport early gives you the opportunity to come across some interesting things. Take this AM for example:

I hit the newsstand and flipped through Entertainment Weekly…which for this week turned into US Weekly as they burned way too many pages on the post VMA Britney Spears recap.

• She’s on drugs and lethargic
• Not as toned as she was in the “I’m a Slave” video
• A bad lip-synched

Holy shit thanks for the recap. I get it. Since when did EW turn into Perez Hilton anyway? While browsing through the rest of the magazine my eyes caught a magazine on the bottom rack named “Girls”. I had to check it out….but weirdly it had what looked like a receipt taped to it.

Good Girls Gone Bad? I wonder if Britney Spears is in it!

Upon closer investigation it became clear that it was not in fact a receipt but a return slip. The kicker: the reason for the return was written on the slip as”DAMAGED”. WTF... My guess is any “damage” done to this kind of magazine may make it a hard re-sell. Shame on you LAX.

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6:00AM Santa Monica: Fact, I come from a long line of “I gotta get to the Airport early” maniacs. My flight this AM was at 9:30…and like a crazy old senior citizen I was up at 5:30am.

This is my nightstand in my bedroom. Classy I know.

Interep pay check as a coaster. BBC DVDs, Miller Lite and a RCA alarm clock that thanks to the camera is pretending to be alive. It has actually been blinking the time* for three months now since I switched rooms in my apt. It’s a showpiece now. I wake up to my blackberry “Baba O Reilly” ringtone.

* The beauty of the blinking alarm clock is that it doesn't stay blinking as “12:00 am” like oh so many vcrs of the 80’s…no it actually is almost keeping pace w/ the actual time, When it reads 6:00 the actual time is 5:45. Pretty sad I know.