YEARS AGO—
I drove down to Los Angeles with my cousin to cover the Electronic Entertainment Expo. My friend Cara was gonna give me $100 to write a little thing about it, and then it’d show up in Paste Magazine, or whatever. I had this childish dream that I would write something so good that somebody would give me a job and then I could do that thing full-time. Of course I never even got into the convention center, never saw a single game, never interviewed a single developer, never even did anything even remotely journalistic, which really was my goal! And so Jack and I just sort of puttered around LA in our decommissioned police car eating pills and mushrooms and smoking cigarettes. It was a mad, bad week . . . and I think about it all the time. It has, in many ways, come to typify my life since then—has become part of my public history!
My god, this was five years ago next month. E3 is June 11th, for shit’s sake! I’ve asked my friend Brandon if he can smuggle me in this year. Maybe I’ll just go for two days or so. If I wrote anything about it, I would do it completely differently, but I would still bring a snuffbox full of drugs with me, because there’s really no way you can take it straight down there. . . .
Anyway! It never went anywhere. I ended up writing some insanely stupid 25k-word piece about not getting in. Brandon, bless his heart, posted it on insertcredit dot com, which was a website I read when I was in high school, (and how I ended up meeting him and Tim and McCune, and on and on—essentially all my Oakland Dudes, et cetera~).
So it went up, and absolutely nothing happened. I think I got maybe two emails about it and that was that. I guess nobody is ever going to pay me to write something again. Oh well.
I once asked my cousin if he read it, and his only response was: “Yeah.” (lol)
Man, I’m just remembering that I flat out ran out of money when I was there. I can’t even remember how I got home. I think someone had to wire me money. See, I was counting on being paid for the article while I was there, which is insane to think about in retrospect. Why did I think that would happen? But yeah, I needed money to gun it back to Oakland in the cop car, and someone felt bad for me and helped me out, which is par for the course.
It wasn’t a fun trip, but I miss the hell out of it. I’m glad I wrote it all down, at any rate. Everything happened as I wrote it, too. Part of me died, and part of me was reborn. It was horrifying and beautiful, but then all noble things are. I sure do miss having someone to get wild with like that. Nowadays it’s just me. . . .
I actually created a DELUXE VERSION to sell on my store, which I guess I’ll put up soon. I just need to prepare myself for nobody to care all over again. Such is life!!!
For now, HERE IT IS:
If you do hate yourself enough to read it, would you mind letting me know? I don’t care if you tell me it sucks. I know it sucks. I just . . . wanna know~
