Severe Tire Damage.

October 4th to October 18th
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So this post is basically the scraps of things that should have been written when I was in LA before NYC.

Two notes of interest that I never wrote about while I was IN Reno-
1) Waitress girl whose name I'll never know. Because I didn't look at her name tag. (She served dinner to my family, and kept hitting on me. My family's friends then proceeded to try and hook me up with her. Perhaps someday I'll meet her again, and we will party hard?)
2) Two of my parent's friends speak fluent Japanese, one of them teaches medical school in Japan during the winter. I thought it was a little strange that upon immediately returned I coincidentally would run into two people that know so much about where I had just been. Typically you don't hear people talk too much about Japan or Japanese culture.

A third note, I suppose, remember the picture of the largest commercial aircraft (A380) that I took? The Chinese and Japanese governments just put a ban on having sex in it...since it has queen size beds in rooms. Hehe...god knows they didn't ban tentacles though...

My flight from Reno to LA was through Virgin Airlines. LET ME TELL YOU. If you EVER have the chance to fly with them, it's completely worth it. I paid $120 to fly direct from JFK to LAX, so their flights are insanely reasonable, something you may want to keep in mind if you are flying from one major city to another.
Their amenities were fucking LIGHT YEARS ahead of every other airline:


Basically you walk onto the airplane and it looks like this. The purple mood lights are pulsating with faint techno music, semi-reminiscent of a Vegas strip-club/diner. (The lights actually change intensity as you fly, to match the time-zones you are moving throughout.)


So this is coach class, which is pretty damn respectable if you compare it to the shitty carpeted seats every other airline uses.


Every coach seat is leather, and has this nifty little remote device.


That glows.


But does NOT control your TV screen, because the TV is touch screen :) Take THAT Jet Blue.


Basically it just pops out of the seat handle and can be used to control the media you are playing, or...


...you can flip it over and it's a keyboard. You can use that to chat with everyone else on the plane :)


I nabbed a brochure from my seat pocket, check out this other cool shit.


So yeah, here's the remote instruction- pretty basic. The chat room really was a good time!


This page explains that the airline personnel don't wander around the cabin with beverage/snack carts. Instead, you pull up the touch screen menu, place your order, and then they bring it to you. So you can order snacks and drinks throughout the flight WHENEVER you want, without waiting for the stupid cart that always rolls into your foot.


Underneath the seats there are USB and AC outlets to power laptops, video games, etc. I literally just plugged my laptop in and went to town (two blogs down is the post that I wrote while I was on the plane). There's also an ethernet connection that will be up and running in a couple months. Internet and AC power on the plane.
Welcome to the future.


And this is the mech-seat you get in 1st class. It fully reclines and does a bunch of other hoity toity shit. I mean, yeah, it looks nice, but coach class is better than most other airline 1st class seats! So...this just seems over the top to me ;) (of course 1st class seats only cost about $50 more too, which is insanely reasonable).
So yup. That was the bitchin' plane ride I had back to LA :)

On another note: Bioshock is one of the greatest games ever.

When I got back into LA one of the first things I did was grab my car from my old parking garage (where I used to live). It's protected by a remote control gate, so I had to follow a car in to get into it and then wait for someone to open it so that I could get out. It just so happened that a cute looking girl was just getting out of her car, so I asked her if she wouldn't mind opening the gate for me.
After she had helped me, and I had left the garage, it dawned on me what the hell I might as well leave her a thank you note. Not something I would typically do, but I guess I had some sass left in me from Japan? So I went back into the garage and left a note with my number on it on her car.
We talked on the phone a couple times, and hung out once. Now that it's several weeks later I think it's safe to assume it's not going to turn into anything.
C'est la vie.

Previous to that, Brenna helped me shave a mohawk onto my head (as seen in the previous post). It was funny, earlier in the day we were at a farmers market and a few people who seemed to recognize her inquired as to if I was her boyfriend. One guy took it as far as to say, "He's cuter than the guy you were here with last time!"
Just...very reminiscent of the old days. I would visit her from across the country (which doesn't seem so far now) and people would ask if we were together, and when we were together a lot of people would tell us how cute we were together...

I can't help but wonder if someday I'll find that again. It's been a long time since I've really cared...long enough that the emotion seems a vague memory...
C'est la vie.

All my stuff that was in storage was in good shape. Good to see that my entire life, packed into a room, hasn't gone anywhere.

I have a new obsession with curry. Thanks Japan.

One of the more important events that transpired during the short stay was a very...interesting...evening spent with Ms. Lesley. We kicked the night off with smoking a hookah at some very chill "joint", attended a sock puppet rendition of "Showgirls," which then transitioned into eating burgers at Astro Burger while dumping Makers Mark in our cups of coke.
Here's the pamphlet for the sock puppet show, it's equally as outrageous as the performance was. Lesley, if you're reading this, that was one of the best randomly planned nights out I've had in a long LONG time :)





A night or two later I went to Universal Studios with Steve and Alyse. It was all decked out for Halloween, definitely one of the cooler things I've ever done in my...life.




The whole park was filled with fog (from fog machines) and there were awesomely creepy costumed people/employees everywhere, scaring the living shit out of anything female. All of the haunted houses were insanely well done...pretty much what you would expect from one of America's largest movie studios...
We kicked the night off by doing a haunted tram tour of the lot. At a point the tram breaks down and you have to walk through the original set/house of "Psycho", and then through the original plane-crash set of the newer "War of the Worlds," complete with zombie airline crews!
Another key point was the toxic waste zone of the park that had military soldiers screaming through bullhorns to watch out for the infected humans...no one listened.
At one point the Geico caveman danced next to me...that was completely unexpected.

While in NYC Halle Berry's main photographer told me I looked like a turkey, and that he wanted to do a shoot with me. I should have taken him up on it.

And last, but not least, this was last month's cover of Spin magazine:

Something caught my eye about the picture, but I couldn't put my finger on it. After a couple seconds I realized...


...the Bucket of Blood Saloon! If you scroll down to my Reno pictures you'll see that I had just went to that place while I was visiting my parents.
It's a small world eh?
A small...Dave Grohl world...