seriously?.....SERIOUSLY!

Thursday was my first day back to work after the thanksgiving holiday slump, and oh what a day it was. I know this is going to be long, but it's funny....well funny to someone that didn't have to go through it.

Gig is a straightforward event for Infinity to show their '08 prototypes at a trendy club. Whatever, do these all the time right? Holy crap. These events may be out of order. But it doesn't matter, it was FUBAR no matter how you look at it.

So we unload the truck fairly quickly, then just as quickly I realize there is NOTHING I can get started on. Power is coming from a generator which hasn't arrived yet. I'm lighting some cars that haven't arrived yet. Oh wait, I can build my truss....oops, they forgot corner blocks. After a couple hours of stalling and finding little stupid things to keep busy, we start getting some stuff. I got into about 37 (your girlfriend sucked 37 dicks?) arguments with the guy that wasn't in charge who was pretending to be in charge. I really wish he would stop telling me how to be an electrician. He wanted me to put our distro right next to the generator, and run all of this very heavy, very awkward, VERY hard to coil again socapex to the lights. I said screw that, I'll run a small bundle of feeder a hundred feet, then do lighter power cable to the lights. After lots of arguing, I went over his head and got me some feeder.

Generator arrives. Walk up to it with feeder. No cams. They said there would be cams. (Cams are what you plug feeder cable into to power a distro) "Oh well, you can just tie in right?" Great. Fine, my rate just went up for doing a tie in. :-) Not fine :-( See, when you tie in, you have bare copper on the end of a cable that you shove through a hole then tighten a bolt over. There are 5 of them. all of the holes should be vertical. One is horizontal. And it's in the middle. Half way through all this it starts raining. Great. Here's the end result.



HEY, they found two corner blocks. GREAT We can build one of the truss pieces. We decide to start with the step and repeat (the thing that people stand in front of to take photos). So we'll be able to get that up, get the lights focused. YAY. It looked like this. You can see best by looking at the ladder that the ground isn't even close to being level. Then notice the 400 pounds of sand on each side of the thing.



So the plan is we have these four cars to be lit from some truss as well as 4 light trees. Just as I'm at a point that I can start building trees, the police come, and start writing tickets for the cars.



Well this isn't right, cause they have permits for this event right?....WRONG! No permits for anything on the sidewalk or street which means we stop working. Ok, so 4 light trees gets cut to 2, we'll just push them against the building. We do that. "Oh, didn't you know that this door will be the entrance for tonight?" 2 trees is cut to 1. "Oh, and this door is the entrance to the club next door." No trees. As we're all discussing this permit thing, we hear some bad noises, then people yelling. Chris, the rigger was upstairs with the client hanging banners out the window. They both leaned out to talk to someone outside, and BAM, the window slams down on their heads. So hard that if there had only been one person there, we may have seen someone die, or at least be paralyzed. So now we have a rigger with a huge bump on his head, and a client with a gash and huge bump on her head/neck. Now all of this was apparently way too much for the other rigger to handle, which resulted in this...



Yeah, that's the feeder I mentioned before, with a pile of vomit on it. At this point I'm half in shock from all the stupidity, half in shock from the window thing (but at least I didn't puke), and generally not in a good mood. About anything will set me off. I notice that this creepy little Mexican man had walked by about 9 times within the last hour. He walks by again. Because of my not good mood, I decide to yell "Do you have a reason for walking around the block and gawking at us?!" And he says "Yes, women with tools on their belts are sexy." Great. Yeah. This happens A LOT. After we chased the creepy guy away, he notices this guy in a skirt standing in front of an art gallery. The guy in the skirt then procedes to whine and cry about how all these people keep looking at him. Well, don't wear a skirt and tights. This was the point where I started asking for whiskey and the crew chief started asking for a 2 gram line.



We finally got the next delivery with the remaining missing pieces, so they start to build the next truss piece. Same as the first, 10 foot uprights with a 10 foot cross piece to go over one of the cars. It will have all these banners on it and a couple of lights. Where the cross piece is going be there is one of those outdoor gas heaters hanging from an alcove, so we can't just build on the ground and stand it up. We build the two towers, and fight the cross piece behind the heater, almost severing the gas line and hurting a few people. After 20 minutes of fighting it and getting it up there, they cut all the crap that was supposed to be hung from it. So we almost burned the place down and nearly injured 5 people for this:



Yep, ONE light. To make it not so silly, and to compensate for the trees we lost, I threw a few more on it. Here's some of the end result. That car is pretty damn cool. There are 6 cameras on it and a screen on the dash that gives you an overhead view of the car with the views from the cameras blended together. I can't see a practical use for that, but when it comes to centering a car on a carpet for an event such as this, it's pretty helpful. By the end of it all, we had completely bypassed our Plan B, and made it all the way to Plan R. From passerbys I was offered cocaine 7 times, meth 3 times, weed 6 times, and 1 offer for a Puma watch.



The out was a whole different mess. When we got back for it, the event was no where close to being over. I wish I had a photo of what I'm about to describe. They told us to wait on the 3rd floor. We go up there, and it's practically a closet. So there are 8 of us sitting on top of piles of furniture next to a door to the roof that does not close. Did I mention that our dead case storage was on the roof? Not on a balcony outside, ON THE ROOF. The out sucked, a lot. And now it's time to go to another out. That will suck. A lot.

thanksgivings!

Whoa. What a week!

Wednesday: Trek to Paramus. After a more difficult than it should have been trip to IKEA, we now have an actual desk instead of a crappy, very small, folding table. Quality of life has greatly improved as a direct result of the desk. I'm sitting at it right now. We were going to end the day with a much needed dinner at Chili's, but thanks to NJ being messed up, we never actually found the Chili's...

Thursday: Jaime, Gary, Michael, CJ, and Andre (all dancer type friends) came to join us along with Ya Han who had been here all week while on break from U of I. Jaime and Gary made an AWESOME dinner, complete with awesome deserts and awesome homemade hard cider. Definitely one of the best holidays in a long time.

Friday: Food coma. Ate left over pumpkin pie all day. Jason and I came very close to beating Mario 3. We made a trek out to east Queens to find another Chili, this time with success.

Saturday: Desk organization, more Wii playing, laundry....generally productive. I also booked a plane ticket home for the xmas drama, I MEAN festivities....

Today had an excellent Sunday morning of coffee, friselles (see one of my very first posts on this blog), and ESPN NFL countdown. Heading out shortly to watch Da Bears and eat some wings. I really wish I had more days like this. Then again, there are a lot of things I wish I still had. But that aside, things are looking up.

Hey! whatsamattaYOU?

Last week while my friend Mike was in town, we were hanging around Union Square when Jason called to say I had to come home cause he was locked out, in shorts and no shoes. People often like to test their drag racing skills on 47th Street here in Astoria. In this instance, the guy went onto the sidewalk and rammed a neighbors fence. Then when he tried to get back on the street he rammed a street cleaning sign. Jason ran downstairs to get a plate number and call the cops....grabbed the phone, no keys. Oh yeah, our front door automatically locks. It's always bothered me how people drive around here, especially after seeing that this guy went apeshit in the spot that had the weather been warmer, about 8 of the neighbors would have been sitting in.

So all the morbidness of potentially crushed neighbors aside, I LOVE how crazy they are. Reminds me of my grandmother and all the ridiculous things the old greaseballs in Chicago do. When we got back out here, they were all STILL outside staring at the carnage, and discussing how disappointed they were in the NYPD for not immediately showing up to a hit-(a fence)-and-run where no one got hurt and no one got a plate number. Then one of them asked Jason what color the car was. "White." Then the old man yells "No, it was black, I tell ya it was black." Awesome. It's been 4 days. If my fence was destroyed, i would clean the mess, and do any quick necessary repairs until spring when I would get a new fence. No. Not these people. Everything is exactly where they found it, but duct taped to the driveway to preserve the "crime scene." It rained. They were out this morning repairing the tape/preservation job.

But then a drive to the laundromat and grocery store made me again cringe at the sight of the old people. I'm going to film what goes on in that parking lot. Words cannot do it justice.

circus punks and gypsy punks!

October ended with one last visit from my circus family. Cricket and Chelsea came down on Halloween to see the World/Inferno Friendship Society at a club in Brooklyn. The show started off interesting when the fire department showed up because the band was juggling fire on the roof. Once inside, we realized we were the oldest people there by about 10 years, so to cope with that we headed to a room upstairs to get severely f'ed up. Once the band came on, the younger crowd had thinned out. The band was GREAT, but I had to cut out early to get to work the next morning.

Thursday Mike came into town, and we had some drinks in midtown. Friday we wandered around lower Manhattan before having to head back to Astoria to help Jason who got locked out trying to get the plate number of a guy that drove onto the sidewalk and destroyed a neighbor's fence. We went to a local bar for a yummy dinner.

Saturday Mike and I wandered around Central Park and got dinner near Lincoln Center before heading to Terminal 5 for Gogol Bordello with Jason and Dan. Jason had a ticket snafu, but got there about half way through their set. They kicked ass, as usual, but played a surprisingly short set. Still worth it, of course. After the show, we all went to the Playwright for a beer and got some pizza.

It's Sunday, and I'm shitty. I'm very relieved that things will be calming down a bit, as all the fun is wearing on me. That coupled with my stupidface issue is making me exhausted. But I'm deciding to actually take some steps to get through that.