Truesday: Of Mice and Men

Your sober tears of solid slumber went unnoticed by both the lords of the festival and the venues covered by their expansive shadow. They cared not for your feelings of abandonment. Your loneliness. The pangs of the rejected, the disenfranchised.

And so you vowed to yourself that “next year, I’m totally going to be prepared for this shit.” Of course, you had no idea what you meant by that, but whatever. It was still sincere. And it’s not like you didn’t have a general sense of what it was you hoped to achieve. Amidst and amongst drunken conversations which permeated the entire month of April 2006, you bitterly slurred-out a handful of potential plans which rotated around such staggering genius ideas as:

1. Starting a DJ Collective that would “totally kill at one of those day parties for a magazine or some shit. Damn, was that real gasoline in that car bomb or what?!! UP TOP!” This assumed that your song selection and transition skills would be so overwhelmingly brilliant that in some weird-ass Pied-Piper sort of way, everyone within a thirty mile radius would beg you to attend their super-secret Beastie Boys events, and the owners of all the bars would invite you into their homes to have sex with their wives/husbands/hand puppets.

2. Diabolically renting Emo’s for the entire month of March 2007, trading entrance to the place for entrance into other events, thus guaranteeing that you’ll finally get into "wherever the hell Japanese Night happens to be next year, god damnit. Who's drunker than me?!! NO ONE! Alright!"

3. Designing and digging a network of interconnecting underground tunnels with secret entrances into all the venues you’re “pretty sure” would be “kickin’ it ‘live”** during 2007. Your design, while cleverly booze-tarded together on a series of color-coded bar napkins, would have been rendered useless by the gaping crater where the Reddy Ice Alien homeless place used to loom.

While inspired and somewhat creative, your plans were based on the hyper-flawed assumption that you were capable of implementation. I mean, come on. Like you’re going to buy a shovel or back-hoe or whatever the hell DJs use to play music. That crap’s expensive, and on top of that, you’d have to figure out how to use it. Screw that. Effort’s HARD.

What you really need to concentrate on are the parts of the festival which you CAN do something about because you will never, ever-ever-ever, get into Japanese Night. People like us don't win like that, even if we cheat with all our hearts. Clubs. Diamonds.

It's just not in the cards for we lowly spades.

What you need to concentrate on is what you know: Doorfolk, Transportation, and Gimmickry. In other words, you'll be bluffing.

Doorfolk.

They work every night at the same places that you’re eventually going to be denied entrance into. Sure, they’re usually brutal, tank-ish creatures who appear to eat live animals and broken glass for breakfast, but really they’re as normal and decent as your AA sponsor. So get to know them before it’s too late. Get on their good side. Show them that you’re not some well-crafted robot, designed specifically for them to test out wrestling moves and mace. If you walk up to them during Sx without them understanding that you’re just a good person living in their same hometown, and not some shit-slinger from L.A., then you can’t get angry when they don’t make the distinction and embarrass you in front of the smoother-talking aforementioned shit-slingers.

So start now. Get to know that big scary looking guy who usually mans the door. There’s a good chance that he’ll be there with the neon-jacketed Sx slaves and all their badge-checking bravado. If he likes you, there’s a chance that he’ll prove it by letting you into the festivities as a private guest of the bar. It will likely cost you several shots of Jagermeister and perhaps a firmly-gripped handjob. But hey, do you want in or what?

Transportation.

Sweet jesus, if you depend on cabs you will might as well be planning on catching rainbows to and fro. My recommendation is to get a small armada of beater bikes and disperse them throughout the downtown area a couple days before the festival begins. It’ll be like your own Yellow Bike program. Park your car somewhere reasonably close, like Llano, and have a bike there waiting for you. Ride it downtown, lock it up, pray it doesn’t get steam-rolled by some crew of asshole punk kids from somewhere super-punk like Des Moines, and then skip from establishment to establishment by way of the Doorfolk you so cleverly befriended earlier in the month.

If you return to your beater to find it properly beaten and/or pillaged, go unlock the next closest one. I recommend having five $25 Craig’s List bikes involved in this scheme, as there will likely be one local writer who may, perhaps, sorta-likely be serially stripping down beater bikes in the downtown area during the festival after his third day of being blackout drunk. He has little self control, and will not mean it personally. So best to be prepared.

Gimmickry.

This is a sketchy strategy, but it’s been known to work. You need a gimmick. A costume. A funny shirt, hat, foam middle finger, Frylock outfit. SOMETHING. You’d be surprised which venues, especially the rsvp parties, will welcome He-Man and She-Ra (better yet: He-Man and Beast Man, in dubious poses).

What you’re promising an establishment is free entertainment. One more reason that fest-goers will enjoy whatever shitty half-band they have crying into too-tall microphones on a makeshift stage of stacked fruit crates. You need to catch some positive attention. Stand out. Make a kickass impression on whoever controls the entrance. So you can’t just walk up there in a polyprene pineapple suit and demand that they let the big fruits in. That pineapple better fucking dance, sing children’s fables, or tell funny non-racist jokes.

Unless it’s the Vice party. In which case the racist jokes might be your only hope.

*The Service Industries of curiously foreign places such as Glasgow, Osaka, and Milwaukee.
**Yes, you revert to the standard phrasing found on The Fresh Prince of Bellaire when you’re pants-soiling drunk off Lonestar and vodka gimlets.