Armed with a magic “pre-approved” industry invite to all the seizure-inducing gaming goodness that is the E3 Expo provided to me by one of the bloggers at the Golden Gopher get-together Tuesday I wa very much looking forward to checking out the action. I was hoping to go yesterday, but the trip to the dentist (and the subsequent purge post) left me too drained to do anything but sit home and feel sorry for my self.
Thus today was to be the day. I found that the No. 4 MTA bus stops a scant several blocks from the convention center but I decided I would bike down and thus I began preparations. Shower, check. Camera, check. Spare battery, check. Wallet, check. Backpack, check. Helmet-glove-bike shades, check check and check. Invite, no check.
The most important component of this excursion had gone missing. It was not where I’d left it on my desk the previous night. Nor was it anywhere I spent the next two hours looking. Some of these places include, the basement, the garage, inside my truck, under my truck. The mailbox, the backyard, the washing machine, clothes hanging in the closet, and oh yes… the trash cans. Not just everyone of the relatively sane ones in the house, but the cauldrons of yuck outside.
It was nowhere. To say I had gone apeshit at its disappearance would be an understatement. For the sake of my fragile sanity I decided the only possible explanation was that someone broke into the house while we were sleeping last night and took it. Hey, it’s a valuable and coveted piece of paper…. could happen!
Of course, what happened was that eventually I found it, tucked into the pages of the current issue of Wired, but for the life of me I can’t remember looking at the magazine, much less stowing the invite in it. Hey, maybe whoever broke in last night did it just to screw with my head… yeah, that’s it.
Now that I’d been tearfully reunited with the document, I wasted little time mounting up and rolling The Phoenix on down to the convention center. In front of the south hall I found a lamp post to lock the bike up to and guess what? I’d gone and left the key to the u-lock in my other backpack. At home.
Not ready to throw in the towel I entered the south hall with my bike hopeful that I could find a place to securely stow it while I at least got the arduous registration procedure out of the way. But I forgot to take into account that among the hundreds upon hundreds of attendees and exhibitors and whatnot moving around me, I was the ONLY bipedal lifeform with a helmet on, with my pedal cleats clicking on the agglomerate tile floor while pushing a rather unique looking bike. It didn’t take long for me to become aware of all the oddly expectant looks I and The Phoenix were generating, as if they were waiting for me to commence announcing demos under way at the BlahBlah Booth of a new multi-platform bike messenger game that’s sure to be a hit with over-the-hill cycling enthusiasts like myself!
Either that or I just looked like a freak to them. Anyway, after some half-hearted looks around at the chaos and not seeing a whole lot of potential love in terms of bike storage I just decided to bail and ended up pedaling through my frustrations with a 15-mile bike ride through mid-Wilshire and up into Hollywood before coming back home.
I did stop at Leon Cigars and pick up a couple of his No. 1s. And now I’m going deep into the backyard for a stogie break and just put all of my E3 hopes and dreams behind me.
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