Adventures with Paton

LONG ENTRY
If you read this, I applaud you

Sunday July 29
Planes all went according to plan except when I arrived. My bag didn’t show up. I’m thought oh great just like Jacksonville; I knew I should have packed that travel toothbrush with me in my purse. I filled out a lost baggage claim they tell me that my bag will get there that evening (its about 3 pm) I was not happy especially since I had the Everybody Else/Rooney concert that night and I wanted to wear something different since I had just seen Rooney on July 19 and I was wearing the same shirt. Ms. Ashbrook picked us up and as we are heading away, the lady at the us airways desk calls and says that the bag actually was on the baggage claim thing and I felt dumb. So brain dead. I checked, Paton saw me check. It wasn’t there! I still believe that lady lied to me that ran and got my bag. Anyway back to driving away from the airport. Paton stopped to get cash so we could pay for things. I had some cash but definitely not enough to live off of for four days. Ms. Ashbrook dropped us off at the house Paton was house-sitting at, so we could pretty ourselves for some hot and talented musicians. Paton hadn’t heard of Everybody Else and we both hadn’t heard of Big City Rock, but who cares we were still excited. Well, I think I was a bit more excited to see Everybody Else again and maybe specifically Austin, haha. We take the nice metrolink and head to the second level. We see the nice Los Angeles ‘river’ as we go and we end up in the desolate station of Pomona, which was about twenty to thirty minutes away by train. We chatted about, what else, but our amazing lives. Lucky Paton only has a two-year school and I hopefully will be able to see her showcase and her graduation next spring in New York. We end up calling a cab to the venue (the glasshouse, which I have heard a lot about and known that Rooney has played there many times.) The show is at seven and the (second) cab shows up around 6:50. Awesome. Obviously we weren’t going to be in the front row and rocking out to them, which is totally cool since I’ve seen Taylor up close and live before and its hard to get a good angle on viewing Everybody Else because there’s only three of them and they sprawl out across the stage. We got to the glasshouse, and the line is long filled with the typical looking Rooney fans, assuming most of them were there to see Rooney. I got my tickets through will call, so I did that a little after we were waiting in line long after seven o’clock had passed. We got our purses checked and they took my nice pens!! I’m so angry. They could say somewhere online and whatnot that pens aren’t aloud. Dumbasses. The glasshouse is a nice sized venue, slightly bigger than the normal small places Everybody Else and Rooney play when they’re on tour. We moseyed on over to stage right so I could say hey to Austin if possible and have a slightly good view of them. I had thought, before the show, that I was going to switch sides to be in front of Taylor to get a good shot of his solos and his amazing play, but that didn’t happen. Paton and I got some liquids and she got some pizza while we waited for Big City Rock to play. They came out and played and were FANTASTIC. They were more rock than the other two bands, which I knew from listening to a bit of their music on their myspace. They had a vibe that channeled The Killers, the perfect mix of rock and synth to make the music super amazing. They played a cover of Ram Jam’s ‘Black Betty,’ which I absolutely loved and I knew the song from the Blow movie soundtrack. I was happy and the show only got better, I thought. Everybody Else was setting up their stuff, like a good band does and all the creepy Carrick groupies behind me to the left kept screaming his name and he kept smiling toward them but I bet he was thinking ‘oh god.’ Poor Mikey and Austin never get loved on. Mikey is so amazingly talented and smart. He plays the drums and keyboards at the same time. I’ve also read his blog and, boy, he knows his stuff. Austin is the newest member since they couldn’t find a person that would fit with the band until they met Austin. He seems to do most of the work after the show, example: he always gets the van and takes the merch and equipment out of the venue to the band. All three load up, because it’s like a puzzle trying to fit all the stuff into the back of their van. Anywayyyy. They played ‘born to do’ first, which I was so not expecting, but it was still awesome because its one of my favorite songs they do and I was still able to record it and get mikey playing the keys and drums simultaneously. Sweet. Carrick’s voice wasn’t doing too well and you can tell on the videos I took. Ouch. Mikey was comical on stage saying they would keep playing more sets if the crowd keeps singing even though Carrick was doing so horribly. I remember on one song Carrick looked to Austin obviously hinting he was struggling and he helped out. On ‘make-up’ they asked some non-talented fans who really didn’t know the words to the song to help them sing. One girl looked very giddy and about twelve years old. That’s what you get when you have some good-looking pop musicians in California playing, but they don’t realize that all of the guys are in their mid/late 20s to early 30s, which is somewhat normal to the person who feels old being in the crowd at one of their concerts. There are the fans that are around the thirteen to sixteen age group then jump to the twenty to twenty-four age group. Back to the show. Paton and I decided not to move over to Taylor’s side like I had planned because I assumed I had a good enough view of him from where I had been moved too, which was in between Matt and Robert, and I knew I was only going to get closer to the Robert because of the groupies trying to get a good view of him. They started with ‘calling the world’ and had the cell phones ringing like the beginning of the song to signal that they were coming on stage and starting. The screams were deafening. I am definitely staying in front of Taylor from now on. We got about right in front of Robert at the end, around the fourth row of people, which wasn’t too bad, but I still had to stand on my tiptoes to get a nice view of Tay. Distraction: As im writing this, stopped at the Fullerton Amtrak station, I notice my EBE sticker on my computer. It’s so funny how they depicted Austin exactly how he is – he’s jumping up with his bass put to his side as he always does during the end of ‘born to do.’ I’m too distracted by the pile of metal and crappy houses right next to the train tracks on the way to Solana Beach. Back to Sunday. Everything ended and I couldn’t hear from all the damn screaming of little girls. We go outside, not even looking or stopping at the merch stuff, but I assume, which they did, that the band members would hang out at their table and meet the fans and everything. The groupies of Carrick compared to the groupies of Robert are nothing. When Robert came out practically every girl who was outside huddled and gravitated toward him like he was Johnny Depp or something. I thought, that he was under the influence of something during the show, but maybe he normally is and this is him sober. I don’t know. I was waiting around and i got to talking to a guy, Marc, who is the drummer in the band The City Drive (i looked on myspace, and they arent my taste in music, but the guy who played the goth kid on big wolf on campus is the lead singer) and he was handing out their free cds. He was cool. I called Gina, so she could talk to Mikey like I had promised her. I left her a message, and then when Mikey came out, he left her a message. He’s quite the entertaining one in person and on stage. Paton quite fancied Andy, the guitarist of Big City Rock, and she was standing around and he kept passing her and she was in lust. I told her she should say hey but she didn’t. I said hey to Carrick and Austin and did my stuff I had to do. We called a cab but I still was working on something, so we didn’t take it. Then Paton called another one but it took damn forever to come so all the bands and everyone left so we just took some creepy pictures. There was a nice guy who worked at the glasshouse who couldn’t leave us alone, which was nice. We got ripped by the stupid cabbie who needed gas money like a creep. We got home and showered and slept all nice. The bed I stayed in was wonderful.

Monday July 30
Universal! I prefer the one in Orlando, specifically because there is more room but the one in Hollywood is nice and cool to see all the sets and everything you can’t see in Orlando. Paton and I rode the lovely Jurassic Park twice just to get soaked then attempted to dry off in Backdraft, which when the big bursts of fire exploded, seriously felt like when I step outside in my current home of Arizona. We rode the mummy, which didn’t fill my desire for an adrenaline rush. We also did the typical studio tour, back to the future, which once you’ve been on the Spiderman ride in Universal Escape, seems slightly fake. We ate delicious dippin’ dots and grabbed dinner at city walk. I forgot to put my memory card back in my camera like a douche so there are only memories in our mind to savor.

Tuesday July 31
ZOO. Paton’s mom works at the zoo, so we got in free and payed a lot more for food instead. We first saw Timon aka the meerkats then followed by the dead looking kangaroo and the other typical caged in animals in the zoo. Next came the spectacular, my favorites; the monkeys. I love them so much. They’re so adorable and so crazily human-like it’s insane to watch them. I got a video of a monkey who was chillaxing on the cage and eating some sunflower seeds. Then we saw the chimps. Hahaha those chimps are glorious. We saw one lying on the ground and we could only put the though of it saying “oh man I ate wayyy too much” or “it’s so damn hot, milk was a bad choice” And of course the infamous one who picked his ass and I had timed my camera recording perfectly to capture it. We then got to Paton’s favorite, the Tiger. She sat there all day (well, as long as she could) to stare at the pretty kitty. We hung out with the wading hippos and once we left of course, they began to feed them. We went around for a while until we were kind of tired and decided to go to Paton mom’s office to rest for another hour until her mom got off work. We made some nice videos, snacked on some munchies from the vending machine. When we got back we just did the usual and sometime during the night, we mentioned Everybody Else and how Paton loved her Big City Rock guitarist and how she enjoyed Austin’s moves on stage, so she imitated him, and I got in on camera because I made her so I could show him. Haha.

Wednesday August 1
We slept in to whenever we wanted to and watched some Spanish soap operas and then decided on season two of sex and the city. I have to say I love the character Steve. I think he’s amazing. Since the air conditioning broke, we were kind of really hot. It felt like my grandparents house in La Jolla, except with no breeze from the ocean. It also didn’t help that I was sitting on a leather couch. We baked a pizza pie and made retarded videos of Paton going around the house and me sounding very mentally retarded and about ten years old in the background and another of me imitating Austin and Paton eating some cereal and the last one of me lying on the floor to cool off and having her throw pieces of Capn Crunch on me while the dogs ate it off of me and even chewed on my hair. How pleasant. We also had fun with the horrible Avril Lavigne song “im with you” and created more tasteful lyrics

sing with avril lavigne's "im with you"
re-titled 'i want you'

I don't know who you are
I don't know where you've been
I don't know if you have syphillis
There's nothing but your rash
no condom wrapped around
I heard you slept with james brown
There's no one trying to fuck me
I guess that you'll have to do

It's a damn hard cock
You tried to jerk off in a sock
Won't you, take me down hardly and thrust into
meeeeeee
I want you
I want you mmmm

I'm looking for a test
I'm searching for ointment
It's way too damn itchy down there
'Cause nothing's smelling right
And everything's a mess
Now no one wants to feel my breast
Doesn't anyone want to fuck me?
I swear i'm not contagious

It's a damn hard cock
You tried to jerk off in a sock
Won't you take me down hardly and thrust into
meeeeeee
I want you
I want you mmmm

Why is everything just oozing?
Maybe an infection of my mind
yea yea yea, yea yea, yea yea, yea yea, yeaaaaaaaaaaaaayea

Chorus until end

lyrics rewritten by paton and skyler

Thursday August 2
We had to get up earlier than normal and cleaned up and I packed. Paton and I messed around with our computers as I tested her on her Joni Mitchell knowledge, which she passed. We had some laughs and went over to her house so her mom could easily pick us up to go to the train station. I said my goodbyes and I was on the 784 train to Solana beach so my ma can pick me up and we can go eat some Mexican food. I was hoping for Nati’s, but it’s too far from where the station is. The ocean finally peaked out of the trees. I picked the perfect side to just sit and watch the waters. For some reason I feel older, yes I know my birthday was a week or so ago, but I guess traveling by myself when I’ve gotten older and not living with my parents for a little while who make me feel like I’m fourteen has finally helped me feel nineteen.

Friday August 3
My mom and I were planning to go see the Dead Sea Scrolls at the museum, but we decided that we didn’t have enough time. We drove back to the land of the dead filled with death heat.
HOT ROD