It's early Monday morning and we have finally returned from Dallas. Friday night went well, and Saturday during the day was good, too. I never got to take Kelly to dinner, though. I never even got to ask her. Sometimes I wonder why I'm still friends with Beecher.
After my last entry, I went to a panel with the full intention of heckling, but for once the panelists seemed somewhat well-informed and didn't treat the audience like a group of dumbasses. I was too busy paying attention to do any actual heckling. After the panel is when the problems started.
I left the panel a little after 4 pm and found Beecher still at the bar with a tab in excess of $250. He was also talking to some redhead named Betty, or Betsy or whatever about climbing. Seems she was a climber too. At any rate, he rambled on about this for a while and then decided he was hungry and wanted to go get dinner like we had planned earlier. This did not mesh well with my plans to see if Kelly was available, but he was insistent. He refused to eat at the hotel restaurant (I can't really say I blame him), and didn't want any of the food around the hotel. Since he was too smashed to drive, yet sober enough to realize this, that meant that I would be driving his drunk ass to some restaurant. I don't really like driving in Dallas. However, as I was about to convince him that he didn't really need to drive anywhere to get food, Jason showed up from wherever he went and said he'd heard about some restaurant he wanted to try. Fine, whatever. This is where I loaned Beecher $175 to cover his bar tab.
Two hours later, we still haven't found this restaurant Jason was talking about and Beecher was taking a tour of gas station bathrooms to do a little intestinal redecorating. $250 worth of cheap drinks will do that to a person. I am now, of course, very pissed off. I'm driving Beecher's jeep around a city I'd rather not be in, with Beecher puking like clockwork and Jason being the whiniest I've heard him be in a while. This was *definitely* not the way I'd intended to spend the evening.
I finally gave up and pulled into a McDonald's at 6:45. Jason was going to complain, but his three working brain cells came to the correct conclusion that, had he said anything, he would be hitchhiking back to school today. This is where I loan Beecher $5.38 for dinner, since he lost his wallet at one of the gas station restrooms.
After our gourmet meal of soy and grease, we started back-tracking through the gas stations we could at least remember visiting. This is the only good part of the evening. His wallet was at the third one we tried. $10 lighter than when he'd last had it, but in an effort to prevent the still-drunk Beecher from starting a brawl, I just gave him $10 out of my wallet and called it a holding fee.
We finally returned to the hotel at 7:45. It took a while to get back since there was some really bad traffic and to avoid it I tried going down a couple back roads I thought I knew. My mistake. By this time most of the programming was over and people were breaking up to get dinner, or play games, or hang out in the bar. Beecher started getting pissed that the bartender wouldn't let him open a tab again. Good. Let him be pissed. I, however, *did* open a tab and settled into a drink while talking to some of the guests and attendees. Things started to look up.
Jason headed off to the gaming room, and I'm not too sure what happened to Beecher for a while. I think he went to take a nap in the room, because when he came back to the bar area around 11 he was more sober and certainly cleaner.
Around 12:30 things started getting worse. Beecher had ingratiated himself with some of the older Cepheids (that sci-fi club from A&M) and had found his way to more booze. He and a couple of the die-hard drinkers invaded the video room for their own personal use. I saw them troop into the room with a large box of alcohol and knew something was up. A little while later, several attendee types left the room upset and I stuck my head in to see why. Seems they'd stopped the movie that was currently playing and had put in Dr. Strangelove. They were also MST3K-ing the heck out of it. Well, at least Beecher was keeping busy.
I decided to get some sleep since we had to drive home today, and went up to the room. Around 3 am I was woken up by the phone. The front desk was asking me to come speak to the night manager on duty about one of the people staying in my room.
I got dressed, and went down to speak to the manager and was told that Beecher had been taken away by the Richardson police department. Wonderful. I asked why and they just mentioned something about creating a disturbance and starting a fight. They were kind enough to give me directions to the Richardson police station. I contemplated going to get him right then, but decided he'd already fucked up my day enough. It wouldn't be the first time he'd had to stay in jail overnight.
The next morning I noticed that the other bed still hadn't been slept in. Now I was getting worried about Jason. He's a whiny little shit sometimes, but he's usually pretty responsible. The panels today didn't really interest me, so I skipped them and just hung out talking to some of the people I'd met the previous day. Picked up a couple books at the book swap, checked the Dealer's Room, etc. I finally ran into Jason a little after lunch. It seems he'd found some guy with an entire case of Bawls the night before and had bought a few off of him. He also ignored the warning on the side mentioning the high levels of caffeine. He didn't want to wake me up, so he spent the night talking to people and, when they finally went to bed, reading a book. I jokingly commented that he was lying to cover up his getting some and he turned a very interesting shade of red. When pressed, he admitted that he didn't actually get anywhere, but he did end up staying awake all night talking to a girl in the video room whose name he couldn't remember.
His mentioning the video room reminded me that I probably should get Beecher out of jail at some point, so after we checked out of the hotel we drove down to the Richardson police station and got Beecher. This is where I paid a $500 fine for public intoxication for Beecher. Beecher swears he'll pay me back soon, but I doubt he'll remember as long as next week.
When we got on the road back to school, I asked the two of them what had happened in the video room. Jason didn't really know much until Beecher and a guy he'd never seen before started yelling about the movie they were watching. Something about Buddy Holly, Las Vegas and Hong Kong. He mentioned that, to illustrate some point about the worthless quality of the movie, Beecher was going to piss in the guy's drink and that's when the guy started the fight. Beecher concurred with this version of the story and added that he wasn't *really* going to piss in the guy's drink. Jason told me that Beecher was really, really drunk at the time, so I'm more inclined to believe Jason on this.
The drive was uneventful until the tire on Beecher's Jeep blew out about an hour outside of Dallas. The spare was flat too. Finding a place to repair tires on a Sunday is nearly impossible. Especially in the middle of nowhere. Fortunately my cell phone provider does a roadside assistance thing, so we were able to have them come out and tow us into the nearest town. Which fortunately had an open garage. Which unfortunately had a shrewd Texas businessman on duty who charged us $50 to fix the flat spare. He offered to sell us a new tire for $150, but I quickly vetoed that against Beecher's protestations that we should get it anyway, just in case. I was having to pay for it since Beecher was broke, so I got to make the decision.
The rest of the drive back was completely uneventful, thank God. Beecher dropped me off at my place and then left to go drop off Jason. I fixed a late dinner and decided to let you all know how badly Beecher fucked up my weekend. Again.
Oh well. MurphyCon is coming up soon and things should start getting better soon. Things are always better at MurphyCon.
GODDAMNIT!
Motherfuckingasshollicking diary just lost my entire fucking entry. Shit!
Ok, short, short version of what I wrote: Christmas sucked. Stuck with parental units. Dog was drunk. Semester's boring. Class is dumb. I might graduate. Fuck the world.
The only thing I feel needs to be covered in-depth is Jason. Little player had two dates for Valentine's Day. Not sure who the first one was, but Beecher dragged me to see the second one. He was out with Snack. I could have *sworn* I had instilled him with better taste in women than that. Skanky whore.
Fuck. I need a drink. hang on, I'm going to the bar.
Ok. Drink makes me happier.
I'm at a science fiction convention at the moment up in Dallas, TX. Some little first year convention called ConDFW. It's ok. Beecher's hitting on the bartender chick. Go figure. She's watering down his drinks trying to get him to leave. His tab is approaching $150 and he hasn't noticed that he's still mostly sober for having had so much "alcohol." Dummy.
He's been alternating between hitting on the bar wench and this very squeeky and bouncing bit of girl called Kelly. She's up here with a group from her university. Cepheid Variable from Texas A&M. Talk about a group of dysfunctional, maladjusted, anti-social weirdos, my god. They came in a group, they go everywhere in a group, and cling together like baby spidermonkeys hang onto their mother's tits.
Kelly's no different, but she seems to have taken the role of the aforementioned spidermonkey mother. She's the one deciding where they eat, what they're doing, where they're going, etc. She's the brains behind the gaggle of freaks. She's also quite cute. Perhaps not the cutest of the bunch, but still very sleek, in that otter kindda way. I like otters. That didn't come out right. She's cute, but not in that standard cute way. Sorta like a wild animal cute way.
Ok, forget that. Just ignore that last paragraph. She's cute. Let's leave it at that. I've been talking to her a while, and she's really cool. Sorta hyper, though. She's really ticklish, and tends to squeek when you poke her. Beecher had no end of fun with that earlier today. I'm going to see if she'd like to join me for dinner this evening. If I can drag her away from the rest of those freaky little spidermonkey Cepheids.
I had a little fun with the dealers earlier. One of the dealers who was selling comic books tried to over-charge me on a book I bought from him. I finally gave up arguing, bought the book, then went down the street to an adult book shop we passed on the drive in. Jason Middleton, the Dealer's Room director, was less than amused to find one of his dealers selling copies of Hog Tied Bitches in between copies of Fantastic Four and Spider-Man. I don't think that dealer will be back again next year.
There's a panel in about 15 minutes on how to start your own gaming company. This should be good for a few laughs. I can just imaging it now: A bunch of middle-aged, overweight geeks who got tired of the available games getting together and creating their own half-assed game. Just because you sold a copy to your friend in the Peace Corps in Guatemala does not make you international. Heckling these bozos should be really easy and entertaining.
Gotta go. Jason's bitching about me having stolen his turn at the computer. Hey, any guy who would take Snack on a date for Valentine's can suck it up and wait.
In fact, I think I'll make him wait. I wonder if this hotel's computer system is adequately protected against intrusion from someone on their DHCP network.
Damn, it is. Well, it's protected well enough from cursory inspection, anyway. A more determined hacker might be able to do something, but I have a panel in 3 minutes I need to heckle at. Not worth it.