Wow. Let me be honest for a second. I suck. I woke up at 8 am to get my cat to the vet to have his nads permanently detached. I felt for him but the pound gave him two options: euthanasia or life as a house eunich. From the vet's office I ran around tying up loose ends because I'm going to be gone all week on a feature. I had a couple of meetings, most notably one about a potential toy line through Topco. I had to go tanning and grab polaroid film and so on. Small tasks. I did this of course with a record setting hangover because as it turns out everything they say is true and the older I get the less invincible I become. I still feel like hell.
Between the meetings I picked up a drowsy cat and dropped him off then braved five o'clock traffic. I was home by seven and started catching up on laundry and packing. I took a short break to see Conte but generally have spent the remainder of the night getting my house in order. My friend Natalie has been staying with me. She was scheduled to get me to the airport at 7 am on the dot.
Natalie passed out a few hours ago. The alarms are set. My last load of laundry is in the dryer and everything is ready to go. Somewhere in there I took time to set up a Facebook account because I'm sick of hearing about the imposters adding my friends under my name. All I had to do was print out my flight info and go to bed. So I looked it up and confirmed that my flight was scheduled to leave at 8 am.
....on Wednesday. Oops. I completely forgot that this is a three day feature instead of a four day. I didn't even open the freakin itinerary. By sheer stupidity I finally have managed to schedule in an entire day where I don't have to do anything or be anywhere. I'm not even sure what I'm going to do with myself. I'm stoked.
So I'm thinking I'll go to the gym and then take Conte out on the trails and then maybe do something useless. I think I'll go to Barnes and Nobles. I'm resisting the urge to squeeze in an am video for the site. Work and play don't have defined lines in my life. Either way I'm sleeping in. All this excitement is keeping me up.
:: Well well I’ve found myself on another signing. Today is West Virginia. We have a two hour drive ahead of us on the tour bus before our second appearance of the day. West Virginia reminds me of Albany reminds me of Louisville reminds me of Ohio. The landscape out here is all the same. Green everywhere with trees starting to turn orange and red. Growing up in California I remember the artwork that would go up in classrooms around this time of year. I remember thinking fall looks nothing like that. Fall looks exactly like that here. Same with winter in Rochester. Suddenly the Christmas lights on row after row of houses with inflatable snowmen in the yard and freckled kids in mittens and knitted hats throwing snow at each other was something more than a scene from “Home Alone” or an illustration in a children’s book. Very Norman Rockwell. It has a way of making you want to hurry up and settle down and attend PTA meetings and bake cupcakes. When people tell me they wouldn’t raise kids in LA I understand what they have in mind instead.
I did a one show feature at a strip club in Dayton the night I flew into Ohio for this trip. I did it because Tim and Felicia run the club and they asked nicely. They’ve been together for 14 years. They traveled together on her feature tours for 7 of those years as she rose in stardom on the xxx market. Now they’re married and have a 2 year old kid together. They’ll be comfortable for the rest of their lives and they’ll live happily ever after. That’s one hell of a good ending.
Honestly everything feels a bit warm and fuzzy and cliché right now as the bus is taking slow curves along the side of a mountain in an undeveloped all American landscape and the sun is streaming through the windows and the music is lazy with an easy beat. It could be Jewel or Fiona Apple or Norah Jones on the radio. Every time I see trails below us I ache for my horse and start thinking I really need to just take time to get him out there and just ride. LA isn’t meant for horses and the trails I’ve been taking run along the 134 fwy and cross metal bridges over a cement canal we call the Los Angeles River. I’m convinced if he can be calm there he can be calm anywhere. I can’t wait for my career to hit a point where I don’t have to live in LA anymore. There are a million places he’d rather live.
The only airline I like is Southwest and frankly I don’t give two shits when I hear about the other airlines having financial problems. I understand why they do what they do from an economic point of view but I don’t agree with it. They crowd out new airlines from coming in and then they take advantage of the customers who are left to deal with them. I guarantee an up and coming airline would behave better. Southwest did.
I had a round trip flight originally booked on American Airlines from LA to Dayton, OH and back for a store signing tour through the Midwest. Adam and Eve booked it and then realized at the last minute that they had me double booked on the day I was supposed to fly out. They decided to change it to a red eye that night after I got off set. But the cost to change the flight on American Airlines was higher than the cost to buy an entirely new flight on Delta. So Delta it was. And that sucked because Delta’s main hub is in Atlanta, GA and the only seats they had left were middle seats and the whole thing turned into a nine hour trip or so after we do all the math with the changing time zones back and forth and back again.
But the important thing is I got there. We did the signing on the cool tour bus and we ate fattening food and we drank because that seems to be the only thing to do out here… which is sad because with all of the industry insiders and admirers you’d think there would have been some sex too. And then on the last night when I got back to my hotel room it dawned on me that my return flight may have been jeopardized when I didn’t take the arriving flight on American. It happened to me on Southwest once and all I had to do was call and they fixed it for no extra money and without an attitude. Stunning.
So I called and a curt young lady told me that my flight was indeed cancelled. She said it was only a shell on their reservation list. Grayed out in a long list of black ones. I told her no problem, please just make it active again because I plan on being on it in the morning. And she tells me she can’t do that. I would have to purchase the ticket at the current price all over again. Oh yeah and they’re keeping the money from the original round trip purchase. No credit. So I ask her to please clarify because it’s sounding like we purchased the seat on that flight. They took the money in exchange for the seat. We did not cancel it. I am making it very clear that I intend to use the seat in question, but they won’t let me use the seat and they won’t refund the money. But they will sell us the seat in question again for an exorbitant price. She says yes. I ask for a manager.
Well the manager took his sweet time getting on the phone. He was so incredibly busy at three in the morning that I eventually just hung up and put the burden on Adam and Eve. Of course Adam and Eve ran into the same foul problem with American Airlines so now I’m sitting in the airport waiting for my Continental flight, which I’m sure was not cheap but was cheaper than buying my original flight twice. And this last minute one way flight put me on the high risk list so I got patted down and searched. And they confiscated my shiny lotion. And that pisses me off more than anything because I have to buy the shit online and it’s not cheap and that was my last bottle. Then they patted me down again.
:: 
Well Adam and Eve did some fancy maneuvering and switched my 8:30 am flight to 11:45 pm so I could make my 10:30 am call time and wrap their movie “Frisky Bizness.” The shoot went well. It was a Jim Malibu feature, which means there will be a good food service, reasonable calls times, and we’ll all be out before we turn into pumpkins at midnight. I got to remake the famous sock dance to an 80’s style beat. Definitely the highlight of the day. My left knee is already almost completely black because we experimented with various household substances to help my socks slide on the hardwood floors. Silicone spray and baby powder are both highly effective. I took one hard fall with each.
After the movie wrapped I rushed home to pack and turn around and leave for the airport. The last minute flight change meant I got less than desirable seats. Try sleeping in a middle seat in the exit row (no reclining seats) non stop to Atlanta. No Bueno and no sleep.
That was yesterday. The flight touched down around 7:09 local time and the connection left at 7:36. It was a quick flight to Dayton, Ohio from there. I wasn’t surprised when my bag didn’t show it’s smiling face on the carousel so I filled out the delivery form and was picked up at the curb in a giant tour bus with my image plastered all over it. That‘s one way to stroke an ego. Sharing the bus spotlight with me were Courtney Cummz, Ava Rose, Bree Olson, Alectra Blue, Eva Angelina, Teagan Presley, and Sunny Lane. We’re doing a signing tour for Roller Dollz and apparently we’ve taken the stance go big or go home.
The bus dropped me off at the hotel where the others had already checked in last night and I got an hour and half of sleep before they pulled me out of bed kicking and screaming (slight exaggeration) and made me get ready for the signing. Then we played hurry up and wait until my bag arrived.
So now we’re on a bus eating subway and talking porn. We’re about to take off but there is a large Midwestern woman with her kids taking pictures of the bus and wanting autographs. She promised to buy the movie. She’s quite aggressive so we signed the stuff to her kids. My scribbled signature and Courtney C. Best wishes and love always. She’ll figure it out when she gets home.
