Fear and Loathing in Orange County

Posted on | January 5, 2010 | 11 Comments

TUSTIN, Calif.
Chris Cassone was wearing a Ronald Reagan T-shirt when I spotted him at the Bob Hope Airport in Burbank. United Express Flight 6396 touched down Tuesday shortly before 2 p.m., Pacific Time. Sunny skies, palm trees, 75 degrees — yeah, the working conditions here are grueling.

A veteran musician who performed at the 9/12 March on D.C., Cassone is active in the Pasadena Patriots — they’re having an event Saturday in Altadena that I plan to cover — and he volunteered to be my chauffeur today.

Our objective for the day was to reach Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa, where the undefeated Alabama Crimson Tide is practicing for Thursday’s BCS Championship Game against That Other Team. 

When we got to Costa Mesa about 3:30 p.m., and found a SuperCuts franchise where I got a much-needed haircut before we rolled on to OCC. After some inquiries, we discovered that ‘Bama had ended practice at 3 p.m., while Chris and I had still been stuck in traffic on The 405.

The freeways in L.A. are not called I-5 or I-405, just “The 5” or “The 405.” It’s a bit of local culture, as is the traffic. At one point, we were creeping along The 5 at about 30 mph when I grumbled about the slowness of our pace. “Oh, this is moving,” Chris said.

Having missed afternoon practice was a bummer, but it couldn’t be helped and, at any rate, the Tide’s practice facility is under super-tight security, as Chase Goodbread of the Tuscaloosa News explains:

Under the direction of Rusty Lawrence, who runs practice facilities for the Tournament of Roses, the bowl game’s organizing committee, a screened fence was constructed in a single day that helps keep the wrong people out. Sandbags placed about eight feet apart help hold the structure in place . . .

So, we then turned to our next objective: Locating Alabama’s headquarters hotel. This proved to be an interesting adventure.

AIR RAGE IN THE FRIENDLY SKIES
The flight out to California had left me frazzled and irritable. Taking a 6;40 a.m. flight out of Dulles meant that we had to leave my house at 3:30 a.m. Tuesday in order to make it to the airport in time to get checked baggage aboard.

So I got less than 2 hours sleep Monday night. That’s OK, I thought, I can sleep on the plane.

It was 23 degrees at Dulles in the pre-dawn Tuesday and I was wearing my heavy winter overcoat when my wife, son and I arrived at the airport. Check-in was easy. I hugged my wife and handed her the overcoat. “Won’t need this in Pasadena.” After I made it through the security checkpoint, I sent out a text-message:

Just cleared security at Dulles 0515 hrs ET. Boarding time 0610 hrs ET. Pasadena, here I come!

After visiting the smoking lounge near Gate C$, I ate a big breakfast (and saved the receipt for this tax-deductible business expense). But my plans for sleeping en route to California were to prove utterly misguided.  Sleeping on planes is not easy for me, and at one point during my flight west, I took out a pen and jotted down a brief note:

10:35 a.m. ET, Jan. 5, 2010,
aboard United Flight 187,
somewhere over the Rocky Mountains

Seat 31 E might not be the worst seat on this 757, by any purely objective standard. Economy class is economy class. Subjectively, however, the seventh circle of Dante’s Inferno might be more comfortable than Seat 31E.
All I needed on this five-hour flight was a couple hours’ sleep, and my fellow passengers have conspired to prevent me from getting it. Just as I drifted off the first time, the Chinese man in Seat 31F decided he needed to go to the bathroom. This meant that both I and the passenger in Seat 31D had to stand up and wait for 31F to go to the bathroom, conclude his business and return.
Chief among my tormenters, however, is a fat, colicky 3-month-old baby in its mother’s arms in Seat 30F. To the extent that the fat little bastard doesn’t cry constantly, he times his outbursts. The minute I start to nod off, “Waaaahhh!”

By the time we got to San Francisco — where I had a 3-hour layover prior to catching the flight to Burbank — I was in a state of wretched exhaustion that only aggravated the depression I felt over my deplorable financial condition. Being tired, I can handle. Being broke, I can handle. Being tired, broke and a thousand miles from home . . . not so much.

This combination of exhaustion and depression leads to a sort of hate-the-world emotion that is not really as irrational as it seems. Sometimes, life sucks objectively. And it is from an accurate awareness of the life-suckage that we derive the concept of Fear and Loathing . . .

So much for that lunatic gibberish. San Francisco sucks. When I went out front of the airport to have a smoke, construction workers were using jackhammers to break up concreat for a renovation project. The effect of jackhammering noise on the nervous system of a man in a state of Fear and Loathing is about what you’d expect. Then I went back inside and tried to log onto the “free public WiFi,” which didn’t work. Screw it.

Passing back through security, I found myself behind two Longhorn fans en route to LAX. Poor luckless bastards. Flew all the way out here, merely to watch their team get beat. The University of Texas is decadent and depraved.

Reaching my gate, I slumped into a seat, started reading and fell fast asleep. About an hour later, when I woke up, it was time for boarding to Burbank. I felt slightly better, but only slightly. The flight to Burbank’s Bob Hope Airport was only an hour and a half, and I slept at least an hour of that — which may not sound like much sleep, but when you’re in a state of extreme sleep deprivation, an hour nap makes all the difference in the world. My mood was much sunnier when I hit Burbank. 

ROAD TRIPS AND BLOGGER BASHES
Chris Cassone proved invaluable as a chauffeur. He’s 59 and has Old School memories, so he referred to himself as my Rochester: “Yes sir, Mr. Benny.”

Had the Internet existed back in the day, the Little Green Footballs headline would read: “JACK BENNY – NEO-FASCIST.” Of course, if there had been an Internet back in the day, Rochester would have had a GPS device on his dashboard, giving him turn-by-turn directions, thus spoiling many an amusing plot development caused by misread maps.

En route to Costa Mesa, Cassone was eager to show me the sights — we passed the mountainside the had doubled as Korea for M*A*S*H — but I was working the phones furiously, trying to organize a meetup with L.A. area bloggers. By the time I’d gotten my haircut, contact had been made with Little Miss Attila and Baldilocks, and I’d also heard from an associate of Andrew Breitbart, whose Big Government crew will be in town this week.

Little Miss Attila and I discussed a possible guest list for the bash. Gay Patriot? Definitely. Patterico . . .? We’ll see. Baldilocks is actually expecting me to buy her a drink, but that would be a violation of journalistic ethics. However, since it might be a tax-deductible business expense — if I write about it, I can deduct it — what’s a little unethical journalism between friends? Hit the tip jar, just in case.

After Cassone and I checked in at Orange Coast College and discovered we’d missed the Tide’s practice, we asked a guy at the OCC sports information office for directions to the Alabama West Coast HQ. He sent us off in the general direction of downtown Costa Mesa. Cassona wanted to use the GPS to find the hotel, but I insisted that we roll Old School, navigating by dead reckoning. “Yes, sir, Mr. Benny!”

We first tried the Marriott, but were told that the team was staying at the Westin. So we headed over, parked the car and I shouldered my computer bag, expecting to poach the WiFi in the Westin lobby bar. We stopped to get a photo of the Alabama team bus:

We got to the lobby bar, crowded with ‘Bama fans. Quickly setting up my laptop, I was ready to order a Corona and beginning live-blogging the exclusive action when Chris and I were accosted by hotel security.

“Are you guests here?” the security man asked.

“Uh . . . not yet,” I answered.

“Do you have reservations?” he asked.

Busted. After all these years of poaching free hotel-lobby WiFi without incident, I was busted while on the verge of my greatest poach evah.

The security man stood by sternly glaring at us while I packed up the National Desk. Chris and I trudged back to the car and did an after-action analysis. Clearly, I’d rolled in too hard. Instead of breaking out the laptop and setting up the National Desk immediately, we should have hung around, socialized, bought drinks for our new best friends and blended in with the friendly crowd. By the time Happy Hour was over, we’d have been recognized as “regulars” and no one would have paid any attention to the fact that I was actually a neutral objective journalist. Could we go back later and try again?

“No way,” Chris said. “That dude’s got you made already.”

Screwed. Totally screwed, without hope of retrieval. And so, sadly, we abandoned all hope and headed over to the home of American Power blogger Donald Douglas. Surely, the professor would be able to figure out some solution to my sad plight. After all, tomorrow is another day . . .

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