Stuicide

I’m back in Memphis. I’m tired, exhausted, and haven’t slept more than 4 hours for the last 5 days. Everything aches. I’m glad to be home, back to someplace normal, someplace quiet but yet… I will miss the LAN for months to come. The atmosphere and community at these events is always unique and is something to cherish. We’ve built a unique community and our reach is much farther than the 109 Gamers that are on our roster.

It’s been a couple of days since I returned. My mind still races over the thoughts of what just happened. I have already forgotten some of the amazing stories and details that I should have shared, so I’m going to try and recreate my entire trip for you, constant reader.

Join me on this journey, It was amazing from the moment I left Memphis until the moment I returned.

Thursday Morning. 6 am

Alarm goes off, I stumble out of bed after 4 hours of sleep. Late night packing caused me to stay up too late and may interfere later in the weekend. I will need those few hours of sleep later, of course I won’t realize it until it’s already too late. Leave for the airport at 6:30 by hitching a ride with my Dad.

I had printed out my boarding pass but still had to check a bag. Welcome to flying in 2008, Northwest charges $15 bucks for the first bag. Pay it grudgingly and move onto security. No laptop this trip, so the amount of electronics in my bag that can be used to hijack an airplane are limited to my iPhone, iPod, and Canon DSLR. As I’m coming out of security, guess who approaches me? None o

ther than TTL Gunny, my southern traveling partner for this trip. We meet, after 2.5 years of gaming toge

ther. Great guy, just like I imagined he’d be and then some.

The flight to Chicago is uneventful, a nice big DC-9 and my whole row is empty so I’m not crowded while I listen to the Bungie Podcast. Arrive at O’hare around 10:30, my bag comes out quickly and we’re on our way to the Palmer House.

The blue line from O’hare to Monroe is about 45 minutes. So I got bored and

took a few pics of Gunny.

Once at the Palmer House, Gunny checks into his room and I drop off my bags. We met up with Sunburned Goose, XerxdeeJ, and Goody for lunch at Patty Burger. As we were eating, the Michigan train crew had arrived and came over to eat with us.

After lunch we snagged some supplies, I got to spend about 15 minutes waiting on a price check at Walgreens for RedBull, and Gunny snagged some sweet Halloween Champagne glasses to celebrate with. We took a walk a few blocks over to LaSalle Street where they filmed a lot of scenes for The Dark Knight, but it was middle of the day so we couldn’t go play in the street and pretend to be The Joker.

Went back to the hotel and up to Gunny’s room. Fouch had hooked up his Xbox and I watched him and a few others play some Soul Caliber IV and other games as we awaited everyone’s arrival. The 4 of us in the room soon turned to 8, then 16, and at last count ended up around 5:00 with 25 people in it.

As I was trying to get a hold of DeeJ to let him know who all had arrived I was suprised in the hall by the one and only Ballistic. He wasn’t supposed to go, but since he hasn’t ever missed a TTL LAN, it wouldn’t be a real party without him. He rolled in with Loco and Utopia from Midway, and only 2 people knew he was even coming to the LAN. A great suprise, even though I had suspected something.

Knowing that we were slightly overcrowding the room, we took off for Lucky Strike a bowling/bar area a mile or two uptown. It wasn’t crowded so we snagged a couch that was meant for at least 20 people.

Half of the guys took hold of a territory by the bar and let a 110 pound blonde bartender get them all incredibly intoxicated. Ann Marie was good to them.

I may or may not have been the one to drop my glass, but I apologize for the small puddle by the bar.

After Lucky Strike I’m having a tough time remembering if we went to Miller’s Pub, but we probably did because that’s what we do. I do know that Ballistic was enjoying Thrashy’s hospitality a bit much and ended up BalJar’ing (it’s a new term I’m trying to make popular) in the bathroom and slept on the floor so I got my own bed for a night.

The LAN hadn’t officially started but the craziness had. If this was the pre-game celebration, I was right to be scared to know what was in store for us the rest of the weekend…