My Birthday Weekend!

BIRTHDAY WEEKEND DAY 1

My birthday weekend started off on Friday. My boss and co-worker bought me delicious lunch and also bought me cupeycakes instead of a cake. I got a red velvet cupcake and it was absolutely delicious. Then I headed home at 1:00 to pick up my brother and Paul. The email I got from Nine Inch Nails the day before said I had to be at the meet and greet BEFORE 2:30. So, we are driving and it’s about 2:30 and we are still 15 minutes away or so because of the traffic. I let my brother off near the mint, and then we drove over to Camden.

We get to Camden, park the car, figure out where we are suppose to be. We chat with several people in the doner line. The meet and greet was suppose to be from 3:15-5:15 but at 4:00 we are still waiting outside. So, they announce they got stuck in traffic and that they would let us in soon. They start counting people out in groups, so we were group 2 of the $300 donor people. The other people around us are talking about how anxious they are and how they don’t want to cry or stumble or not say anything, and we are all talking about how exciting it’s going to be, so probably another 30-50 minutes of waiting, our group gets taken in, they had already announced that the band would only sign one thing, and that there were no photos to be taken, only a group photo would be taken.

So we go back where they are, and there are these curtains and we are the second to last people in our group, I peek through the slit in the curtain and see that Trent is about 5 feet away from me and I start to get all teary eyed. So, the people behind us and me start talking about the I’m on a Boat video which cheers me up and makes me not get teary eyed.

We are finally around the curtain but there’s people in front of the table so I can’t see any of the band members. We get up, and Robin is first. We talk to him for a minute or so about the great music, and how awesome his hair is, Robin wishes me a happy birthday and asks our names.  Then Justin is next and he is just so fucking nice.  He says happy birthday to me and shakes my hand, I start to get a little bit teary and he says no need to cry it’s okay!

You can sort of view Paul talking to Robin here.

Next is Trent. I put my dollar bill down (what I was having them all sign) He asks me my name, and tells me happy birthday. I ask for a hug, and he gets up and hugs me and I start to cry and tell him how much his music has meant to me and how long I’ve been listening to him. He says don’t cry it’s okay. So, he had already signed my dollar bill, but then I put down my perfect drug single. I tell him this is a cd that’s rarer than Still, and he’s like oh yeah? and i’m like yeah, it has two r&b songs on it and they suck, he says to me, are you sure it’s not us, i laugh, and he says wow that’s so strange, you know record companies just mess everything up don’t they? and i reply, yeah it seems like it. then he thanks me for donating and coming down, and tells me to enjoy the show.

(somebody took this photo and posted it on the NIN forums of me meeting trent!!!)

After that is Ilan, I’m still all teary eyed, he wishes me a happy birthday and thanks me for coming out, and tells me that he hopes I enjoy the show.

As I’m whipeing my tears away before the group photo, Justin comes over and gives me a big hug and says “there’s no need to cry it’s your birthday”. Then we get into a group photo, I have no idea where they are going to post those, I haven’t much investigated that yet though. So, we wait around for about an hour in the pit area, then NIN comes out for sound check. Trent comes to the mic and says “there was a lot of hugs and not a lot of sound check”. We all laugh, then they played Good Soldier and Dead Souls. After this, it’s like 6 or so, and we haven’t been allowed to go to the bathroom or sit down since we got there. So, Paul and I dash to the bathroom and then grab some food since we hadn’t eaten.

We end up sitting down next to the Y-rock table, and I’m only concerned about eating my $5 hot dog at this point. Then we are talking to the other people sitting at the table, then I realize the guy sitting across from us is Josh T. Landow. I don’t point this out or anything, but then realize the other two are Dj’s also, but I’m not sure who they are. We talked about the sound check and meeting Trent etc.

After this we go to the merch table, I buy an awesome shirt. I hop on twitter which hadn’t really been connecting at all, and saw some of Trent’s tweets. They said :

- Thanks to those I got to meet this afternoon – you’ve begun restoring my faith in people and I needed that. Enjoy the show!

- Easy: encountering real people in the real world mostly = love. Reading bullshit online from anonymous cowards = hate.

- The price of attempting to engage an online community is high and probably ultimately not worth weeding through the sewage.

- and with that.. BLOW ME! – I’m going to go play a show!

So we watched Street Sweeper Social Club, they were pretty amazing. Then NIN came on, they were amazing like always. They played some fantastic songs that I love, and some that I’ve never heard live. They didn’t play closer and hurt which I thought was pretty amazing, because I got to hear songs I’ve never heard before.

The set list was:
home
beginning of the end
1,000,000
march of the pigs
line begins to blur
survivalism
the big come down
head down
burn
gave up
metal
banged and blown through
the downward spiral
wish
heresy
mr self destruct
the day the whole world went away
physical
the hand that feeds
head like a hole

Some of the best photos I took :

I like this because it shows all of the equipment on stage.

Those were taken during sound check. These are some of the best from the show:

You can view all the photos here.

After they played we ended up leaving so that we could hang out with Crystal. We left and ended up at Perkins with her. She gave me a fantastic purse and pj’s for my birthday. We had a silly time annoying the FUCK out of this asshole waiter, who when we sat down kind of just said “well i’ve already made my tips for today, so i don’t care”. that was fantastic, we came back to the house hung out and then went sleepies.

BIRTHDAY WEEKEND DAY 2

We woke up kind of late, well I didn’t because I couldn’t sleep, but we headed out of the house about 1 p.m to head up to NYC. We hit this HUGE community yard sale that took about an hour to go through, during that hour, we actually went to our landlord’s house, which was fucking weird, because we didn’t know he lived there.

So, we get to NYC about 3-4 we find some parking near the TokiDoki store. I’m getting super excited, as I’ve looked forward to this day for a long time. We find the store and it’s less than half of the size of our living room, I couldn’t believe it! They barely had anything that was on the website, except they had all the purses and stuff, but not most of the t-shirts.

Then we head over to the Kid Robot store which is only a few blocks from TokiDoki and it’s pretty amazing, it was two floors. We ended up buying two of the adult swim special editions and Paul bought one of the alphabet keychains, that look like activision atari games.

So, then we head uptown to the Musuem of Sex. They had an exhibit going on that featured animals, then I guess two main exhibits that they have all the time. It was a pretty amazing musuem. I learned a lot about animal sex, how a lot of species have sex with there own sex and all kinds of stuff. I learned that mallards “rape fight” and one of the mallards was going after another one, it crashed into a window and fell to it’s death, then the mallard that was alive went to town on this dead mallard, a lady wrote a paper about it and documented it, she won a nobel prize for it.

After the Musuem, we go outside, we are about 4 blocks from the Empire State building, so we decide hey what the fuck, let’s check it out. We get there and there is a really long security line so we decide against it.  We go back to the car and drive over to Brooklyn to pick up GGG. We went to dinner at this place called Planet Thailand or something like that. It was amazing. My brother had sushi for the first time and hated it, so me and GGG ended up eating most of it. The food was goddamn delicious.

After this we drove over to this bar that GGG told us about when we came up for Paul’s birthday. It’s called barcade and it was amazing. GGG whooped my ass at Tapper which I had really been talking a big game, so it serves me right lol. There was probably at least 30 different arcade machines, we spent a lot of time here playing games. Nepo ended up showing up and some other people. Then after being there for a while we ended up leaving and going to this inside outside bar, that was FULL of hipsters it was so silly. We ended up hanging out there till probably 2:30 am or so, then we ended up calling it a night since we were driving back to PA.

BIRTHDAY WEEKEND DAY 3

I tried to sleep in since I didn’t go to bed until like 4/5 in the morning or something. We got up and hung out with my brother for a bit, then we ended up going for breakfast/lunch at Perkins (my brothers new favorite restuarant i think). After this I went over and got some of my birthday presents from Paul’s Dad, which was pretty awesome.

Then we got on the road to go to see Henry Rollins do spoken word in Wilmington DE. Wilmington was soooo nice and I totally need to go back there to take photos!!! Henry was AMAZING, just as I imagined, I even found myself getting a little teary eyed during some of the stuff he talked about. He’s just amazingly awesome and funny and angry.

After we left there Paul and I ended up at a diner enjoying lunch/dinner. It was the perfect way to end the weekend just hanging out with Paul quietly.

It was one of the most amazing weekends of my entire life, and I will never forget it.