Rollercon '09: Day Three

Saturday, August 1:

My general ramblings have resulted in long posts that are apparently boring as fuck to read, so I'll try for shorter bullet points for the attentionally-challenged:

• Teaching Tarametrics: yeah, I'm gonna gonna torture as many skaters as I possibly can. It's going international, since I had a London Rollergirl in the class. MWAHAHAHAHAHHA. I also got to taunt a couple of Sac City Rollergirls, since LA's Tough Cookies are going up to play them later this month...and I hope to be subbing with them for that game!

• Sitting with sisters Miss E. Vil(Duke City)and Demanda Riot(B.A.D. girl & Team Awesome)talking derby terms. Do you know what the difference between a "sit and hit" and an "ass to puss" is? Nothing but the names.

• Getting potential offers to train on an international realm. Now if that's not a good excuse to finally get a passport, I don't know what is.

• Pick-up scrimmages. Nothing boils down the essence of DIY derby more than packing a black shirt, a white shirt, and heading on down to skate with and against strangers just to see what happens. No big production, just skating and hitting. I had a blast, even while skating on the Floor of Death at the LV Sports Center.

• Smackya Sideways from Rose City. I love this girl. She's a tank. A very agile tank. Almost every time I went up to skate, there she was on the other team. Taunting me. I told her after the first four jams that if we're going to continue meeting like this, she needs to buy me a drink. I remember each of us getting only one decent hit on each other on the track. We're that good, apparently. Or that wary of each other's potentially painful capabilities, I dunno.

• Taking the crapola double-decker shuttle bus at night. Boy, what a difference night and day makes. The bus is almost tolerable, and getting to talk about the potential impact Whip It! will have on DIY derby, the awesomeness of the name "Rack Attack!" for a team, stories of people missing flights due to missing passports, more tattoo talk, rules differences between flat track, banked track, and Old School, and just how much can a skater drink in Vegas and still function the next day?

• A quiet dinner. This can't be underestimated in a loud city like Vegas. Getting stuffed stoopid on bacon-cheese fries and steak salad is fun. Epic fun. Good thing we don't do that too often.

• More Tara tattoos. I had no idea so many mai tais could be made in one evening. So many tattoos done, so many photos taken. There's a distinct thrill in giving a guy a "tramp stamp" in front of hundreds of girl skaters. However, the 2am dooshbag rush from the bar across the hotel driveway was not fun. I wanted to poke their eyes out with a boar's tusk.

• Staying up til 7am. This is not for the weak. We stayed up through Closing Time for the Dooshbags, many Dealertainers(Michael Jackson was of course everyone's favorite...the Fight Crew folk who were there couldn't remember the Thriller choreography, much to our horror), many mai tais, a severe lack of pants, buttons traded, derby discussed, and a lot of talk about bacon. By 7am there was a very small but very hardy group who wanted to go to breakfast. I called it off...I had to get some sleep before going to the airport in 3 hours.

• Getting to the airport on schedule, only to have everything else go silly. The Southwest terminal had improved their wait times in the security line. However, they seem to think that carrying on roller skates is a potential security risk, and they scanned my skate bag a couple of times before I was allowed to go through. Got on the plane all right. Departed the gate, and then...stop. What the..?! We sat on the tarmac for a good half hour-45 minutes. At first they said it was for "emergency vehicles on the runway", but there are windows on the plane and we saw nothing. Then it was announced we were sitting due to the winds shifting so much that the airport had to change the landing patterns of the planes. That made more sense. I surreptitiously texted my sister to let her know we were late, which was a good thing since the airline website did not reflect the delay at all.

• Los Angeles. People talk a lot of smack about LA...I myself have been known to scream, THIS CITY IS A SHITHOLE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! while sitting in traffic. However, this place definitely beats the living bejeezus out of Vegas. To come out of the airport to air that's cool and breathable was delicious.

• The cat(s). Lou C really missed us. So did Kitty, and Kitty isn't even our cat. Taking a much-needed nap with Lou C was a grand thing.

So that's the basic rundown of Rollercon. I know I'm forgetting stuff, and of course I need to post pics. But there you have it.