I had never really been “in” NYC before, so I figured why the hell not. I went ahead and set myself up with a decent hotel in downtown Manhattan, the Millennium Hilton right next to Ground Zero for 9/11, and then just prepared myself the best I could for the unplanned weekend getaway.

Things didn’t start off too great, however. Here’s what I wrote about “The Plane Trip From Hell”:

It all started well. I made it to San Francisco International Airport from San Rafael in record time during rush hour traffic; a mere 45 minutes. The airport shuttle in the Long Term Parking Area arrived just as I got out of my car and approached the bus stop. I flew through the security checkpoint line without a single problem or threat of a anal cavity search (still debating whether this was a good thing or actually the first of the bad yet to come). My flight from SFO to DEN was on-time and started boarding precisely when I arrived at the gate. The flight was quick, utterly painless and arrived in Denver 15 minutes ahead of schedule. It was then that all hell broke loose

Upon arriving at the Denver International Airport, my good fortunes began to turn for the worse. The stunning 5′6″ brunette with the size 0 black mini-skirt and 34C pink lace Victoria’s Secret push-up bra that was visible through her form-fitting white tank top decided to punch destiny in the face and stay in Denver instead of heading to Gate 38 to board the plane to La Guardia with me. Sure.

I never got her name. We never even once made eye contact. But love doesn’t always need that. The simple fact that her immaculate cleavage and perfectly toned thighs thoroughly kept me mesmerized during the entire 2 and 1/2 hour flight was enough to let me know that she was indeed the one. Alas, she was afraid of her destiny and headed to baggage claim instead of into my arms, onto my plane and into the Mile High Club.

Things only got worse from there. I boarded the plane on time and got to my seat in the back only to notice that the plane was fairly empty and nobody else was getting on. At first, I thought it was an empty flight and I would be able to stretch out and let my balls breath for the next 3 hrs 45 minutes. I soon found out that wouldn’t be the case. It was a technical difficulty. There was a fuel leak detected and it would take them 15 minutes to fix it and start boarding the rest of the passengers.

I waited. About 20 minutes later, the other passengers boarded and everything seemed back on track. An exceptionally fine Israeli girl with a sweet smile and C-cups sat a couple rows in front of me. I was starting to feel good about things again until the rest of the passengers got on. One. Two. Three. Make that FOUR mothers with babies sat in various seats in the final three rows. To make things worse, a couple of rowdy children sat in the two seats in front of me and a smelly old couple next to me. It was hell.

A baby cried on cue. Then another. Then the two kds in front of me started jumping up and down in their seats. Not really helping my headache any, the father started yelling at them, only resulting in them whining more. I wanted to kill them all. Just take off and get me to NYC, I was thinking. United Airlines wouldn’t allow that. After 2 hours sitting in the plane on the ground, they finally let us know that the plane was just too fucked to fly. They would deboard us all and try to get us on a new plane since repairs would take a minimum of 3 or 4 hours.

I waited restlessly at the gate in the airport, hoping for some positive news about the flight change. Nothing for 15 minutes so I began to panic and turned on my laptop to see if there was a WiFi connection at the airport. There was one offered by AT&T and even though it was $7.95 for a day that I wouldn’t fully use, I just had to get it just so I could log on to MySpace and check my email while I waited. It helped calm my nerves.

The delay ended up not being too long and our new plane was set to leave at 3:40PM, about 3 hours after when it was originally. I thought now that things would be smooth sailing for the rest of the way. I was wrong again. We taxied on the runway for more than an hour, while the air conditioning in the plane was completely off and the hot Denver sun was baking the airplane. It was hot. I was cramped and sweaty. Most definitely not a good combination.

We eventually took off…I actually clapped and yelled out “woooooo!” which got a huge chuckle from the other passengers. The takeoff was bumpy, but I was ecstatic to finally be in the air and back on my way to New York. Shit obviously didn’t stay good. There was bad weather ahead and the plane would have to re-route. This caused another 45 minute delay as we had to fly south and around the bad weather before heading back towards New York. I was pissed and the only thing that I was able to do was order 5 vodkas, at $5 apiece, to try and get me back in a better mood. It worked to an extent, but it wasn’t nearly enough to erase the pain of a tumultuous flight. I hate you United Airlines. NYC, here I am.

Once I arrived, everything turned out great. I met up with Jackie & Amanda at the hotel and then shortly after Paula came by and we got to formally meet for the first time. We didn’t really do much, but I had fun walking around the “big city” for a bit then getting drunk off Paula’s roommates’ liquor.

I woke up the next morning in my hotel room and noticed that it was exactly 9:11AM. This was particularly weird because right outside my window was where the two towers used to stand. I thought for a while how surreal it all was and just started out the window in awe of the empty space in the ground and next door where the buildings where. It was crazy thinking that I was 50 or so stories high, towering above most of the city below me, yet if the towers were still stand me, I’d be looking way up to them from where I was standing. Surreal.

I spent most of the morning just walking around the streets, pretty much up and down every street in lower Manhattan, before taking a ferry to Staten Island to where Amanda lived. We fucked around for a bit then had to go back to my hotel to meet up with my friend Charis, who had flown up from Miami to hang out with me in NYC for the weekend. We all started drinking, taking pics, having an orgy, blah, blah, blah, until Paula showed up and we went somewhere for dinner.

I say “somewhere” because I remember very little from the evening because I was quite plastered by this point. Based on what the girls said, I was pretty trashed, Charis had to feed met at dinner and they had to trick me into drinking water by saying it’s vodka, and I spend a lot of the time harassing some couple that was on a date. So, basically, I was about as drunk as I always am by 9PM every night.

It was fun except for the fact that the cab stole my digital camera that had quite a bit of dope pics on it. Hence, everything you see in the My Photos section are ones taken with my Sidekick or Macbook or one of the girls’ cameras. Sucks!

The next day Paula had a casting to go to and Jackie had to get back home for some family thing, so it was pretty much Charis and myself for most of the afternoon. After playing Gynecologist for a few hours, we decided to hit up the Times Square area and do some tourist shit. We walked around a bunch, got one of those drawings of us on the side of she street and eventually hit up the dope wax museum.

The museum was a shit load of fun, mainly because Charis was into molesting the wax statues every bit as much as I did. We got a lot of mean looks from parents and retards, but it was loads of fun doing things like molesting the molester, aka Michael Jackson, or being able to choke President Bush like so many people would love to.

The trip was pretty short and I was blacked out for much of it, but the weekend was a blast. I loved being in NYC and could see myself living there for a year or two of my life some day, and it was especially fun getting to send time with the girls. Truly a great trip even though I didn’t get to molest the Statue of Liberty like we were thinking of doing or getting to eat from the pizza place in Staten Island that Amanda claims is the best in the area. Maybe next time!

This was what I wrote at some point after night #2:

I have fallen in love with New York City. It’s a real truly authentic and passionate love, too. It’s leaps and bounds above the run-of-the-mill love that everybody gets as often as spam in your inbox that typically results in me slipping the girl a roofie, having my way with her all night long and then when dawn rolls around play dumb and ask all shockingly, “omg, do you think we had sex last night?????”.

No, it’s not that kind of love. My love for New York City is a much truer kind. It’s real. It’s the kind that would get me to club a girl on the back of the head and drag her back to my cave by her foot and make her my wife. Mine till death do us part or she starts getting crows feet, saggy breasts, stretch marks, or the ultimate love-crushing FUPA (fat upper pussy area), which would cause me to dump her for a newer, younger, firmer model that I love just as much as I once loved her. Yes, that’s how I love New York City.

She’s a fucking dope ass chick and we share a lot of the same feelings about life, kids, relationships, weed, etc. Oh, and when she’s giggling she sometimes transforms into a Jennifer Love Hewitt look-a-like. It was quite amazing. The only negative about her visit is that it was a few weeks BEFORE she got herself some saline-enhanced puppies instead of a a few weeks AFTER. I would’ve enjoyed it being after just a little bit more.

Immediately after Erica left and I was going through “wicked” withdrawals (I admittedly got hard every time she said “wicked” in her cute Boston accent), I flew down to LA because one of my FL friends, Nikayla, was there on vacation and hanging with her friend Kim. I figured since I adore Nikayla like no other, I just had to be there when she was partying it up in La La land.

While there, I went out with Nikayla, Kim, Brandon and Jordanna “Parties at the Playboy Mansion Every Other Weekend” Gross. I got really super shit-faced falling-over-sloppy drunk and had a great time. It’s no surprise, though, I always have an amazing time with Nikayla and Jordanna’s always a joy to be around. Speaking of Jordanna, I will write a book about her some day if she doesn’t write one first…her story is an enjoyable one that needs to be shared and she’s my “fave”.

After these two breaks, it was pretty much non-stop 80+/hr work weeks on APF. Nevertheless, I decided to try and squeeze in a weekend vacation to FL for AIDS Walk Ft Lauderdale. I was able to get a bunch of people to donate based on the fact that they felt compelled to donate if my fat ass was going to walk the 10K in the south FL heat and humidity. However, things didn’t work out quite as planned.

As I was leaving to the airport, which was right after I got off work on Friday night (after putting in 60 hours from Monday through Friday), I found out that my sleeping arrangements for the trip weren’t available anymore. I was supposed to stay at someone’s place who was doing the walk with me, but some roommate shit happened and I couldn’t. I was tight on funds so getting a hotel last second for two nights wasn’t even possible. After calling a bunch of people, I found another floor to crash on for the weekend.

I arrived in FL after a long and exhausting flight where I couldn’t sleep because someone had a cat that would simply “meow” repeatedly for the entire flight. It was easily one of the worst flight experiences I’ve ever had to deal with, including ones with engine trouble and extreme turbulence. From the airport, I went over to where my friend Jackie was staying because she was my last second emergency floor option. It was in the early AM but she was still up with her friends partying. I got there, crashed on some pull out bed in the living room and then finally got some rest.

We went out partying hard that night and that’s where the all the photos are from. I was able to get a lot of my friends to come out and drink, including first-timers Charis, Suzy, and Stephanie, as well as old stand-by’s Nikayla, Dora, Maria, Bernadette, etc. It was great times and this is where I started developing a bit of a crush on the lovely Charis, but we’ll save that for another day.

The problem with all this fun was that I had to be up at 8AM for AIDS Walk. I was used to getting up early after a long night of partying so I didn’t think it was going to be a problem. Boy, I was wrong. Even though I had gone to sleep with my cell phone next to my head, it didn’t wake me up when my friend called because it somehow got put to silent. I actually woke up exactly when the walk was set to start, which was way too late for me to get there.

I was extremely depressed because this was really the whole point of the FL trip, but I rationalized things by telling myself that the most important thing was that I was able to raise a lot of money for a good cause regardless if I made the walk or not. Nevertheless, I was extremely pissed off at myself and disappointed that I wasn’t able to participate in it because I wanted to really bad. I even did a full 1oK walk on the treadmill the week before just to show myself that I’d be able to do it.

I ended up going out that final night, but it was more of a chill night than a party night. We drank and hung out till about 4am and then I left to drop off the rental car at the Miami airport to head back home. Luckily, there weren’t any cats on the flight back as I was able to get one or two hours of sleep before landing in SF and driving straight back to work from the airport before starting yet another 80+ hour work week that continued until APF was ready to ship.

I had just moved into San Francisco to work at IGN.com. While I looked for a place, Sam Kennedy (Gamespot then and 1up.com now) agreed to let me move into his 1BR apartment in the Mission District if I paid half the rent. Once I got there, Sam K & I convinced David Toole to leave is well-paid position atTarget back in Orlando to move out here on a whim because he could easily get a game industry job too. He moved. He quickly got a job with Sam K at Gamespot.

For New Year’s Eve we decided to get a bunch of friends together, all mostly from the #vidgames IRC channel that lived in the Bay Area. It ended up being myself, Toole, Kennedy, Sam Bishop (who eventually ended up crashing in the living room of Sam K’s apartment with myself, Toole & even my brother all piled in), Darknight, Rugalz, & Prisoner (went with the IRC names for the last three .

We started drinking early while we played all sorts of games in the crowded living room, including a lot of the Japanese import from Konami. Guitar Freaks. It was pretty much the precursor to Guitar Hero that’s taken the nation by storm over the past year or so, yet we were playing it and loving it back in the last millennium (aka 1999). There was even a time that Kennedy & I walked around all over the Mission District to try and find a prostitute that we could pay to play the game with us naked (I was even going to do an IGN article about the hooker playing Guitar Freaks), but we failed because they kept on getting picked up by old men with cars.

But, I digress, it was just an amazingly fun night of playing videogames with great friends while getting completely shit-faced on all kinds of alcohol. Then as midnight neared, we decided that it’d be fun to break into the Ziff building to see the fireworks from the rooftops. We trekked our way over there while yelling “Happy New Year” to everyone that we passed. Then when we got there, we used our skills learned from years of gaming to sneak past the security guard and then run up the parking garage and onto the rooftop of the building.

The adventures didn’t end there. After witnessing the fireworks and the dawning of the year 2000, we headed back to the apartment to celebrate the fact that the world hadn’t been destroyed by Y2K. On the walk back, we passed the most atrocious looking hooker imaginable. She looked to be 50 years old. Was wrinkled head to toe. She was missing most of her teeth. And she just looked flat out disgusting. She offered us “a blowjob for a quarter”. We declined.

Then amazingly enough, as we were maybe a block or so away, this car comes driving by and the ugly hooker was hanging out of the passenger window and yelling at us “you guys missed out on a blow job for a quarter!” Hilarious. Fucking off-the-charts hilarious. Somebody actually picked her up. Good for her and good for him. I guess. Anyway, the alcohol drinking continued, the partying continued and the gaming continued. A definite happy fucking new year.

You can head to the bottom of My Photos to see a few snapshots of all of us geeks from that glorious and unforgettable night.

• BrandonCam in Orlando (11/13/04)
• New Year’s Eve ‘05 (12/31/04)
• John00Flemming @ Ten15 (01/01/05)
• Jennifer Dorn’s Cali Trip (03/13/05)

Stay tuned for more photo updates that include ones from “the greatest New Year’s Eve ever” and all the ones from the pre-re-birth of DaveZdyrko.com.

• Sasha @ Ruby Skye (02/25/05)
• Random Party Photos (01/15/05)
• Partying @ Ten15 (05/22/04)
• Partying @ Ruby Skye (06/24/04)

I also have three years of New Year’s Eve photos that I never posted back in the day. My best guess is that the hangovers might’ve destroyed all my memory of me even taking them, so I couldn’t share what I didn’t know I had. Anyway, once I get through the old stuff, I’ll start posting more of the semi-new items.

I’ll see what I can do about rounding up any photos that were taken between that last September ‘05 vacation and now and posting them shortly. There were a couple of FL trips and a impromptu jaunt to New York City that happened during that period. I’m sure there’ll be plenty of great photos to check out, both for those in the hot women camp, as well as those in the fatty fetish camp.