OK, so this is my unfinished CSS7 review. Originally I was going post the whole thing at once as one
HUGE ginormous blog entry covering the whole event, but I kept delaying finishing it so I'm just going to post what I have now and hopefully I'll muster the energy to finish the rest of it soon. This was definitely the best Shred Symposium I've ever been to, and since I've been to the last 6 of them (including this one) that's saying a
LOT! A huge part of what made it so fun this year is that Chicago rolled in
deep. Usually it's just Tim and I traveling to events like this, but this year we were joined by Tom, Kamil, and Shawn, and then Scott and Val made an unexpected appearance. That's 7 chi-town gangstas
! Also, even though he's not from Chicago, I feel like Zach Jahner belongs up there too, he's the only non-chicago member of team ramrod, and a definite new addition to massive and sought-after COC (chicago outer circle)
. So anyways, having the homies there was part of what made it the best, but also every Symposium gets successively more fun and comfortable than the last as I get to know everyone a little better each year. It's such a great event, and Stephen did an
amazing job for his first time running a tournament.
Friday:
So, it started out with Kamil, Tom, Tim and myself flying out together and meeting up with Ken, Lon, and Joe Crain at Denver Intewrnational Airport. We all met up by the fountain and had an awesome hack session with Kamil's HUGE crocheted Polish granny sack while we waited for Brad to come pick all of us up in a huge rental van. Brad is such a pimp, I think this might have been the third year he's hooked me up with a free ride from the airport. Footbaggers are great people
. So we all piled into the van and headed to the hotel to drop off our stuff before meeting up with everyone at a shred that was already happening. The host hotel was the shit!!! Every room was a suite with a separate living room and bedroom, a baby kitchen with a mini-fridge sink and microwave, a fairly sizeable bathroom, 2 closets, 2 TVs, and alarm clocks with auxiliary miniplug inputs so you could plug in your mp3 or CD player. And on top of that there was a pool/hot tub, and evey morning there was a free continental breakfast, which at most hotels means old muffins, an apple, and little boxes of Frosted Flakes or Fruit Loops. Nope, not here. We got scrambled eggs with cheese melted on top, fried potatoes, bacon, saaaaasage, french toast, pancakes, biscuits 'n' gravy, some kind of pineappled-ham, cereal, english muffins, oatmeal w/brown sugar and raisins, fresh cantaloupe and honeydew...... and more stuff that I'm probably forgetting. For FREE! And then to top it off, between 5 and 7 pm there were free cocktails, which sadly I missed every time, but I heard tell they were pretty good and strong. And the rooms had 2 full size beds and a pull out sofa-bed, so even with 6 people in the room, no one had to sleep on the floor. All that for $109 a night?!?!? WTFuck, that's a deal and a half! Anyway, after dropping our stuff off in the room we headed over to a downtown jam that was just ending. As we were walking up to the group shredding, we were still pretty far away and someone asked if the girl shredding was Emily. I said it looked more like Amelia (it turned out to be Sunny), to which they replied that i couldn't be because neither her nor Jeremy were supposed to be coming out. Right as I started to say "Oh yeah, you're right," we saw Jeremy's smiling face. That was a cool surprise
. I got another surprise when I was about to say what's up to Luis, and he tuned around to reveal a face I had never seen before
. I assumed it must be Luis's brother and managed to switch the word Luis with Nelson in the nick of time and saved myself a little embarrassment. I don't think anyone else was new there so I said my hellos to all the old homies, and continued on to Breckenridge Brewery for the players party. I was in the first group to arrive there and start setting up, and hence in the first group to start drinking
. I'm pretty sure Chicago took the drinking crown for CSS7 (since Kevin Richie didn't make it out
). I took care of business on the first night by passing out at the after player's party shred at the hotel, and Tim and Kamil tied on the second night by decimating themselves along with a fifth of Absolut in about half an hour
. I didn't really plan on drinking that much but they had so many tasty brews at Breckenridge and I was trying to sample them all
. So anyway, the party at the brewery started to wind down and everyone started to head back to the hotel. I still wanted to party! Joe Crain said that there was some party still going on at a place called "An
dakain and Skywalkers," so we wanderered around downtown Denver asking bums if they knew where this bar or club was, but no one had heard of it. I don't think it actually existed. So I ended up just drunk dialing some peeps (Shawn, Kamil and Zach i think) and managed to slur out enough questions to eventually find out that eveyone was at the hotel shredding by the entrance to the pool bag (the hotel pool was outdoor so to keep it open in the winter they inflated what looked like a giant lawnmower bag over the whole area to keep it warm). So I followed Joe back to the hotel and somehow met up with the rest of TR (Team Ramrod= Tom, Tim, Kamil, Shawn, Zach, and myself) and we all headed over to the shred. Pretty much all I remember from the rest of the night was sprinting down the hallway toward the shredding people and doing a half flip/half summersault mid-stride and barreling into the room at full speed to see the shocked faces of everyone in the room. Then I sat down against a wall and watched people continue to make shocked faces as Tom bubba'd their minds
. After that I must have promptly passed out because the next thing I remebered was waking up with far less people around, at which point I went up to the room to sleep my drunk off. From what I heard I missed a pretty stange rest of the night with Dat and TR running into a drunk vampire broad, slutty leg-touchers, and a steetwalker getting a leg up on Dat's hood
.
Saturday:
Wake up, still a little drunk, need some food. Stretch my back a little head downstairs with the plan of eating free breakfast and then heading straight to the pool area before heading out to the church for the event. I got denied at the door of the breakfast area for being shoeless
but managed to run up to the room, shoe-up my feet and make it back down in time to eat breakfast before hitting the warm tub. The only draw back to the hotel was the water temps of the "hot" tub and pool. The hot tub wasn't hot (warm at best) and the pool felt like a very large bath tub (both in water temp and depth - 3½ ft deep). But it was still fun. Shawn, Tom, and Zach came with me, and we met up with some of the Missoula crew and shot the shit for a while in the warm tub. I then headed back to the room, showered off the chlorine, and met up with the guys to journey to the site. Most of the walk there was spent listening to Tim and Kamil discuss the humorous aspects of the street Arapahoe, which we took all the way to the shred church. I wish I could remember more of the shred that went down on saturday. After just watching for a good while I started warming up w/ Tom and Tim i think. I ended up playing with different combinations of TR and felt kind of dumb since I can always shred w/ them at home, but it was good for warming up. Then Stylee Riley from Montana jumped in our circle. My doppelganger
. He was quiet but fun to shred with cause he's got these crazy cranky ankles. Crankles....
. I really liked his style, it was a little one-sided but had awesome flow and really smooth links. He hit one of the best frigid swirls I've ever seen, super clean with very deep and flat frigid delays. Actually, the whole Montana crew was really cool. Ty was really good at four square and had a super solid toe game, and was cool to talk to. He gave us the idea of a cool footbag 20 questions variant. Jeramiah is king of the pixies, haha
. Actually, I was really glad to talk to Jeramiah and let him know that I always remember him as Jebadiah (as in Springfield)
. I was a little worried at first that he might take a little offence to it, but he seemed just fine with it. I decided not to push the envelope any further by calling him Hans Sprungfeld and asking to check if he has a silver prosthetic tongue. Let it be known that I am on to that pirate's secret identity though
. Anyway, I freestyled some on Saturday which was pretty fun, but didn't hit anything worth mentioning. I got to watch some good shred. The Monhollon bros shred mezmerizes me. I kicked with Luis a few times before at CSS6 and the FR taping and remember him having
the best style, kind of a mix of Lon Smith and Juan Rangel, but I didn't know he had a brother with an equally awesome style and links. They could link strings of only infinities and I would watch like this:
.
TO BE CONTINUED..........................?
Good work naming it that.
