The Days That Changed My Life
So here I am, on New Years eve 2004 turning to 2005... Which I guess is now New Years day now. Tonite was a long night of getting hammered up and it is now just about 3:00 in the AM, I just walked in and had the urge to write this while I still wanted to. I apologize for grammar or not making sense as a whole. Anyway, I was out all night talking to people and hearing what they've been doing over the past year and answering the same kind if questions. All pretty mediocre stuff. Suprizingly, right in the thick of my bad habit of getting drunk, blacking out and doing a whole lot of bad shit, tonite I found myself rather mellowed out for the first time in the longest time I can remember. The two nights that changed my life are about to have their one year anniversary, and all that I could do tonite was think about them. Those are the nights of January 3rd and 4th, 2004. New Years eve last year was pretty rad. I threw a party at my apartment which I love, and did a few stunts and filmed some shit, then passed out in my bed there before midnight. The next day or the day after I headed to Saskatoon Saskatchewan. I had found out that there was a Don't Try this at home show there a few weeks before, so I called up my friend there to hook me up with tickets. Steve-o ended up putting on shows that saturday, and the next night as well, since it was the last date on the tour. I got totally juiced and hung out with Steve and his Crew, Nick Dunlap, Carolla, Mike Liddle and such both nights. The first night, before steve-o came out for the show, on the huge projections screens in the club they screened a little known film for everyone to watch called: "Disarray from the Bay." It was from a stunt group called "SPDST" from Thunder Bay Ontario. I casually watched it in between getting myself round after round of drinks and finding random places in the bar to piss which didn't include the washroom even once. Cool I thought... as I had just been into stunt work seriously for the past 5 or 6 months I thought, man that's the direction I'd like to be headed in.
Time for a new paragraph. The second night, I noticed the guys from this SPDST crew were right in the show on stage. I found myself kind of bitter due to the fact that they weren't taking people from the crowd because of this. Steve-o told the story of how they were hanging out together that whole day, again, bitter me stood there drunk and listening. The show went down and Steve-o and what turned out to be Damien, Mattson, and the T-man put on a fucking awesome show. I hung around with Steve a bit more after the show then finally headed home. About 2 weeks later I was casually browsing Steve-o's website and I came across the reviews for the S-toon DTTAH shows. To my amazement, there was a link to this site up there. Traffic flew in like crazy and my site was a ridiculous hit across the globe within a matter of weeks. A few days after the uplink, I was added on my messenger by A guy named Damien Gilbert. He was the guy who ran and started SPDST, but by this time I couldn't even remember what SPDST was, while I was so into handling my own booming affairs. He looked at my videos and he showed me some of his and we got to talking for a few weeks and then finally became friends. He finally asked me if I would want to join the Crew. At this point I had offers to move to Europe to develop a jackass style show, offers to take part in documentaries about homegrown stunts, and offers from dozens of groups/ companies who wanted to buy my footage, or for me to develop new footage for them. Some of these videos I was asked to be a part of, you would recognize the name of because they are very popular and famous but I don't want to throw their names around here for my own reasons. I turned every one of their offers down. I told Damien I would join his crew for a few reasons. Although they already had a DVD released and a strong web prescence, they were pretty much just starting out as well. I wanted to be a part of something from the ground up and give everything I had at it, just like I had to do with my site. Everyone else just saw me as the next big thing, a nice stick of butter for their toast. I wasn't getting in this to make some fatcat production company richer. They were also Canadian. Almost every country has one main stunt crew who really dominates, and I don't care what anyone says, it is true. I wanted SPDST to be Canada's #1. Now it is. I love all the people in my crew and we work so well together that it is almost sickening. It is at the point where it is impossible for us to fail at this, I hate to say it but even from right when I joined, how much we've grown and how unbelievably good we are now is just plain ridiculous. People across the globe, just from the trailers are saying that this video is completely smashing the "bigtime" stunt movies that I was originally avoiding getting involved with. I wanted to have some say in what was done with my stuff. Not just send my tape in and collect my money. That was never what any of this was about for me.
Not to say that any of this success has just fallen into our laps. We have had to work our asses off to get to where we are right now, and I am glad because if we didn't, we would just be another group of dumb fucks with no appreciation. Every day of my life I think back to how it all came together. It all started on those days where there was the biggest blizzard of the year and everyone said you shouldn't even think about travelling. I told everyone fuck that, this is a once and a lifetime chance. Little did I know what an opportunity I would have missed had I listened to anyone who told me not to go. It was all thanks to Steve-o and the recently defunct Don't Try This at Home tour. Steve is definately the man, and he changed my life and I don't just mean in a gay inspirational way, although there was that too. All of this took place one year from January 3rd. This day is going to become more inportant to me than my birthday. No one really knew the story of how I joined the crew, so now you all do. As I sat here and looked at all of the pictures, posters, stickers and dvds on my wall, it's easy for me to think about where all of this is going. It's rare that I stop to think about where it all began. Sorry if this reading was kind of boring, I don't really give a shit, I am drunk and I think I did a pretty good job for it being 3:30 now. Happy new year.