Welcome to Season 17!

Our opening day is still scheduled for April 4, 2026. I’m happier than a pig in poop to get our blog kicked off for the season. We’re on to Season 17 if you can believe that. Seventeen years! We thought we’d be lucky if we lasted seventeen days! Half the original crew thought it was a one-time thing. The other half didn’t show up.

So much has changed too! Words have changed meaning, people have grown, and what we love so much is that many of you who dreamed of exotic ownership someday are now owners. How cool is that? Some of you were twelve years old running between Lamborghinis with your mouths open. Now you’re forty and writing checks with your mouths still open.

Back then “burning wood” meant something you did in a fireplace. Now it pretty much means you ran out of lube. I have no idea where that came from.

So many of you who now attend were just kids who ran to the bathroom every five minutes. Now we’re old men who still run to the bathroom every five minutes. The circle of life, except Disney won’t make a movie about it.

My God, at our age, we’ve had more hands up our ass than a Muppet. Nobody tells you that part of getting old. You start picking your doctor by who has the smallest hands. Oh, you laugh until you’re there and your doc with his hand up your ass asks you to talk like Kermit.

Here’s how it goes. They juice you up, then they shove the Hubble up your ass and pretend they’re looking for a constellation. They send you a few interesting pictures that look like Journey to the Center of the Earth, then nobody talks about it ever again. Look at anyone over 50. They’ve all been on that ride. It’s the exact opposite of riding an exotic.

We’ve spent a lot of time talking about our future at E@RTC. Last year was our first down year and we’ve had a lot of honest conversations about why. We’re making a bunch of small changes to bring the fun and the energy back up to where they belong.

We’re going to be using the “horseshoe”, the space next to BJ’s for more themed events than ever before. This is on top of our big events where we take over the entire mall. There’s a new security and custodial team in place, which should help a lot. We finally have professionals. I mean, we always had professionals. They just weren’t professional at this.

I also plan to be there for opening day. For those of you who don’t know, I’ve had a very rough two years, and I’ve had more pipes running through me than Gasworks Park. I’m much better right now. By the way, chemo is much like Taco Bell. You know what’s coming, you just don’t know when. Eat at Taco Bell for a month and you lose the same amount of hair.

I wrote fewer blogs last year and a few were from my hospital bed. I wasn’t laughing as much because it kind of hurt. I now feel much like my old self. Which, for the record, was only slightly better than my hospital self, but at least I can stand up at a urinal again.

I plan to be there a few times this season to get plugged in. It’s hard for me to both run the back end of the event and be there every Saturday when I still have another company to run. Doesn’t mean I’m not working behind the scenes. If anything, I’m like the guy behind the curtain in Oz, except shorter and with more prescriptions.

I’d love to see as many of our old thugs come out for opening day as possible. You’re all very missed. Most are now housebroken so it should be easier to get them all in one spot without complaints.

The property owners of Redmond Town Center have been wonderful as usual, so please do what you can to support the mall. They do a lot for us, and we never want them to feel like they go unnoticed. What a great bunch of people.

I’ll be writing every week from this point on. This marks the first Thursday at 3 PM blog of the season and we’ll keep this up until we’re done sometime in October.

See you all very soon! Meanwhile, stay tuned for our special calendar update.