It occurred to me the other day, while I was sitting on my couch looking at a black screen because my stolen digital satellite had gone down, how dependent my life has become on what some may call unethical means. My friends and I were discussing what drugs we should do for the Weezer concert.

“”Well, we really shouldn’t do acid because it’s on a Sunday and then we have finals that week, and the last time we did acid we didn’t sleep for like 40 hours.””

“”But at the same time, I don’t want to just smoke out either, because this is pretty special. I mean, its Weezer, man, they haven’t released an album in like five years. I think we should do shrooms. Shrooms are pretty damn cool and we’ll only be screwed up for like six hours instead of 40.””

“”Yeah, I suppose those have some residual effects, too, but shrooms would be cool and we should do them just because we had a bitch of a time getting these tickets in the first place ….””

Suddenly my roommate came downstairs and said, “”Hey, they zapped the card.””

“”So unzap it, jerk-off.””

“”No, they like really zapped the card.””

Turns out DirectTV had just about had enough of us watching every Pay-Per-View movie, five porn channels, and every local channel in the United States for the low, low price of free every month and they hadn’t just done a normal zap, they had completely screwed over our card.

They had sort of screwed over our card in the past, and then we would have to fix it, but this time they screwed it over in an unfixable way. So we turned on the Dreamcast and played some pirated games for a while and thought about how we weren’t going to watch Pay-Per-View for months. It was kind of a sobering thought; the kind that could only be remedied by drugs, or alcohol, or bashing our heads against the wall to get some sort of getting-away-from-reality effect.

But back to how we got the Weezer tickets: My friend Dan forwarded me an e-mail saying that Weezer tickets were going on sale the next day so we talked about how we would wake up early, say 9 a.m., head over to the box office and buy the tickets. The next day, I rolled out of bed around 11:30, picked up Dan, and headed toward UCSD. On the way, I called up EDNA, and then the box office, and they told me that they only had 500 tickets and they were only giving out one per I.D. I swore, rolled a few stop signs, and speed-dialed a bunch of my friends that didn’t like Weezer and asked them to buy me tickets.

By the time we reached UCSD, I already had one guy buying me a ticket. I parked in a “”B”” space with my grad student permit and went to the Bursar’s office and got a sticker for my other I.D. (I have two UCSD I.D.s for this exact purpose). Then we went by Round Table and collected a bunch of I.D.s from a bunch of non-Weezer appreciating friends, and headed to the box office. They marked our I.D.s with a Sharpie and sold us some tickets. Apparently they sold out in less than two hours.

Soon Monday came around and another friend tipped me off that they were selling tickets again, so we took out our I.D.s and a very sharp knife and proceeded to doctor them until the Sharpie marks were no more, and bought some more tickets. All in all, we ended up with 11 tickets at a mere $16.50 each. The closing price on eBay is around $55 now. And that’s how we got the Weezer tickets.

Now, three of these tickets couldn’t have been bought without the help of an additional I.D. I found lying on the ground at the Pi Phiathlon. I was walking back from helping a friend roll a joint out of a small nug I found in my room while going through my books. We weren’t doing it for personal pleasure, it was really the only way to fairly enter the pie-eating contest.

But we were walking back and I saw this I.D. on the ground. I picked it up and it looked very similar to my best friend who comes down a lot for concerts. The split second of thinking about trying to find its rightful owner ended, and into my pocket it went.

I think the moral of all these stories is that if you’re going to do something wrong, you’d better go all out, because you’ve already crossed the line of being a good guy. And the more wrong you do, the funnier the stories usually are. This is also why “”The Family Circus”” is boring as hell.