Stiff Sale til Sunday

my mom came home for lunch and she brought a friend of the family who is an extremely successful businessman.

apparently when people heard that i was coming home, something i never do, everyone wanted to hang out with me, which is sweet, but secretly all i wanted to do here was hide out, do some laundry, take a few pictures, meet the Chicago buzznetters and bloggers and get the f out.

but best laid plans… and now ive met neighbors on both sides, old neighbors in our old neighborhood, people at my moms work, and a lady who makes my moms bagel every morning – and this is only day TWO.

so dude takes us to lunch at an ok restaurant and tells me that he reads the busblog “sporadically” because of several reasons that he will give me tips on later — uh, no thanks — and tells me that he hasnt yet purchased Stiff but will probably this week and says that he bets there are lots of potential customers that are in the same shoes that he’s in. so to speak, meaning they want it, ive got it, but theres something in the way.

midway through my soup i politely told him that i didnt care if anyone didnt buy my book, that i wrote it so i could give one to my teachers who i dedicated it to, and to my mom who i secretly dedicated it to.

he said, dont you want to sell a lot of copies?

i said, of course not.

he said, jo — my mothers name is jolene — he said jo, whats california done to little tony?

she said hes always been like this, and added, he buys USED clothes!

so dude says, the biggest shopping day of the year is about to happen, more sales are going to take place on Friday and Saturday than in all of the summer days combined. people will be looking for things that they want but they will also want GREAT VALUES. BARGAINS! then he asked me if i ever bought things that weren’t on sale.

lap dances, i told him. and winked at my mom.

but he was right, no, i barely bought anything, but never things that werent on sale unless it was a once in a lifetime situation. like a concert ticket, or bleacher seats, or a power adapter for my laptop whilest on vacation.

so he said, tony you have to put your book on Sale but you have to do it in such a way that people will feel good about the price.

i was all, if people are worried about price then they havent seen the value of the item so therefore price is irrelevant.

he said, true, to a point, but you see value of certain things like plasma tvs or corvettes or – and he looked at me – good clothes, but you dont buy those things. so price does factor in.

have i mentioned i didnt like this person?

but then he presented his really good idea

so what you do tony is you let your readers email you with their Best Offer, like a Priceline.com for your book. if its a ridiculous price like $6 you say no thanks, and perhaps they’ll email you back with a better offer. if you can reach some sort of agreement you send them a bill and ship it out to them.

if you want, he said, you can even negotiate the shipping price, since i see you only ship things Priority Mail, bubba this is a book why not send it Media Mail for $1?

and to prove that even sorta horrible people can have good ideas, thats exactly what im going to do.

for the next 4 days only you can email me at stiff@tonypierce.com and make me an offer on my book. keep in mind that right now CafePress is offering unsigned copies for $19.08 plus shipping and im offering signed copies for $25 plus shipping. so if you want an autographed copy its a tad more.

also during this special timeperiod you cannot specify which cover you want – if you want a certain cover you have to pay the regular price. if you want the dealio price you have to take the cover i send you.

Also, realize i have some copies of How To Blog for sale too, so if you want both let me know and make me an offer, or if you only want HTB email me with an offer.

i will do my best to hook up every reasonable offer, my only stipulation is to be fair, be polite, and dont tell anyone how much you paid.

this is a four day sale only and i wont be able to ship them out till Tuesday at the earliest which is why this sale exists – and because dude had a decent idea.

the paypal invoice i will send you can be paid by credit card, check, or paypal.

now you cant say you dont have anything to be thankful for 🙂

it snowed here this morning, i believe to welcome me back.

or to punish the fools who dared fly out today, the busiest travel day of the year.

why do people travel on the busiest travel day of the year?

next year im driving. actually there might not even be a next year thanksgiving in chicago. i love it and all and i must say that despite the last post, and the fact that my bag was delayed an hour, it was a mostly-pleasant experience.

especially the hot dog.

additionaly LAX yesterday at noon was, dare i say, nearly deserted.

is everyone high?

anyways, next year everything is going to be different. i wont have a book for sale during the holidays, i wont fly anywhere, i wont be in the cold.

i woke and saw the whole Seinfeld cast pimping out their seasons 5&6 dvds. maybe whoring out is the right word. who are these people who get a million dollars a season and then find it necessary to release dvds later of shows that are on reruns three times a day on free tv?

if you need the money so bad how about returning to television where you belong?

kramer looked horrible.

jerry’s hair is thinning like crazy.

i know, takes one to know one, but im not selling 10 year old bits for top dollar.

this Christmas im thinking about driving up through frisco and oregon and seattle and then turning back down and coasting downhill all the way back to LA.

ive never been to seattle and id like to stay in aberdeen and take pictures of the bridge where kurt slept. some reports say that he never really had to sleep in the cold under the bridge, that his relatives and friends let them stay with him, but still, id like to see that bridge.

ive been listening to a lot of nirvanah lately because of this book. yesterday i listened to Dumb and In The Pines from mtv unplugged like five times. i even played it for my mom as she drove me back from the airport.

of course it all depends on if mc marc brown will let me drive through the woods for a few weeks before and after Christmas.

which i guess depends on how successful this Chicago trip goes. which depends on how many people attend the Buzznet meetup at Uncommon Ground on Saturday.

i know its officially a Buzznet meetup, but Bloggers you’re welcome too. in fact these meetups have been populated in good part by Bloggers who weren’t yet Buzznetters and never even considered Buzznet before they came to the meetups.

so yes, Bloggers, even if youre not considering Buzznet, please come to the meetup on Saturday. we’re all friends. and this week we’re all Chicagoians. and i read many of you and i’d love to meet many of you. mostly the Cub fans, but if the rest of you would like to come, i suppose thats fine too.

my mom is gonna have lunch here with me so i can drive her back to work so i can have the car and drive around and take pictures of the town that i grew up in. and hopefully i will be able to upload those pics tonight because im sure youre all omg dying to see them.

this house is so clean. being home reminds you how much of a stank pig you are.

maeko + iron mouth + zona boy + maizzy got stiff!

its two am here in chicago

and for some reason im tired. i shouldnt be. i slept on the plane, something i love to do, i didnt even watch the diane lane + john cusack romantic comedy, in fact i even read a few chapters of Buzzmarketing which mc brown has been hyping since ive started at buzznet.

and i listened to howard stern on my ipod, and of course the sound of one hand clapping.

i fucked around in LA procrastinating so much that i nearly didnt make it on the plane.

if you havent flown lately they have these automatic machines where you slide your credit card and its supposed to do all the necessary things to check your ass in. of course they still have people in blazers to help you out, but if you check in with fewer than 45 minutes before takeoff they freak you out and say, your bag probably wont get on the plane and they might not even let you on.

why?

cuz they have to check your bag out.

why dont you check it out right here?

thats not what we do here, we check you in here.

and if you think i have snappy comebacks in my comments, you should see what im capable of when i see that my country is on its knees thanks to a terrorist act four freaking years ago by dudes who checked in on time, by dudes who werent wearing a cubs hat, by dudes who didnt have a suitcase filled with autographed copies of Stiff for the local libraries here in the windy, nor dvds of porn and mp3s.

if it takes you more than 45 minutes to see that theres explosives in my bag then we’re in for some trouble, america.

and on top of that — those fuckers didnt even use explosives! they used box cutters.

IN THEIR CARRY-ON!

but i just bit my lip and went to the xray portion of the obstacle course and watched a lady break down her baby stoller one-handed (the other hand held her frigging baby) as her husband sat on a chair with his shoes off getting the wand-treatment.

and four of us waited for this woman to get everything out of the stroller including the hidden 3 yr old who didnt know wtf was happening.

excuse me, never in the history of terrorism has a blonde haired family with a 4 month old and a 3 yr old terrorized an airplane, other than with cries and screams and whines and mommymommymommy at 45k feet.

let the soccermom and the middle manager through!

but i took a deep breath and thought about miniskirted teenagers who waited for me back in hollywood if i missed the flight, because the automated check in machine told me that there were no more flights if i couldnt get on this one. so i chilled and watched the dramadey and took a mental note that if i was ever blessed with doe-eyed little angels no way would i allow my wifey to have to break down her shit one handed while holding my prodgeny.

in fact no airplane flights during the holidays for my family. clark griswold style minivan action until the kids are at least in school. an airplane is no place for beasts who cry. not because theres something defective with the childrens, but because theres far too much to cry about.

top of the list being theres no food on these flights. even on United. or Ted as i rode today.

one tiny bag of pretzels is what we got.

heres my advice for the airline industry: feed us and make either big tobacco or the pharmecutical industry pay for it. if i got a nice meal that had a huge ad for Marlboro Country on the alumnium foil id be totally cool with it.

since Mobil/Exxon made so much frickin profit last quater – let those motherfuckers put a huge ad on the napkins or on the cans of pop that they hand out. put a Shell gas pump on the dish that you serve me some chicken cordon bleu. you have a captive starving audience flying halfway across this great land of ours. we already hate you oil profiteerers and big tobbacky – feed us and we’ll call it even.

and people are all, you should pack a sandwich. we were three across all the way to the back row. anyone with a sandwhich got farted on. i didnt want to be the object of anyones wrath or jealousy. i ate my nine pretzels like everyone else and fell asleep dreaming of a real chicago polish sausage

which i got several hours later at 10pm at a nice little hut called McDog’s in the northwest suburbs.

with a grilled skin so perfectly crispy i knew i was back home.

and all was well.

tomorrow i will go to radio shack, to get my momma wifi for her house after i demand that sbc yahoo hook her up with dsl immediately.

this dialup business is for the birds.

jay + pitt + dave the pa + how you should start a blog