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1:39 PM, Tuesday, September 22nd, 2015:   This is a very strange entry to write, but kind of overdue. I always want to dispel the idea of luck and magic or some perceived misunderstanding on how I got where I am and quite a bit of my good fortune has come from one dude who most of the time in the past 21 years we've known each other... I couldn't fucking stand. So yes, this is kind of a romantic comedy. Ha.   I met Chris Johnson my freshman year in college as we were both doing the radio thing. High strung, but we got along, and he liked one of the songs on my new cassette I was releasing. Cassette. Ahem. He broke the station's rules by playing it and got written up, etc. Funny looking back, but at the time kind of a badass move. Remarkably thanks to my chronic chronicling, the music director who turned him in and the program director who wrote him up interviewed me around that time about the release and I still have the audio.   21 years. Wow.   He moved onto another college... met up again in 1998/1999 when I was at CD101 and he was applying there. He didn't get the gig. We stayed connected as he followed my journey in LA while he was on his own journeys. I appreciated our online back-and-forths because he was very quick (almost too quick... like remote-control-ADD quick). However like a lot of people that followed the early journey stuff where it looked like Adam & The Trinitrons were going to take over the world, only to be decimated by an inept manager, he was annoyed and angry. Felt I should do more, that if I treated it like real-estate I could make it. No amount of explaining that it's not always applicable to showbiz seemed to work and I just stopped talking to him. I was going through a shit storm emotionally at the time and the one thing people never realize when it comes to scheming your career when you are personally the product? You have to take into account your emotional state. Because without that? You have no product. What I should've done in 2002 and what I was capable of are two entirely different things. He was (admittedly) an arrogant prick who did indeed want me to be successful, but just couldn't stop being an arrogant prick about it. LMAO.   With Facebook we reconnected, I blocked him again for the same reasons - LMAO - and yet again, I made the attempt to reconnect. The only reason is because there has always been something about him I respected. He's had various levels of success in his chosen fields, made small fortunes left and right, and was a great person to bounce things off of. The thing is? He knows this about himself. He pisses people off constantly. In the past 7 years though, it's gotten better and we've maintained contact. And in 2007 I needed a HELOC to help buyout Jess from the house and he helped me get one. A year later, he gave me one piece of advice that completely changed my life which was paraphrasing "take ALL of your money out of your HELOC to the max, even if you have to put it in a bank account and you lose money every month, they are freexing all HELOCS because of the crash.   So I gambled. I took out $55,000 against my house on my home equity line. Later that year when the stock market crashed? I bought IMAX stock at $2.75. It saved my house. I lived off that money, made over $50k on IMAX over the years and no longer even have the HELOC. It allowed me to do all sorts of things with my career, travel the world, get married, have kids (stay home with the kids) and now obviously we're in a completely different financial situation.   Now granted, that piece of advice was only part of it. I had to pull the trigger, I found an investment... but I never would've dumped that amount of debt on myself had it not been for him and I also learned a rather valuable lesson about myself. When I'm against a wall? My brain figures shit out. I don't know how at the beginning, but it always does. If I can muster the nerve to jump off a cliff, I seem to find the parachute. That's what's allowed me to build what I've built since. Even I think what I'm attempting is insane when I start... but it seems to work out.   But now we go to why I'm writing this today. Today is the one-year anniversary of a phone call with Chris where out of absolute annoyance at n00b questions about why RentTheDelorean.com doesn't come up on Google he wrote a bunch of shit and then just called me. He talked like the fucking micromachines guy and I literally wrote everything I could hear on a piece of paper. The tips he gave me required a LOT of work and were kind of vague, but eventually got narrowed down once we were back online typing. But it involved starting from scratch and keeping up with a lot of shit all the time once it was redone. However, my back was up against the wall. I hadn't made shit in 2014, I did NOT want to sell the time machine and I checked out of life for a few days and painstakingly followed his advice. He said give it 6-8 weeks, you'll be in the top 5 and if you make your site attractive enough, you'll beat out everyone. 2 months later I booked my first big corporate gig in Arizona and then when 2015 hit? All, fucking, hell broke loose. I got every lead. Every single one. Didn't book all of them, but they all came to me first. It was insane. Soon I was booking for cars all over the country and next month our company will cross $100k in revenue just this year.   Now granted, I am the one doing the work, I keep it updated and deal with all the social media sites, I make the videos, the commercials the branding, etc.... but believe me, none of this would've happened without his help. This isn't like 2008 where he just wrote a sentence and I ran with it. He legit gave me invaluable advice about how SEO works and he was absolutely dead-on. Other than paid ads, my site is at the top of nearly any search involving Renting a Delorean time machine. Even when people have tried to copy me by confusing people with RentMYdelorean as their domain name, my shit STILL comes up when you google it. Of course the look and work I put into the site is the 2nd of the one-two punch. Nothing else compares.   So I'm writing this to not only say thank-you but to dispel this myth that I'm lucky, or that I personally understood EXACTLY what to do and made RentTheDelorean.com successful on my own. I did not. Without his help, this year would be far more of a dogfight with the other owners. The crazy thing is though? Out of pure sympathy I told some of the other owners what to do so they could be a little more successful. Nearly identical advice. They didn't do it. The second you explain that you have to spend money? Most people drop out of the conversation. Fear jumps in, they're afraid they'll spend it and it still won't work... they don't have a complete grasp on WHY they're spending the money when they can get it for free...   ...but the people with their backs against the wall that HAVE to succeed? They jump. And if they have the talent they can knock it out of the park.   So thank you Chris. You've always been a supporter and I think I've always known that deep-down. I respect you and root for you as well. I'm glad we've found a way to co-exist without wanting to kill each other and truthfully, we've all mellowed a bit in old-age. So that's a plus.   Here's to the future.   Adam