PokerStage

Sundays are for Poetry

2009-05-31T12:52:00.001-05:00

Visit JohnHartness.com for the latest. Next chapters of Choices coming next week.

Relaunch

2009-05-28T14:05:00.002-05:00

So in an effort to begin to consolidate my lighting design photos, photography efforts, writing and blogging into one place, I've relaunched my personal website. Please change your links, RSS feed readers and plans for daily reading over to JohnHartness.com. This site will remain live, but I will be posting here less frequently, as I try to make this other site happen.

Choices, Part 9.

2009-05-27T20:50:00.002-05:00

“So how exactly do you propose we continue our little extravaganza? If you recall, I rode here on a motorcycle, and somehow I doubt you came rolling up in a minivan.”

“I have a car. It seats four. I’ll drive.” Emily offered.

“I’ll drive.”

“No way, mother. My car, I’m driving.” Myra looked like she was about to say something when Michael piped up.

“I’m sure there will be ample time for all of us to share the driving. After all, by my calculations it’s somewhere in the neighborhood of a 15-hour drive to get to Eve. And since she is the closest, that should be our next stop, don’t you think?”

“And where, exactly, is Eve?” I asked.

“Well I don’t know exactly, but as far as I can tell, she’s in New Orleans.”

“What the hell is she doing in New Orleans?”

“She’s…working. Yeah, that’s it. She has a job there.”

“Michael, there’s obviously something you don’t want to tell me, so of course that’s what I want to know. What is she doing in New Orleans?” I loomed a little, but the little shit was unperturbed. That’s what comes from being God’s Own Enforcer, you get to be a little hard to intimidate.

“She’s working. And if you want to know exactly what she’s doing, then I guess we’ll have to find her.”

“Alright then, let’s roll. Emily, keys.” I was already heading for the door with my hand stretched out behind me, but Myra’s voice drew me up short.

“Freeze, buster. You might be able to fly the coop at a moment’s notice without so much as a hairbrush, but us womenfolk are going to take a few minutes to pack. So why don’t you and your little friend just sit there and enjoy each other’s company while Em and I go pack a couple of bags. We’ll be right back.”

Now I’m not going to say the thought of hopping on Lucky’s bike and rolling east didn’t occur to me, but I knew that would only doom me to a trip with a naggin archangel as my only company, and besides, since her presence was evidently required, I figured this would be a good time to get to know my youngest living child. They didn’t take that long, especially considering their gender, and it didn’t take us long to catch I-49 east and get the wheels on Emily’s Camry to humming. We stopped for the night in Tyler, a little town on the appropriate side of Dallas, and got a couple of rooms at a Quality Inn.

Michael volunteered to stay outside with the car to “better commune” with his Lord, since angels don’t really need sleep, and Myra just laughed when I raised on eyebrow at her as I headed into my room. She turned around and followed Emily into their room and I tossed my backpack onto the other bed and stretched out to watch a Law & Order rerun for a little while. I didn’t feel much like sleeping, and since there’s always a Law & Order rerun on no matter what time you turn on a hotel TV, I just kicked back and tried to process a day, that even in my nearly limitless experience, had to deem was pretty screwed up.

I had processed myself into a nice solid sleep with my boots still on when I heard a soft knock on my door. I grinned and smoother my hair into place as I crossed the room, popping an Altoid as I took the chain off the door.

“I knew you wouldn’t be able to sleep with me laying just a few feet away…”my words trailed off when I looked down at Emily standing there in a t-shirt and sweatpants, looking up at me nervously.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t meant to…I should just…I’ll see you in the morning…Oh fuck I’m suchanidiot…” she turned and started to bolt but I caught her arm before she finished the turn.
“Hey, hey, hey what’s wrong? Come in, sit down, I’m sorry, I just…” I trailed off myself as I realized I was rambling.

“Just what? Just thought I was my mom?” She arched an eyebrow at me in a perfect imitation of the look I’d given her mom a couple of hours before. “Not bloody likely, as your divine friend would say. She’s out cold. I think today was a lot for her to handle.”

“I know the feeling. I thought I was going to lie here and watch TV for a while and didn’t even know I was asleep until your knock woke me.”

“Oh God! I’m so sorry! I’ll go, I didn’t mean to wake you, I just assumed you’d be up. I mean, Michael doesn’t sleep, so I guess I thought that maybe you didn’t either.”

“Michael’s an angel. I’m human, or at least pretty much human. I do sleep, not as much as most, but I do sleep. But I’d rather talk to you. I’m sure you’ve got a few questions for me.”

“A few? Yeah, that might be an understatement. But I guess, I mean, I guess my only real question is why?”

“Why? Why what?”

“Why did you make my mom fall in love with you? Did you love her? I know why you came back, you didn’t mean to, but why did you leave in the first place? And don’t give me that shit about not watching people die, I can see that lie in your eyes.”

Sometimes I wish I had normal kids. All these years, and every single one of them has been a precocious little shit. All the way back to Abel, who knew what our Father wanted almost before he did. And Cain, who was so quick and strong. They’ve all been amazing kids in some way. Take Matthew, my last son. He was the bravest kid I’d ever seen. I didn’t want him to fight in the war. I knew better than to think that the Redcoats actually had a chance – free will has been winning out ever since Eve ate the fruit, but Matthew had a fire in his soul. He burned with so much righteousness that he would have blinded that little putz Michael, and he felt the injustice of the British rule so sharply that I never had a chance of talking him out of the war. I only went along to protect my identity, and in the hope that if I was with him, I could keep Matthew from doing anything too terribly foolish. I was wrong, of course.

It wasn’t even that much of a battle, really. We were far from any of the major incursions, just fighting with a bunch of patriots in Winnsboro, SC when a Loyalist group decided to follow up on the recent surrender of Charleston by wiping out the patriots throughout South Carolina. Our ragtag bunch beat them back pretty handily, but not before Matthew was shot in the leg. It would have been easier on him if they’d hit him in the chest. The doctor, or what passed for one there, didn’t even try to treat the wound, just hacked his leg off above the knee with a crude saw. The doctor knew nothing of disinfectant, and all he had for a painkiller was a stick to bite down on, and a little whiskey when he woke up the next morning screaming in agony.

He lasted for six days before the pain, the shock and the infection killed him. I sat beside his bed day and night with my musket across my legs, daring anyone to try and move him. I held him when he shook with chills, I mopped his brow when the fever started, and eventually I wrapped my arms around him and cried into his sweat-soaked hair as he lay still. I looked down into Emily’s eyes, blazing truth the way Matthew’s eyes used to glow with righteous anger, and I started to tear up.

“Alright. But if we’re going to have this conversation, I’m going to require some mental lubrication.”

“Huh?”

“A drink, kiddo. I don’t tell these stories sober. It’s a rule I’ve got. Think your mother will be good to sleep through the night? This could take a while.”

“After the day she’s had? Yeah, I gave her half an Ambien, so she’ll be out for a good eight hours.”

“Then let’s roll.” I started toward the stairs, heading for the bar a couple hundred yards down the street, when I heard Emily clear her throat. I stopped, and looked at her standing there, barefoot, 24 years old, wearing sweats and a T-shirt that obviously served as pajamas. “Good point. You wait in there, I’ll go get us a bottle and a couple of glasses, and I’ll be right back.”
No, I didn’t ask her what she liked. I didn’t really care. The booze wasn’t for her, it was for me. She would probably need a slash or two before we were done, but I was gonna need a couple good belts before we ever started.

“That’s not good for you, you know.” Michael said as I walked past the car. He was sitting on the hood leaning back against the windshield looking up at what stars he could see through the sodium vapor parking lot lights.

“If I want your opinion, angel, I’ll beat it out of you.”

“I’m just trying to help.”

“If I ever ask for your help, please stick that fiery toothpick you carry around up my ass.” I didn’t wait around to hear his response, if there was one. I walked to the bar, flashed my best smile at the bartender and asked her how much for a bottle of Johnnie Walker Green. After a few minutes of negotiation, I slipped him a ridiculous amount of money and walked back to the hotel with two highball glasses and bottle of good whiskey.

I knocked on the door, walked in, poured two fingers of amber firewater for Emily and knocked back a stiff shot of my own. I decided to dilute the second belt with one ice cube and knocked it back, too.

“Geez, Dad. Is it that bad? You’re hitting that stuff pretty hard.”

It had been a long time since anyone called me Dad, or anything like it, and her words made my hand shake a little more. I poured myself a third drink, added a couple of ice cubes to this one, and sat down at the ubiquitous round table that you find in every cheap hotel across the US. Emily sat cross-legged on the bed nearest the door, and for a long time she just looked at me.
“Well, go ahead. You wanted to ask me questions, ask.” I said when I could no longer stand her looking at me like she could see everything without giving me the benefit of lying about it.
Her voice was very small when she finally spoke, but it was loud enough to bring the walls of Jericho down all over again. “Why didn’t you want me?” She looked up at me through a curtain of her own hair, and those eyes, those eyes that could see straight into the heart of the matter, were full of tears.

I was on the bed with her before I knew I’d moved, and I was holding her as she cried little girl tears. She sobbed like the little girl I’d never known her as, and all I could do was sit there stupidly and wrap my arms around her and rock back and forth. After a few minutes her crying started to slack off, and I smoothed her hair back out of her face and wiped her face dry with my shirt sleeve. I looked her straight in the eyes and said, with all the sincerity in my soul “I never knew about you, baby. I was gone before your mom even knew she was pregnant. If I’d known you were coming, I could never have left you. And if I’d ever seen you, I could never have left you. I’ve had hundreds of kids over the years, and I’ve never been able to stand leaving after I’ve seen their eyes. It’s not that I didn’t want you, baby, it’s that I never knew there was a you to want.”

“I know. I mean, I’ve always known that. But it never mattered, you know? At least, not until you were here to say it to me.”

“I get it. But it’s true. You know that, right? I didn’t leave you. I just left. It might not have been the right thing to do, but it felt like what I had to do. At least then.”

“I know. So why did you make my mom fall so hard for you? You know she’s never had a third date in my life?”

“Wow. No, I didn’t know that. That wasn’t the plan. That’s not the way it was supposed to go. We were just supposed to be a summer thing, a couple of young people sowing oats, or at least one young person sowing oats and one person who still looks pretty good for a really, really, really old dude.” She laughed, and I knew we were good. If I can make ‘em laugh they can’t stay too mad at me. And it’s harder to throw things when you’re laughing.

“So you were supposed to just be a fond memory and maybe the face she saw every once in a while when she looked across the breakfast table at her husband?”

“Something like that, although I’ll admit in my vainer moments to hoping I was remembered in slightly different moments than those taking place at the breakfast table, unless you have an unconventional idea of breakfast.” I arched one eyebrow and got a punch on the arm and a golden laugh as my reward.

We talked through the night, mostly inconsequential getting to know you crap, but it was nice to take the time to connect to someone, someone who I didn’t have to hide my true nature from. By the time the sun came up and her mother came in from the room next door with coffee we were friends.

Choices, Part 8

2009-05-26T20:10:00.003-05:00

Chapter 2

‘Talk.” We were sitting in the back booth in the diner, Myra next to me, Emily on the inside seat facing her mom while Michael and I took the outside. There was no one in the diner but us, the cook and a Mexican kid washing dishes. The dinner rush was over, and the diner would be closing soon, so Myra locked the front door as soon as we came back in through the kitchen. She got coffee for all of us and a fresh towel for Michael’s nose, and we took over the back corner of the diner where we wouldn’t be disturbed.

“I said, talk.” I leaned into Michael and put a little more menace into my voice.

“Oh really, Adam, don’t try. You caught me off guard, and I need you, which are the only reasons you’re still mobile. I can kill you, remember? It’s what I do.” And he wasn’t kidding. Michael was the Lord’s enforcer, the one who dealt with anyone who broke the rules seriously enough for Dad to take a personal interest. I remembered.

“Mr. um, Michael. Please. Won’t you tell us what is going on and why you brought Adam back here after all this time?” Looked like Emily learned negotiation from her mother. 'Cause she sure as hell didn't get that silver tongue from me.

“Of course, since you asked nicely.” The little prick actually raised one eyebrow at me with that line. If I had any regrets about punching him in the snoot, they were gone.

“Now, as I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted, there is coming a time of Choice, where a representative of humanity will make a decision between Order and Chaos, Good and Evil, the Light and the Dark. This human will decide the fate of all mankind for the rest of time, and it is up to you, Adam, to find him.”

“Huh?” Sometimes I’m less than eloquent.

“Was there a particular part that you didn’t understand, or was it just your general stupidity shining through?”

“Let’s take another look at the bit about me finding him. Why me?”

“Because you were there at the time of the first Choice, of course. Everyone who was there for the first Choice must be there for the final Choice.”

“So you’re saying that because I was there when Eve took the fruit…wait a second, you said everyone?”

“I believe I did.”

“Well, that’s gonna be a problem, seeing as how Abel’s suffering from a bad case of dead and Eve won’t be in the same time zone as me.”

“Your latest offspring shall fill the void left by your second son, and as for Eve, well, you’ll just have to be persuasive, now won’t you?”

“And Cain?”

“Cain, too, Adam.” Michael managed to lose the smug for just a minute at the mention of my oldest son. I hadn’t seen Cain in a long time, even for us, and it wasn’t a situation I was looking to change. Eve and I both had some issues with forgiveness: she couldn’t forgive herself, and I couldn’t forgive Cain. The last time we saw each other was the kind of meeting that country and western songs are written about, the kind of songs that feature destroyed bars, at any rate.

“No deal. I’m not going to put Even through that, I’m not going to deal with Cain, and I’m not going to let Emily get anywhere near either of them. Period.”

“This is not open for debate, Adam, son of God.” Michael turned The Voice on me, and his had more behind it than just a few thousand years of practice. His Voice came complete with Power, the kind that comes from a guy that sits on a big throne, and I knew that the floor was closed for debate.

I looked at Myra, then at Emily, and closed my eyes for a second. “This is tough. I know this is going to hard to believe, but everything he said is true. And we do have to do this. He can’t lie when he uses The Voice, and he can’t support a lie with it, either. We have to do this, and we both have to go.”

“Both? You mean all three of us, right?”

“Actually, Myra, you don’t have to go. Emily’s presence is all that is required.”

“Oh hell no! I sit here for almost 25 years waiting for my one true love, and the day he walks back into my life you tell me that he’s just going to ride off with my daughter and some snotty angel with a bloody shirt? Well you’ve got another think coming, Mr. High and Mighty Archangel, there is no way in hell this woman is getting left behind while Captain Immortal rides off into the sunset again. He’s stuck with me, at least until I get to find out if he snores too much or can’t figure out how to put the toilet seat down, and that means you’re stuck with me, too. And if you don’t like it, I can bloody your damn nose for you again real quick-like.”

“Adam, you always have had a taste for, shall we say, volatile women.”

“We can say that. And Myra’s coming with us. I just met this daughter today, so I can’t rightfully just swoop in and take her with us, can I? Don’t answer that. I know you’ve never been the most subtle of the seraphim.”

“Comes with the flaming sword, old chap.”

“Alright, all bullshit aside, where are we going? Where’s this guy who’s gonna decide the fate of the world?”

“Well, he’s not the first of our concerns. First, we have to find Eve. And she might not be as easy to persuade as you three. And she could be even less thrilled at my appearance,” said the angel.

Choices, Part 7

2009-05-26T12:49:00.001-05:00

“So why did you come back?” Myra asked me after a long moment.

“What?”

“Why did you come back? After all this time, why come back now? I don’t think I’m going to believe that you suddenly developed a misplaced parenting gene and decided to pop in to see if you had knocked me up and had a daughter to raise, and I’m sure as hell not going to believe you came back to see me again for another tumble after all these years.”

“Mom!”

“Oh don’t be all outraged, Em, I’m pretty sure he’s heard it all before.”

“I have, and more besides. But to answer your question, I didn’t.”

“Didn’t what?”

“Didn’t come back. At least, not intentionally. I was just riding along on my way back East, and got hungry. So I pulled in at the next stop. It wasn’t until I walked into the diner that I remembered that this was your place.”

“You…forgot me?”

“No! No, I didn’t forget you, I just didn’t remember that this was your place until I walked in. And honestly, if I had remembered, I probably would have kept on rolling. You know, trying not to reconnect and all that.”

“So you stopped because you just happened to get hungry near my exit?”

“Well, not exactly.” This from Michael, who had apparently forgotten my instructions to keep his mouth shut, and had either forgotten or was choosing to ignore the outcome of our last interaction, that last day in the Garden.

You see, Michael was the right hand of the Man. The hand that held the flaming sword, and was in charge of enforcing Dad’s edicts. So when we were tossed out of the Garden, it was Michael that did the tossing. Or at least, it was Michael that started the process. In the end it took several of the archangels to get the job done, and some of them looked a little the worse for wear when it was over. Michael particularly had seen better days. I’m pretty sure I broke his nose in the scuffle.

That may have been the first day of Knowledge of Good and Evil, but my sense of right and wrong was pretty deeply instilled long before, and when he put his hands on Eve and she cried out in pain as he twisted her arm behind her back to remove her from the only home we’d ever known, I reacted without thinking. Further reflection brought me to the conclusion that had I thought before I socked the head of the militant Archangels in the snoot, I would have done the same thing. Every time.

So there was no love lost between Michael and I, and this revelation that he may have had something to do with this uncomfortable reunion (not to mention the repeated slapping of my face) led me to turn, very slowly, and face the immaculately dressed scion of heaven.

“What do you mean, not exactly? And let’s have an answer without any of the standard angelic obfuscation, if you don’t mind too terribly.” I can affect a pretty solid posh British accent of my own when the situation warrants, and I felt like it definitely warranted.

“Wouldn’t dream of it, my boy.” He knew I hated it when he called me that. I always did. “I may have manipulated your hunger pangs a little to bring you to this place. These ladies are very important, and have a very important role to play in what is coming.”

“And what, exactly, is coming, Michael? And what do you have to do with it?”

“Well, Adam, ever since you and Eve left the Garden, things have been moving toward this final confrontation.”

“You’re obfuscating. What confrontation?”

“Just because you’re obtuse does not mean that I am obfuscating. The final confrontation of Good and Evil, Adam. The choice between Right and Wrong, between God and Satan, between Order and Chaos. The Choice.”

“Oh.” I knew this was coming eventually. Dad explained to me back in the Garden that when he gave us free will, he knew that eventually we would have to make a final choice between the Light and the Dark. I always thought the “we” he was talking about was each individual, that everyone made their own choice, but Michael was making it sound like there was one big Choice that was going to happen that would decide the fate of the whole human race.

“Of course there is,” he said when I expressed my thoughts to him. “There was one Choice all those years ago in the Garden, and Eve made it. She chose Chaos, and you were removed from the Garden. Had she chosen us over your friend the Lightbringer, you and all your descendants would have grown and lived in the Garden forever. But she chose poorly, and humanity has suffered for it for millennia. This choice is like that one, and will be made just like that one was, by a random human on behalf of you all.”

Silence hung heavy in the afternoon air as we all contemplated the angel’s words. Michael couldn’t lie, the Archangels never learned how, so what he said was certain to be truth. It might not be the whole truth, since angels certainly knew how to hold things back, but this didn’t feel like one of those times. Of course, I hadn’t had any of my long talks with the seraphim in a few thousand years, so I suppose they could have learned a few new things.

“That’s not fair.” My head snapped around and my eyes locked on Emily, who stood beside the picnic table, eyes glistening as she stared a hole into Michael. “I’m not going to abide by the decision of some person who hasn’t even been chosen yet who knows nothing about me and has no right to make decision that will affect my whole life and the life of generations to come. That’s just not fair and I’m not going to put up with it!”

“My dear girl, not only is it fair, it’s the basis for your entire country!”

Michael laughed. “Your entire idealized existence is run by people who don’t know you and couldn’t care less. This is just more representative governance, dearie, and you will deal with it because no one asked your opinion. Leave the grown-up talk to the grown-ups and go back inside to your dishes. We’ll call you when you’re needed.”

Emily walked up to Michael, looked him square in his sky-blue eyes, and slapped the shit out of him. Then she spun on her heel, marched over to the picnic table and sat there, jaw set, daring anyone to try to make her move. Yep, that’s my kid, I thought.

“You deserved that one, Mikey. Now what’s the deal, really? Somebody somewhere is going to run into Lucky, get tempted, and they’re going to make another Eve-level Choice? I thought we were a little far along the road for that.”

“Oh no, Adam, not at all, not at all. This Choice will be so much more that Eve’s little choice that she may as well be forgotten by history. This Choice will determine the true outcome of humanity. You see, now they’ve seen what Chaos is. They’ve seen the Dark. When Eve made her decision to bite the fruit, you two had no idea what the Dark was. You had no frame of reference, so Eve’s decision was made in a vacuum. A little unfair, really, that she’s taken so much blame for it for so long. After all, it is human nature to want to know what’s behind Door #2. I should know, I helped write that bit.” Michael had to stop to spit a little blood from his mouth halfway through his pretty little speech, which diminished the impact somewhat, but the words sat me on my ass just the same.

“So you’re saying Eve was set up?”

“Excuse me?”

“Eve. Was. Set. Up. The whole thing was planned from the Beginning. She didn’t have a choice after all. She had to take the fruit.”

“Of course not. She could have refused to eat the fruit. Of course, if she had, we would have come up with something else. Eventually you were going to have to leave the Garden. It was the only way you could see the world, after all.”

“So for thousands of years Eve has suffered, thinking that she brought all the evil into the world, that if she had been just a little stronger, or if Lucky had caught her on a better day, or if she hadn’t wandered off alone that morning, that she could have said no and spared the world a wealth of suffering, and now you tell me that if she’d said no you would have just kept on coming until eventually one of us gave in?” I might have been yelling a little by the last bit.

“Pretty much, yes.” The smug smile was what did it. I knew he was trying to push my buttons, and he was always the second best manipulator out of the angelic herd. At that precise moment, however, I didn’t care. I just knew that he had allowed Eve to suffer with the guilt of falling to temptation since the dawn of time, and I was, to put it mildly, pissed.

So I hit him. I swung from the knees, and I punched the leader of the Angelic Host right in the nose with everything I had. Angels aren’t really that different from the rest of us when they choose to take human form. They bleed, even though they can’t die. They can hurt, though, and a shot to the nose stings like a son of a bitch. So when I put everything I had into a roundhouse that connected solidly with Michael’s nose, I felt the satisfying crunch of cartilage under my knuckles and I knew that I’d broken it once again. Damn, that felt good. I highly recommend punching out a pompous archangel once an eon or so, it’s good for the soul.

“Dammit, Adam, that hurts!” He was lying on his back in the dusty parking lot and I liked him a lot better with blood spattering his French Blue dress shirt than I had just a few seconds earlier.
“It wasn’t meant to tickle, you prick. Screw you and your little games, I’m outta here.” I turned on my heel and headed back towards my bike, determined to leave Texas and Michael behind me as quickly as I could.

“Dad.” I stopped. There’s only a couple of words that can stop me in my tracks, but that one’s a lock. “Please don’t go.” I turned, and there was Emily, not looking at me, but looking at me all the same. “Please?”

“Why?” I asked. Like it mattered. She was my kid after all. If she wanted me to stay, I was staying.

“I think this might be important. And I think you might have to do this, no matter how big a douchebag this guy is.” Well, that cut right through it all right there. Sometimes there are things you just have to do, whether you want to or not, whether the people you have to do them with are douchebags or not; sometimes things have to get done. And sometimes you’re the only one that can do them.

“This is gonna suck.” I said as I walked back over to her.

“Probably.” She agreed, and she tossed Michael a dishrag to stop his bleeding nose.

“I’m gonna need some coffee.” I was walking back towards the rear entrance of the diner by now.

“I’ll handle it. The lunch rush is over and you never could make coffee worth a shit.” Myra said as she passed me on the way into the diner.

“Hey! Wait for me!” Cried the warrior archangel as he tried to get his bloody nose to cooperate enough to let him follow us into the diner. To quote one of my favorite philosophers, I had a bad feeling about this.

Choices, Part 6

2009-05-23T23:28:00.000-05:00

So let’s take a good look at my afternoon so far. I was driving cross-country on a motorcycle I borrowed from Lucifer Morningstar on my way to look for Eve, my long-lost and content to stay that way immortal first love when I encountered a woman that I had relations with a couple decades before, along with the offspring of said relations, when the friggin’ Archangel Michael showed up demanding that I tell the women the truth, of all ridiculous things. I did the only thing I could think of, I walked briskly across the dusty parking lot from the diner to the run-down bar that shared the interstate exit and ordered myself a shot and a beer. There are some situations that just cannot be addressed properly without a certain level of mental lubrication, and this was shaping up to be a Cuervo-sized situation.

Once I felt that I had properly fortified myself for the confrontation that was coming, I made my way back across the parking lot to the picnic table where the archangel sat chatting idly with my daughter while her mother smoked a cigarette. These are not situations that occur every day, not even if you’re immortal.

“Myra, I think I owe you an explanation,” I started.

“Explanation? Explanation?!?” Usually when a word of four syllables involves more than two octaves, whatever follows is not going to be good, so I decided to head her off before she could get a head of steam going.

“Yes. Explanation.” I used The Voice. It’s nothing supernatural. I really don’t have any abilities other than the touch of ESP that everyone has and a ridiculous lifespan, but with age does come a certain level of authoritative voice, and I had elevated mine to capitalization status through a long period of study with the Greek orators. Those boys could talk, let me tell you.

“I know that I left without any warning, and I know that I showed up here again the same way. But I did warn you when we first became involved that I wouldn’t be staying very long, and that one day, you’d likely wake up to find me gone. We agreed that we’d enjoy the time we had, and that we wouldn’t put any strings on each other.”

“Yes, but that was before…” she trailed off and looked down, suddenly very interested in the scuffed sneakers she was wearing.

“Before what, Myra?”

“Before I fell in love with you.” She said, in a very small voice, this confident woman near fifty suddenly teenager-shy again, and looking for all the world like she wanted to be doing anything else in the world other than having this conversation. I knew the feeling, and I’ve had these conversations before. I could only imagine what it must have felt like going through it for the first time, and from the other perspective.

“Myra, I loved you too. I still love you, after a fashion, but there are some things about me that you didn’t know then, things that make it hard for me to fall in love.”

“Hard, Adam?” another party heard from as Michael decided to remind us that we weren’t having a private conversation.

“Michael, when I need your particular input on human relationships, I’ll look it up in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Until then, butt out. Myra, I’m not really sure how to put this, but it’s probably pretty obvious that I’m not exactly normal. I look about the same as I did when I left, and that’s been”

“24 years and three months, give or take a week.”

“How do you keep track of it that closely…” I trailed off as I looked over at Emily, looking about twenty-three and a half, and decided that finishing the question would make me look infinitely stupid and lead to more unnecessary input from my good buddy Michael.

“Yeah, a little over 24 years. So, the thing is, this is not easy to explain…”

“Adam, you’ve had work done. It’s okay. We’re not LA, but we’re not complete bumpkins, you know. There’s even anesthesia for facelifts in Texas nowadays, and most folks don’t even assume guys are gay if they get a little Nip/Tuck action. Well, most folks don’t, anyway.”

I laughed. A lot. I’ve had this conversation on more than one uncomfortable occasion in the past few millennia, and I’ve never been accused of cosmetic surgery before. This was certainly a day of firsts. I laughed, and was so taken aback by the idea that I just blurted out the truth without thinking a second about it.

“I didn’t have work done, honey, I’m immortal. I don’t age. Remember the Adam from Genesis? Yeah, that would be me. And Moses got most of that stuff right, because I told it to him while we were hanging out in Israel.”

“Yeah, whatever. You’re immortal and I’m Farah Fawcett.”

“No, really. I look the same because I always look the same, at least since we left the Garden. And I left without saying anything because I’m not strong enough to stick around and watch the people that I care about grow old while I stay forever young.”

“What?”

“He’s telling the truth, love. If you just take it at face value for now we can get on to the grand reconciliation and we can all leave this dump of a town. Honestly, Adam, why you insist upon finding trysts in such father-forsaken holes in the cosmos I will never understand.”

“Michael, for the last time, Shut. Your. Mouth. And when did you decide to be British?”

“Just now. It’s a pretentious decade and I can’t possibly fit in without an appropriately posh accent.”

“I think you’ll manage just fine. Anyway, Myra, like I was saying. I’m immortal, and the reason I left was because I really did, I mean do, care for you, and it’s just too hard staying in one place for very long because of the inevitable questions about not aging, and that coupled with the whole watching the people you love grow old and die thing, well, it’s just gotten to be too much for me over the centuries, so now I relocate after a couple years at the most, and I stay less time in places where I’m afraid that a real connection might be starting, because I figure it’s easier on the people that I leave behind if I leave sooner rather than later, you know, giving them a chance to move on with their lives and that sort of thing, and…I should probably stop talking now.”
“Yes. Stopping talking now would probably be a safe move, Adam.” Her voice was icy, and the look on her face made me inch out of arm’s reach, fearing another slap might be forthcoming. Instead, she looked down at the ground, took a deep, shuddering breath, and looked me straight in the eye.

“You. Son. Of. A. Bitch. You selfish, uncaring, thoughtless, chickenshit son of a bitch! You ran out on me after I laid in your arms every night for six months! I told you things I’ve never told anyone before or since. I told you my hopes, my dreams, my fears, the embarrassing things that I’ve never once dreamed of having the courage to tell another living soul, and then one morning I come in after my shower and you’re gone!

Gone, without a note, without even a slap on the ass and a thank you! You worthless motherfucker, you leave me without any reason, without any hope of ever seeing you again, and then you have the unmitigated gall to come back in here twenty-four years later riding on your big motorcycle spouting some bullshit about immortal and scared to love and expect me to fall for it just like I fell for your line of shit the first time you were here?

Well fuuuuuuck you, buddy, that train left the station a long time ago, and the only thing I got out of the deal was a beautiful, smart, darling daughter that you don’t ever, ever deserve to try to be part of her life. So get back on your motorcycle and ride off into the sunset you came out of, and don’t you dream of coming back into my life or my baby’s life!” By now she was full-on sobbing, screaming and looking for things to throw at me, so before the cook decided that it was probably worth it to come through the screen door where he was watching the show, I reached out to Myra, put my arms around her, and held her.

I pulled her to my chest, and so many memories came flooding back. Memories of waking up with her naked lying across my chest in the middle of the night, the ceiling fan doing nothing to cut through the heat of the day that still lay across us like a blanket. Memories of sitting on a hillside by a pond watching the sun set and pretending to give a damn about the corks we had floating on the ends of our fishing lines. Memories of watching her sling coffee and hash browns along the length of the breakfast counter to long-haul truckers and locals alike, each served with a smile and a saucy shake of the hips. I held her as she cried like a baby that’s just lost her favorite toy, and more than one tear of my own slipped down my face to dampen the curtain of hair that hid her face.

But finally she cried herself out, and got tired of hitting my back with her fists, and she pulled away.

“Better?”

“Yeah, I just needed to get that off my chest.”

“Good. It’s good to see you again. I’m glad you’re well.”

“Well might be stretching it most days, but I’m still here. And I think I’m glad to see you, too. But why did you really leave? And really, where is your fountain of youth, because most days, especially the way my feet feel when I pull a double, I’d like a swig.”

“Well…you see, here’s the problem.”

“What?”

“I was telling the truth.”

“About what?”

“About the hard to believe bits. You know, immortal, Garden of Eden, Adam. That stuff? That was real. I’m that Adam, and I left because I didn’t want to fall in love with you and watch you die, and because I thought if I left soon enough I could be gone and you could move on, leaving me as just a faded, but pleasant memory from your youth.”

“So let me get this straight. You’re the Adam of Adam and Eve, fig leaves, snakes, apples and Cain and Abel?” This was Emily, who had been content to sit and watch things unfold to this point.

“Yes to all of the above, except Luck-Lucifer wasn’t really a serpent, just kind of a snake in the grass metaphorically, and the fig leaves really were just inserted by uptight artists. We went straight from naked to woven grass skirts, actually.”

“So if you’re Adam with a capital A, and I’m your daughter, which you seem oddly willing to accept at face value without any mention of DNA testing or other proof…”

“It’s the eyes. I recognize them. My eyes always breed true in the first generation, so I learned to recognize them after a while.”

“Okay, so you’re Adam of the original humans Adam and Eve, and I’m your daughter, and you’re immortal, so what does that make me?”

“From what I can tell, lifespan tends to follow the norms for the period when you’re born, so you won’t end up immortal. At least, none of my children since Cain have been.”

“And exactly how many of them have there been?”

“437.” I now remember how much I disliked certain aspects of hanging around with angels. They keep a lot of trivia floating around in their heads, because they can I guess. And Michael, being ridiculously honest and forthcoming even at the most inopportune times, felt that he had to share my exact offspring census with the gathered family at a time when some obfuscation may have been the more tactful approach.

“437? That’s not a family, that’s a regiment! Jesus, what do you do, just leave a couple of bastards in every town where you stop for lunch?” Emily was a little outraged at finding out that she was part of such a large family.

“No. Please remember that I’ve lived for eons. When you look back across the entirety of the human race, I am not responsible for an inordinate number of offspring. In fact, with the notable exception of the time of the Roman Empire, I have been very particular with the… I do not have to explain myself to my own daughter!”

Slap! “You do not have the right to call her that! You were nothing more than a sperm donor, she is my daughter and nothing of yours!” Again with the slapping.

I fixed Myra with my steeliest glare “Nothing of mine? You can’t even pretend to tell me that you’ve looked in those eyes every day for 23 years and not seen a piece of me looking back at you. Now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to finish this conversation without getting hit any more.”
“So I had 436 brothers and sisters down through history, are any of them alive now?”

“One, but you might not want to spend much time with Cain. He has sibling rivalry issues. You mother is the first woman I’ve shared enough of myself with to have a child in some number of years, so you’re the only…”

“How many?” A small voice from Myra.

“Excuse me?”

“How many years? How long has it been since you ‘shared enough of yourself?’”

“About 1755 or so. I had a son. He died in the war.”

“Which war?” Emily asked.

“The Revolutionary War. We fought together. He caught a bullet in the leg and it had to be amputated. It got infected, as so many of them did, and he died. It wasn’t pretty. I held his hand when he went. He was 24.”

“I’m sorry.” Myra said softly.

“It wasn’t the first time I’ve held one of my children as they’ve died. It’s not something that gets easier the more often you do it, though.” We were quiet for a moment, then, both of us lost in thought. I flashed back on the dozens of times throughout history that I had watched my reflection dim in my child’s eyes, and Myra shuddered slightly as she thought about losing Emily.

More scribbles

2009-05-21T17:00:00.002-05:00

I'm not done with Adam and his cast of characters yet, I was just travelling last night and didn't get my writing in. Here's something on the poetical front while I prep another entry.

Hollydays

Colbie Callait’s singing Mistletoe on the XM holiday station
While a little Mexican boy sits cross-legged
On his brown front yard
Looking down the street expectantly,
Searching traffic for a Greyhound sleigh
to bring Poppi home.

Two fat women,
One white with a bad dye job and a
Trailer-park linoleum kitchen hair style,
One black with a Santa hat and a wifebeater
Walk side by side along a busy street
Hauling their Wal-Mart groceries
And government cheese
Home
To the efficiency apartment with the Toys-for-Tots gifts
And Methodist-donated decorations.

All the flowers in the cemetery
Are fresh
Except one.
What happened to you,
Mr. Robert Keziah 1953-2009?
Was he the last
Is he forgotten
Does nobody care
Is everybody busy

Why not him?

I like to walk among my ghosts
On holidays
To remember where I’m from.

Not just a river in Egypt

I never think of you anymore,
Until I see a picture of us some asshole put on Facebook,
Standing on the steps in front of my college dorm
Decked out in our finest freakwear to go out on the town,
Nineteen and smiling like we’ve got our whole lives in front of us,
Or something equally stupid.

I never even notice we’re not together anymore,
Until I hear a song on my iPod that you just had to had to haaaad to have
Right
That
Minute
So I got out of my very warm and comfortable bed,
Thankyouverydamnmuch,
And bought the MP3 for you off Amazon so you could play it
Seventeen times
At least
That night before you fell asleep with your head on my shoulder
And your hair tickling my nose.

I never turn my head when I think I hear your voice,
Unless maybe it’s at that Starbucks on 7th St. where we almost got
Thrown out for being just a little too friendly
On the couches which just happened to be in front of the windows
And there might have been a complaint from a mother
Or three
Walking her kid to the comic book shop next door.

I never, EVER, don’t go somewhere just in case you might be there,
Except for what used to be our grocery store,
Or VisArt,
Or that Cajun joint in NoDa with the bread pudding you used to love.
I guess you
Probably
Still love that bread pudding.

I never miss you at all hardly,
Except at night.
Nights are a little tough, I’ll admit,
When there’s not anybody snoring so gently beside me
Nobody hogging the blanket
And putting cold feet between my legs just as I’m about to fall asleep
Then giggling and kissing me breathless
Before looking up at me with those kitten eyes and asking
“But you love, me, right?”

So I’m fine. Really, I don’t ever really think about you.
Much. To speak of.
Anymore.
Really.

Better Home

He set his banjo on a peach crate,
Picked up a mason jar full of clear liquid,
Tore himself off a slash and said,
“Sing for me, Vera.”
Her voice wavered like a robin’s song,
High and clear across the smoke-filled room
And everybody drew still as Grandma sang gospel.

“I was standing, by my window,
on one cold and cloudy day”

Grandaddy’s fingers skipped across the banjo strings
Like Mama through a Carolina cotton field,
Bare feet kicking clods of red dirt while her patchwork dress
Snagged on branches, snatchin’ notes out of the air like
Grandma’s song floating through the kitchen while she made collards
For Sunday dinner.

“Will the circle be unbroken,
By and by, Lord, by and by.”

The whiskey stole his fingers,
Hard living and twelve children stilled her voice.
There was no music in them by the time I came along,
But every once in a while, when I played freeze tag with my cousins
In the back yard and hid behind the laundry hanging out in the sun to dry,
A bird would carry back a hint of melody, and I could hear the song
In Grandma’s eyes as she stood at the sink washing dishes
And watching the kids play in the yard.

“There’s a better home a-waiting,
in the sky, lord, in the sky.”

Choices, part 5

2009-05-19T18:57:00.000-05:00

Anybody still out there?

“Yeah. I think she knows me. Or at least I think she thinks she knows me. Or thinks she knew me. Or something like that.” Just for the record, I’m never flustered. It’s not like this is the first time I’ve had a kid. It’s not like this is the first time I’ve found out some time after the fact that I’ve had a kid. This is, however, the first time I’ve been inexplicably drawn to a diner in the middle of Monkey’s Nut, TX while en route to find my estranged wife of some innumerable number of centuries only to be confronted with the unmistakable evidence of a past indiscretion. So I might have been a little more rattle-prone than normal.

“Well, how does she know you? ‘Cause I don’t know you, and it ain’t like this is that big a town, and really, I’d remember anybody as close to my age as you who looks like you if you’d come through any time recent.”

Yeah, that whole immortality thing? I look like I’m about 28. Forever. It has its advantages, like never having to worry about Grecian formula, but one of the drawbacks is that if you see the same person with a ridiculous amount of time between visits, you look the same as the last time they saw you. This becomes somewhat inconvenient when you’d rather the mother of your most recent offspring not drop a cup of coffee into the middle of the floor upon your arrival.

“It’s a long story. Look, here’s a buck for the coffee. I gotta roll.” And I stood up to head for the door. Except, of course, there was a problem with that. There’s always a problem. I mean, I understand the need for some dramatic conflict, but seriously, the last guy to write about me was Moses, can’t I give up a little on the conflict by now?

Myra had made it back into the diner and was headed my way, an inscrutable look on her face. It was almost a cliché, the way she ran into my arms, grabbed me by the back of the neck and kissed me like she was checking for recent dental work. Then, after she held me like there was no tomorrow, she pulled back, hands on my elbows, and hauled off and slapped the ever-loving shit outta me. I saw it coming, figured it was coming from the moment she dropped the coffee cup, really, but didn’t bother trying to stop it. I just took it, and let me tell you, a woman who’s spent a couple decades slinging hash at a roadside diner in Texas knows how to lay one on a guy.

“I deserved that.” I said, whipping a little trickle of blood from my lips. Yes, we can bleed. We can be hurt, we just don’t die from it. You don’t want to know exactly how exhaustive some of our testing of that fact has been. The details are a little disturbing, and the memories of those times a little embarrassing.

“You’re goddamned right you did,” Myra said, drawing back to lay another on me as I turned the other cheek. I didn’t turn the other cheek out of some retarded sense of pacifism, that’s just what naturally happens when somebody slaps the piss out of you, you turn the other cheek. I caught her hand before the blow landed, and did the only thing I thought might defuse the situation: I kissed her.

In retrospect, kissing Myra in her heightened state of emotion only had about a one in three shot of ending the violence, but it was a better shot than anything else had, and I really didn’t want to get physical with her. Not just because I don’t like hitting women, but also because the cook had come out of the kitchen to watch the floor show, and he looked like he could cause some serious damage if so inclined.

So I kissed her, and I poured everything I had into the kiss. It’s not like I have any supernatural abilities, other than immortality and a little bit of extra-sensory perception where Eve and Lucky are concerned, but after a couple of eons you pick up a few things. And since I spent most of the 15th century in France, I learned from some of the best.

When I felt the iron melt out of her spine, I stopped kissing her, looked into her eyes, and said “We should talk. Outside. All three of us.” And I led her to the door, Emily in tow. We walked out of the diner, around the side of the building to a couple of concrete picnic tables that I remembered from my last trip where the crew took their smoke breaks, and I sat Myra down. Emily sat next to her, and I sat on the table cross-legged facing them.

“So, I guess I have a little explaining to do,” I started, trying to figure out how I was going to get part of the story out without telling them the whole thing, when something new happened.

Now let me interject something here. This was something new. That’s a big deal. I hadn’t really been surprised by anything that happened in the world since Alexander made his great sweeps across the world. And that was just more me being impressed by his audacity and drive than actual surprise. But what happened next had never happened to me before, at least not since we left the Garden.

“You do indeed, Adam. You do indeed. And I think both of these young ladies deserve to know the truth. The whole truth, as they say.” The voice came from behind me, and I knew it instantly. It was Michael, the first unfallen angel I’d seen in the flesh since we left the Garden, and he did not look happy to see me.

Choices, part 4.

2009-05-18T19:24:00.002-05:00

So I've decided that this little story has a name: Choices. And I think I've figured out where its going. I'm not sure how long it will take to get there, or who will join the party along the way, but it's good to have an ending in sight, I think.

I crashed in Flagstaff for the night, and rolled on east the next morning. I’ve always been a morning person. It was always my favorite time in the Garden, and nothing had happened in a few thousand years to change that. There’s something fresh about a morning, when the promise of the day hasn’t been spoiled by having to deal with other people yet, that always makes me look at the world with a little lighter eye. So I rolled east. I knew I’d eventually start to feel where Eve was. We could all always find each other. Me, Lucky, Eve, Cain. Yeah, Cain’s still around, too. I tend to steer pretty clear of my firstborn son, not because I haven’t gotten over what he did to Abel, but because he hasn’t. He and Eve stayed in better contact with each other than with me. I guess they feel like they both carry a burden I can’t understand. Families are like that, I suppose.

But I had no hint of Eve, Cain or Lucky this time. I headed East because I’d been living in the West for so many years I assumed Eve would be somewhere far away. I last knew she was in America a dozen or so years ago. I was in Los Angeles and I felt her. She never made contact, and I knew better than to try. I figured she’d probably stayed pretty close to the East coast since then. It’s also got more big cities, and Eve’s done a pretty good job of losing herself among people for a while.

I love America, with its big wide expanses of country. Europe has nothing like Texas, where the whole world seems flat. There are some parts of Africa that are similar, but yet not. America has a vibration all its own, a youthfulness that carries across even though the land is no older or younger than any other piece of dirt. You see, a country tends to take on the characteristics of its inhabitants, and Americans are quick, vibrant types. Always impatient, like kids. So the country feels young. I like it, it makes me feel like I’m only 2,000 again.

I got hungry around Amarillo, and I swung into a little diner I’d visited once acouple dozen years before. The same tinny bell rang as I walked through the door, and the same (or more likely so similar to be interchangeable) old men looked up from their places at the counter as I strolled in. My boots clicked across the same checkerboard linoleum, tracks worn colorless near the door and in front of the cash register. I nodded to the cook behind the counter as I crossed the room, knocking the road dust off my jeans as I made my way to a booth near the jukebox.

It was late afternoon, and the sunlight streaming through the dirty windows had taken on a golden-amber tone as that big ball settled low in the sky, just starting to tinge the horizon with fire. I’d just turned to slide my jeans across the cracked red pleather seat when I heard a gasp and a crash of broken crockery.

“Shit, Myra! What the hell’s the matter with you?” the cook yelled at the woman who stood, stock still in the middle of the floor with coffee spilling all over her feet. I took one look at her and my heart sank a little. I knew her. Biblically, as they say. And if anyone’s qualified to use term, it would be me. She was older, of course. The blonde hair that once spun gold out of that afternoon sunlight was now a dishwater bland, with more than a few streaks of grey shot through it. The little crinkles that used to appear in the corners of her mouth were permanent lines now, and she didn’t seem to float across the floor like she used to. She was a little heavier than when we last met, but not fat. Just a woman’s body, not a girl any longer. Not a girl for a long time, I suppose. But her eyes were the same. The eyes never really change. As long as there’s still a person in there, the eyes are the same.

And her eyes held more than just a spark of recognition, they held an entire bonfire. They burned into me with 25 years worth of questions, answers, speculations, loss, love, forgiveness and more than a little pain. But oddly enough, not a hint of regret. I was glad for that. I didn’t want her to regret anything about our time together. I certainly didn’t. Of course, I knew it was fleeting at the time, and she obviously had waited for me to come back. And when I did, it was two decades later. And I still looked exactly like I did the day I left that little diner, intending never to return in her lifetime.

That’s the key to being who we are, to living like we do. It’s not to refuse to make connections. We’re human, and we need those connections as much as anyone. It’s to know when the connection has to be severed, for both our sakes. It would be impossible to live with someone who doesn’t age without growing to resent them as your youthful vigor fades. Love can turn to hate very easily, and there’s nothing worse than being hated by someone who once loved you like you were the only two people on earth.

Just trust me on that one. I’ve got a little perspective.

It’s just as hard on us, giving our hearts to someone we know will die in what is just an eyeblink to our lifespan. So we hold back. We can’t give ourselves completely to a mortal, and that’s the kind of thing that perceptive lovers pick up on. And after a few millennium walking the earth, you’re not interested in dating rocks anymore, so you’re going to have perceptive lovers.
So we make brief, incredibly deep, incredibly vital, soul-touching connections. And then we sever them before it gets somebody really hurt. We hope. Sometimes we miss, and the person we leave is in stasis for the rest of their lives hoping we’ll come back. Dad, I hope that’s not what happened to Myra.

So I sat there, and I looked back at her, and she looked at me, and I looked at her, and after a minute she seemed to convince herself that I wasn’t really me. That’s the logical choice, after all. I mean, who goes through 25 years and still looks like they’re in their twenties? Other than Dick Clark, and I know his secrets, so don’t sweat it. After an eternity that couldn’t have been longer than a few seconds, Myra ran to the back, where I heard her ask someone back there to “cover for me.” Seconds later I heard the screen door out the back of the kitchen slam, and then I could just barely hear the sound of someone sitting on the back stoop, striking a match, and taking the first long drag off a cigarette.

“Boy, mister, you got her wound up tighter than a clock spring at midnight. What’s the deal? She know you? Cause I’ve never seen you before, and I’d remember you.” The voice came from my elbow, and as I looked up the arm from the coffeepot I saw a nametag that read “Emily,” an apron over a uniform and the pretty face of a twenty-something blonde girl with a pixie smile and a cute upturned nose. And then I saw her eyes. Or more to the point, I saw my eyes in her face, and I knew that my life had just gotten a little more complicated.

Continued: meeting Eve

2009-05-15T11:58:00.000-05:00

It had been a few centuries since I last saw Eve, and that didn’t end well. Not for us, not for anyone watching, and not for the residents of the surrounding countryside. I found her in London at the turn of the century, the 17th century that is, playing ratcatcher in the sewers just to see if she could catch plague. Eve liked to live on the edge, and ever since that whole tossed out of the Garden thing, she had been trying to die. This was her third go-round with the Plague, and it wasn’t working out any better than the last two. I’d heard of the mad ratwoman all the way up in my home in Austria, and I knew right away who it was. I also pretty much knew the outcome of our meeting before it happened, but that didn’t stop me from going after her. Again.

I found her outside the Rose, one of the new style of theatres. She looked like hell. Eve had never been classically beautiful, but over time she came to revel in filth, as if she could hide the mark on her soul if she layered enough dirt on her body. This time around her hair was long, hanging nearly to her waist, and matted with things I’d rather not describe. Never a tall woman, she had affected a hunched-over posture and a limp that I suppose made her less obtrusive in her current surroundings. That’s one thing about the both of us: unless we go to some lengths to hide it, after a time it becomes obvious to anyone around that we’re not exactly normal. We looked the same, after all we are the original people, but there’s something just a touch off. We have no clearly-defined ethnicity, because there wasn’t such a thing when we were Made. And there’s something in our eyes, something about the weight of a few dozen centuries that’s impossible to hide. So we don’t look to many people in the eye. It’s nothing personal, too much eye contact just leads to questions most people aren’t interested in the honest answers to.

Eve had gone to remarkable lengths to hide herself, dressing in the filthiest rags she could find and apparently taking a daily bath in the sewers for good measure. Her face was char-woman dirty, and a cloud of stench hovered around her like a cloud of hungry flies. Come to think of it, there was more than one fly hovering around as well. She was, of all ridiculous things, sitting on the steps of the theatre playing a recorder.

“This isn’t Hamlin.” I said as I stopped just outside ground zero of her odor.

“Bugger off.”

“Good to see you, too.”

“I wasn’t jokin’. Bugger off. I’m spending quality time with my friends. And they don’t like you.” That’s when I realized that maybe Eve had spent a little time with that Pied Piper fellow after all, since there were a dozen or so rats starting to gather. Most of them were the size of large mice, but a couple of them looked like small cats, and one reached nearly as high as my knee when it reared up on its back legs and hissed a warning at me. If it had been a few hundred years later a witty remark about Mrs. Frisby might have come to mind, but at the time I just kicked it in the guts.

“Why’d you do that?” Eve screeched as her “friends” scattered back into the shadows and sewers.

“I don’t like vermin.”

“Really? And here I thought rats of a feather and all that.”

“Eve, what are you doing here?”

“Don’t call me that! And I’m doing what I please. Just like you, doing what you please, in your little chalet or whatever you call it up on your little mountain. Why’d you come down here bothering me anyway?”

“I heard about a crazy ratwoman who goes into the deepest plague pits and comes out none the worse for wear. I thought it might be you. I guess they missed that “worse for wear” part, but I did find you.”

“Like you been lookin’.”

“I have, Eve. I looked for you for thirty years after you left me in China.”

“Well now you found me. What. Do. You. Want?” She spoke slowly, precisely, as though to a mental deficient. Which, I suppose, in her eyes, I was.

“You. Me. Us. I want us back.”

“There hasn’t been an us in a thousand years, and won’t be an us for another thousand. Now bugger off and leave me to my friends!” With that, she played another shrill tune on her pipe, and rats streamed out of the sewers at us like a roiling tide of furry, smelly water. I couldn’t hold my footing and was swept along with the rats out of town and across the bridge. All I needed was the Ramones in the background and it would have been classic crowd-surfing. Except I was rat-surfing. And the Ramones wouldn’t be born for another couple centuries.

So there I stood, on the outskirts of London, watching helplessly as thousands of city rats took a holiday from London, clearing out most of the Plague from the town, but with the unfortunate side result of spreading it throughout the English countryside. I suppose I should have felt guilty, but they were going to die anyway, so did it really matter that much when? Sometimes taking the long view of things can make one seem a little heartless.

So I headed back up my mountain and spent the better part of three decades learning to ski and paint landscapes in Austria. I lost track of Eve again, and when I hopped a ship to the New Country I figured she’d either find me someday, or she wouldn’t. Again, that whole “long view” thing. But now, I knew I had to find her, even though I didn’t know why. I just knew that if we weren’t together the next time I ran into Lucky, it was going to be very bad for us. And if I didn’t classify what happened to us the first time we both hung out with Lucky as “very bad,” even I was a little nervous about what this time might bring.

Adam & Lucky 2

2009-05-14T12:20:00.001-05:00

This picks up where yesterday's story left off. I don't know where this is going, I'm just trying to force myself into writing for at least 30 minutes a day as an exercise, and somehow I found myself rewriting part of the book of Genesis.

I rode a few hours east until I got just outside of Flagstaff, and pulled over to watch the sunset and think. It wasn’t out of the ordinary for Lucky, or Lucypher if we wanted to be particularly precise about it, to show up unannounced, but this time I hadn’t seen him in years. I wondered what he wanted. He always wants something, and he usually gets it. And it’s usually not good either to be the one who gives it to him or to be between him and his goals. It’s better to sit on the sidelines and watch the carnage, hoping not to get too much splatter on your shoes.

That’s what I’ve done for years – watch. I’ve watched people grow from just a couple to billions of huddled masses, yearning for something or another. I’ve watched people kill each other over pennies in the street and I’ve watched people give their last breath to help a stranger. And through it all, ever since the Garden, Lucky has been a constant. Always around, always goading something into action. I never know why or what he wants, I just watch.

But this little interaction was different. This was the first time in millennia that Lucky had been goading me. He wanted me to do something, and whatever it was, I didn’t want to do it. The last time I did anything he wanted it didn’t turn out so well for me, so I’ve tried to steer clear of his maneuvering since then. So I sat, and the sun set, and I watched the shadows lengthen and the desert turn from a superheated wasteland to a patchwork canvas of light and rolling shadows. I like sunsets, they carry the memory of the day before and the promise of the day to come.

Eve always preferred sunrises. She said they were more anticipatory, like a held breath before the day explodes like a sneeze all over the world.

Yeah, Eve’s real too. It all is, except for the bit about Lucky being a serpent. That was a little bit of poetic license on Mo’s part, but he was always creeped out by snakes and I think the whole serpent thing was just a little underhanded way of making sure people overall didn’t like snakes any more than he did. Really, Lucky was our friend, and was in the Garden with us from the very beginning. Several of the archangels used to come visit in the Garden: Gabriel, Airel, Jophiel and Metatron were there the most, but after we left the Garden we saw more of Azrael than we really wanted to.

So yeah, Lucky was around the Garden. And we really did all live there with all the beasts in perfect harmony and everybody lived forever and nobody died and it was all sweetness and light. But that can’t sustain. It’s not a natural state of being, and Dad understood that. And he gave Lucky the hardest job, because Lucky was his favored child, and he knew that Lucky would do it without question, no matter what it would cost him in the long run.

So Lucky gave Eve the apple, and she shared it with me, and we ate it, and got kicked out of the Garden, and headed off to the land of Nod and all that stuff you’ve read about since you were a tadpole. And it almost killed Lucky, not just to be banished from Dad’s side forever, but to have to trick Eve and me, who were his best friends, into doing something that would make our lives pretty awful for a very long time. After a long time and more than a few beers, I managed to forgive Lucky and we reached an understanding of sorts, but Eve never let it go. Leaving the Garden broke something inside her that never healed, even after all these years.

Oh, I guess by now you’ve figured out that we’re immortal. Gaining knowledge of good and evil didn’t do anything to change the whole living forever thing we started off with, even though we didn’t pass that on completely to our children. They lived a good long time, don’t get me wrong. And I watched more than one century turn with my kids, but eventually they grew old and died. And I watched more and more centuries turn without them. And no matter what my buddy Clive Lewis wrote about all men being “sons of Adam,” it didn’t change the fact that my direct sons and daughters were gone.

So I sat on a little hill just west of Flagstaff watching the sun go down and trying to figure out what Lucky was looking for. What did he want me to do? He had suggested California, so of course I headed East, but is that what he wanted me to do in the first place? Lucky was the original trickster, so it wasn’t out of the question for him to double- or even triple-think me into going exactly where he wanted me to go.

As I sat there pondering, the first star of the night came winking into view in the east, and I could feel my answer. East. I had to go East, and I had to find Eve. This was gonna get ugly.

A beginning

2009-05-13T10:20:00.002-05:00

I don't know if this will grow or not, but the beginnings of this story kinda came to me between hitting the snooze button this morning.

I sensed him before I saw him. I always do. I was just sitting there, minding my own business, playing a little blackjack when I felt his presence over my right shoulder.

“Hi Lucky.”

“Big A.”

I hate that. He always has to go there right away. And he’s supposed to be subtle. Ass.

“Been here long?”

“A while. Playing a little cards. You?”

“Well, you know me, Big A, I’ve got a place here. I love this town. Everything about it just calls to me.”

“Yeah, I think I heard that somewhere.”

I finally glanced over and gave him the satisfaction of a look. A new look for him this time around – red riding leathers, no helmet of course, black boots, black hair tied back in a ponytail and sunglasses. The sunglasses were kind of a given, I suppose.

“Nice outfit. You look like one of the cavemen in that insurance commercial.”

“Thanks. You, as always, look well put-together.”

I’ve never been sure how to take his compliments, and I wasn’t in Las Vegas to think, so I just went for face value.

“Thanks.”

For once he didn’t press the issue and stopped talking. So we sat there playing blackjack for a while. Me playing green chips, him moving quickly from green to black to purple all the way up to the yellow $1,000 chips in a couple of short hours. He lost just enough hands to keep from getting thrown out, but not quite enough to keep the eye in the sky from getting suspicious.

“A, looks like we’ve got company.”

“You got a mouse in your pocket? I’m not the one that’s been sitting here counting cards for three hours.”

“Yeah, but I’m not the one who took twenty grand in chips out of my safety deposit box this morning. Chips, I might add, that came from a casino that was exploded a couple decades ago.”

I hate that he always has more information than he rightfully should. I suppose, to give him his due, that he does have people literally everywhere in this town. But it’s still annoying. I’ll grant that visiting a box that hasn’t been touched in 25 years might raise an eyebrow or two, but I’m still blaming the attention of the lummox in the off-the-rack suit on my unwanted companion’s unabashed card-counting. Either way, the brutes in suits might have had a few questions for me that I wasn’t fully prepared to answer at exactly that moment, so I looked at my old pal Lucky.

“Keys?”

“Might I suggest California? I hear Sacremento’s nice this time of year. My bike’s out front. You’ll know which one. You owe me one.”

“We’re not even. This doesn’t even come close. Nowhere near to close.”

“You really know how to wound a guy, Big A.”

“Bite me.” With that, I grabbed Lucky’s keys from the table, tossed a green chip to the dealer and headed for the cage. I spotted another security lummox between me and the cage, so I decided on discretion as the better part of valor, tossed a couple grand in chips into the air and used the resulting pandemonium to make my less-than-subtle way to the exit. As I glanced back towards the table where I had left Lucky, I noticed that he and the two guards were having a beer and yukking it up like long-lost frat brothers. Which for all I knew, they might have been.

He was right, I knew which bike was his right away. It was big, loud ostentatious black thing with flames painted on the gas tank. Subtle. I swear, the thing looked hungry. I put the key in the ignition (apple key chain? Really?) and headed off down the highway, turning immediately to the East as I recalled Lucky’s nod toward California.

Okay, so looking back on it, maybe opening a 25-year-old lock box wasn’t exactly the most under the radar move I could have made. I know that people take out safety deposit boxes in this town all the time. But not all of them pay the rent on those boxes with automatic debits from numbered accounts. And I just had the bad luck to run into the same security guard that rented me the box the first time, on his first day of the job 25 years ago. Little bugger had a good memory, that’s for sure. And I guess I hadn’t changed much since then. Ok, make that not at all. So it might have been my fault we got spied after all. But I’m still blaming Lucky. After all, he’s been taking the blame for things for a couple millennia now, so what’s one more little incident?

Maybe I should back up a little. My name is Adam. No, I don’t have a last name. Yes, that Adam. No really, you can feel for the rib if you like. But it’s better if you don’t. I’m ticklish.

Warning

2009-05-05T21:38:00.002-05:00

Started re-reading Transmetropolitan.

Felt inspired.

Might need a little push to take the gloves completely off.

But just a little, itty bitty one.

So let's start small. I bought a gun. A shotgun. A big, black, compensating for the white-guy dick I'm swinging shotgun. It goes boom really fucking loudly. I bought it because the old folks around the corner from us got robbed. Twice. While they were home. A couple of cockknockers broke into their house while they were sleeping and robbed them at gunpoint. In their own goddamn home.

I have warned Suzy that if anyone breaks into the house with impure thoughts she should contact our next door neighbor Johnny immediately. Johnny is a drywall contractor. A short-barrelled shotgun has quite the spread. I fear for the integrity of the hallway walls.

Do I have to turn in my liberal card because I bought a shotgun and don't bat an eyelash at the concept of liquefying any asshole that threatens my wife or my personal well-being? Do I have to throw away my Obama T-shirt because I went to the range with Special K and remembered that I enjoy shooting things? Nah, there's some delicious irony about going to a firing range wearing an Obama shirt.

Everybody's freaking out about swine flu. I don't give a fuck. I haven't given too much of a fuck about things that might kill me since they told me sunlight causes cancer. Let's review - the source of all life on the motherfucking planet causes cancer and requires that you get pieces of your face occassionally cut off. You shoulda seen my dad's nose a few years ago. I shit you not, his dermatologist's last name musta been Frankenstein. So if sunlight causes cancer, which can kill you, but without sunlight we begin to freeze ohhhh about eight minutes after the thing goes away, then why would I worry about piggy flu? Fuck it, there are too many people in the world anyway.

Yeah, I mighta been a little testy lately. Mighta been wound a little too tightly. I got a ridiculous project that's threatening to eat my entire Atlanta office, both my NC sales goofs have issues with their issue (or the wenches that spawned them), and I lost and halfway regained a job in the last week. That might make me a littly salty. Deal. Or don't. Whatever.

Fuck I love me some Spider Jerusalem. Makes me wanna write. Thanks, Garth.

Just in case...

2009-05-04T15:52:00.001-05:00

I still have any readers. And in case any of them live, or will be in Las Vegas this weekend, here's a heads-up that the Falstaff and Special K bad beat machine will be in the city of glitter from Thursday til Monday.

You've got my numbers, hit me up.

Couple of hands

2009-05-03T11:49:00.003-05:00

From last night's game at the Casa de Jones that raised some eyebrows. In a set of circumstances that surprised no one, both hands involved me and Jim the Knife.

Let's set the stage a little - Jim and I have played thousands upon thousands of hands of poker. Almost every week for several years, we've spent a few hours sitting across a table from each other. To say that we're familiar with each other's game would be a slight understatement.

The first hand came in a hand of Omaha. Jim and I ended up heads up after his flop bet, and I called a bet on the turn and again on the river. The board was, as is typical with Omaha, fairly coordinated, and I made the call on every street with a pair of aces, king kicker. Obviously this is not an advisable strategy in many circumstances, but Jim and I have played a lot of hands together. I might have mentioned that. I picked up a vibe, nothing I could put a finger on, just an inkling that I was good. Not strong enough to raise, but enough to call the smallish bets he was firing. He'd controlled the pot size well, and he was able to make reasonable sized bets without the pot blowing up and becoming unmanageable. This not only allowed him to make a bet on every street with air, it also allowed me to call on every street with just one pair. There were a few remarks of astonishment around the table when my hand was turned over and I raked the pot, and it all came down to playing the player. I picked up a small pot and moved along, but the read was good and that was what I cared about.

The next hand I still read fairly well, but didn't work out nearly as well for me. I picked up AQo in middle position and raised. Jim three-bet from the button (or maybe cutoff, but I think it was the button). BTW, we're in Hold'em now. There were a couple other callers and I called to see a flop of Q-10-2 with two diamonds. Action checked to me and I bet about $10, close to the size of the pot with top pair, top kicker. Pirate Rob called my bet, Jim raised to $35, and Matt, a solid player who I'd only played with once before, smooth-called the $35. I went deep, deep into the tank and tried to think my way through the hand. I was sitting with about $85 behind, so calling was out of the question. It was either fold top-top or shove. After thinking for a while, I remarked that it was Matt or Pirate Rob that I was sweating, not Jim. This wasn't intended to be a shot at Jim, just that I had narrowed his range to a set of deuces, set of tens, A-Q, K-Q or two big diamonds, which would give him the nut flush and Broadway draws. Since I was ahead of all but two of the hands in his range, I wasn't really sweating the fact that he was going to call my all in regardless.

Frankly, given the money in the middle and the amount to call, he had to call my all in. It was an extra $50 or so to win $100 or more, so as long as he didn't have complete air or a gutty, he had to call. Note that neither of those were in the range I put him on. But I don't know enough about Matt's range, and his smooth-call of the $35 had me really concerned. In the end I shipped it in, Pirate Rob folded, Jim snap-called, Matt got out of the way, and Jim tabled a set of tens. Given the range I put him on and where I was against most of that range, I make the same move every time. And given that I was ahead of 60% of his range (or more), it's +EV long-term.

Overall I felt like I played moderately well last night. I called way, way too much preflop, but to me at least it became a game of floating and catching up. Some nights it's about starting well, some nights it's about getting there. Last night I got there. One of my biggest hands was one that Bad Blood got away from, and damn him for it. In Omaha the flop came down Jx-10d-Jd, and my hand was J-A-9-6. I checked the flop, and called Blood's bet. I check-raised when the turn brought the 6d, and Blood and Pirate Rob both called. River was a 9 and I fired a decent-sized bet. Blood went so far into the tank I was afraid he'd have the bends when he finally came out, but he folded his pocket tens. Rob got away from his flush, and when the prop bets were made on what we had I showed the turned boat that improved on the river. It was a nice pot, but Blood made the monster laydown to save a big chunk of his stack.

A few more details

2009-04-28T11:46:00.003-05:00

I know, I know. I never post anymore. I could give you the standard excuses, but I won't. I'm just busy and not quite as into it as I have been in the past. But I did buy a new camera, and I have been blown away at how good the picture quality is. I picked up the Canon Rebel Xsi, which is a little better than an entry-level SLR, and I got the Canon 70-300 lens with built-in image stabilization, so the lens ended up costing about when the camera did, but as you can see from the pics on the last post, it's worth it. Special K and Dr. K came up to Merlefest for Saturday, and he showed me a few tricks to make my shots better. I took over 60 photos over the course of two days, and culled that down to 100 or so that I liked. My plan for the week is to cull even further and then do a little iMovie thing to show off some more pics. If that ever happens, I'll let you know.

Update from the land of dead blogs

2009-04-27T11:33:00.003-05:00

I bought a new camera.

I took it to MerleFest.

I saw some killer boogie.

You should all go with me next year.

Riding Coattails

2009-04-18T08:09:00.001-05:00

If you wanted any more proof that he's one of the very best in this business, go to PokerNews and follow Pauly's live updates from the LAPT final. With Pauly, Change, Mean Gene and Otis all at one non-WSOP event, the A-Team is definitely in Argentina this week.

Back in the saddle

2009-04-13T21:27:00.002-05:00

Poker content - Lost my ass in Tunica. Lost my ass again at BadBlood's. Shoved into the nuts and lost my ass at my home game. And I still love the game. We did wonder what type of thread we could get started of jealous bitches on the forums if we posted that Lee Jones made a McDonald's run at Blood's home game, though. That dude is great fun, but I hate getting in big hands with him. You'd think he'd played the game once or twice.

Today was first tech for the Avett Brothers, and it was a trip to be back in the saddle. This was the first show I'd really done since Godspell in September. I did a little one-weekend thing in December, but it was super-simple and nothing near as complex as this. I picked up a dozen used LED color-changing fixtures online (go here if interested) and bought a pair of small moving lights. I also got a lighting board that is PC-based, so the whole control rig runs out of a backpack, and a bunch of cable and big hampers to move everything with. So today was all about loading it in, putting it together for the first time and beginning to teach their road guys how to run it all. Once I figured it out, that is.

The Avett boys are really loyal, and their road crew (the parts that don't play in the band, that is) are all people that they've known for a long time. This doesn't necessarily mean that they know a ton about lighting, so I'm learning how to run a new console while I try to figure out how to teach their lighting guy how to be a lighting guy. It's a challenge, but he's really bright and was like a sponge today soaking everything up, so I'm pretty sure it will work out okay. These guys are getting bigger and bigger and I think they might be ready to make the next step. If you're going to see Dave Matthews over the next 5 weeks or so, get there early enough for the opener, because they're worth it.

They're also all about the art, which is very cool. So today we got the rig put together, and everything actually worked the first time we turned it on, which NEVER happens. We actually got done early enough to cut a chunk of the crew early and I got a couple hours of dark time in the theatre to program. That's something that I almost never get, and I've yet to be on any show where I have enough time, so to grab an extra two hours today was a luxury like getting to sleep in when the time changes. I think we've put together a good rig, and the ColorBlast TR fixtures (the LEDs) have a ton more output than I expected. We're flying them at about 20-22', and I didn't think they'd give me any punch at all over 16-18', so I was very pleasantly surprised.

And the console that I'm learning has turned out to be very intuitive, and I think it will be good for their guy, since he doesn't have any experience on lighting boards and thus doesn't have any bad habits. It's a Jands Vista PC, which uses a much more visual system of running and programming lights than any other lighting console on the market. When it came out, it was a total reimagining of lighting control, the kind of thing that comes along once every couple of decades. And since it's PC-based, it doesn't have a big piece of furniture, so it's way less expensive. It's available in a big desk-type light board as well, and I've sold one of those to a big church that I worked on a few years ago, but the PC version is ridiculously inexpensive and powerful.

So all my gear worked and I got out of the theatre by 8, so that was a good day. And it was a good thing, since I've got another 8AM call tomorrow. I'm still debating with myself whether or not to talk to Scott about running a couple of their shows later in the summer. They've got two shows in Myrtle Beach, which is an easy drive and I'd only have to burn one vacation day, but if anybody knows the boys are coming close to them and wanted to party, I might be persuaded to range a little farther afield.

Flooding New Orleans

2009-04-02T23:32:00.002-05:00

With my chips, that is. Two buy-ins in two hours was enough to get me out of the casino and onto Bourbon Street for the night, not that my nights run all that long anymore. Anyway, I've got a teleconference at 9 tomorrow, so turning in early was ok. I set myself a 2 buyin stop loss for the night, and rapidly went past that dumping another hundred at the blackjack table. But on the to my tales of woe and mediocre play.

First bu-in was easy - I lost about $50 playing 4/8 Omaha Hi before I got called to my $1/2 seat. All that came in a hand where I flopped the open-ender, got there on the turn, and got out for only one bet on the river when the board paired. My nut straight no good to her boat, but at least it wasn't PLO. Meh. Then about three hands into my $1/2 session at what might be the most passive table I've ever seen, I flopped the K-high straight on a board of K-J-10 with two hearts. I held Q-9 off suit, and led out. Guy immediately to my left called, and the short stack at the end of the table raised my $6 bet to $20. I raised enough to put him all in, and the guy to my left moved all in over the top of me. I hadn't been at the table long enough to have much of a read, but I thought he was a pretty sharp player, solid, but capable of making a move. I put the short stack on a King or maybe two pair, and the guy to my left on hearts, so I made the call with the baby end of the straight, saying to the guy on my left "If I'm coolered, I'm coolered."

I was coolered. He turned over A-Q off, having limped into a 7-way pot with AQ and flopped Broadway. Shorty at the end showed another Q-9 off, and when the board didn't bring an ace, I lost my first buy-in. I didn't sweat that too much, since it's pretty rare that someone limps with AQ at the $1/2 table, so I reloaded. A big chunk of my second buyin went away when I flopped a flush draw, bet out, got one caller. Turned the open-ender to go with it, bet out, got called, and when the river missed me I had to fold to his shove. Then I made my last poker mistake of the night. Old nit had raised his button to $12 every orbit. He was a local, and old fuck, and a table captain besides. Add that to his habit of hiding his green chips behind all his other chips, and I kinda didn't like him. So the third time he raised his button, which put me having limped in under the gun with Qh-7h, I called out of spite, figuring he was raising with position. The only times he raised preflop was from the button and cutoff, and he limped every other hand. His pattern was to raise preflop and overbet the flop if it checked to him. This flop came down A-7-x, and I checked, planning to go to war with 2nd pair if he did his standard overbet. He did, pushing $50 into the $30 pot, and I moved all in over the top. He had A-K, I didn't improve, and I went to wander Bourbon Street.

Neither of those hands turned out the way I wanted them to, and maybe with more information on the old fuck I don't make that move. It could be that he had the goods every time he had the button, but I don't buy it. I just ran into him the time he did. Meh. Tomorrow will see me heading to Biloxi to check out the casinos there after I wander the Quarter a little during the daytime, take some pics and snag some souveniers for my sis and Suzy. Then hopefully I can rebound in Mississippi from the drubbing I took in NOLA.

Heads Up Continued

2009-03-30T15:14:00.002-05:00

So I mentioned that I'd been playing a bunch of these heads up SNGs on Full Tilt, with good results. So I thought I'd put down a few thoughts on how I play them to see what people thought about the strategy that I've developed, and to give me something to look back on in a few years and think "what a moron!"

1) I don't open-fold my button. Hardly ever will I toss away my hand from the button. It doesn't matter how bad the starting hand is, on the button I'm getting 3-1 on my money to call, and against a random hand, I could very well be good. I see my opponents throw away their button hands a lot, and I can't help but think that it's a mistake. And one reason I think it's a mistake is

2) I raise a LOT from the button. With any two cards. ANY two cards. Let's start with the fact that if I don't bet or raise, my opponent doesn't have the chance to fold. So by not betting or raising, I'm removing one of the ways I can win the hand. And since I'm going to have position on every other street, increasing the size of the pot when I'm in position versus the hands that I'm out of position is +EV. If you don't believe me, think about it this way - if we played 1,000 hands together heads up, and on 500 of them I had position and the pot was $120, and on 500 of them the pot was $40 and I was out of position, how much do you think I would make against an opponent of relatively equal skill over those 1,000 hands? Yeah, I don't know either, but having position is a huge advantage, and if I can play for more money when I have an edge, I'm gonna.

3) Bottom pair is huge heads up. Most flops miss most hands, so bottom pair is quite likely going to be good. And I'm certainly going to bet it like it's good, once again giving my opponent that opportunity to fold.

4) Your opponent is going to overvalue their draws. Not every opponent, and not every draw, but I've found a TON of opponents on these low-stakes SNGs pushing with flush draws and straight draws and nothing else. So if you value small pairs more than they value draws, then you'll be willing to call their shove with middle pair and let them stack off with a naked draw. Now sometimes they'll get there, but less often that they hope.

That's just a few things I've observed over the past couple of weeks. I'm sure I'll come up with more drivel as I play more of these things. So far I've run my last $80 into $200, jumped up to the $21 SNGs, hit a bad patch of variance (lost 3 in a row at 80% favorite) and dropped back to the $10.50 SNGs. I'll probably hang out at the $10 level until I get to three or four hundred in the bankroll, then move back up. I'll take occassional shots at higher levels now and then, but I don't plan on playing constantly higher than $10 until I have at least 20 buyins for the next level. That said, my bankroll management is usually for shit, so don't hold your breat for me to wait at $10 until I get to $400.

The Hero Call Revsited

2009-03-29T12:31:00.002-05:00

So there were a couple of hero call moments at last night's home game that I was involved in. You can call them pressure points or whatever, but there were two moments that stick out in my memory as opportunities for someone to make a big call for a sizable pot, one time the call was made, the other time the fold was made.

The first situation was between me and Hot Brian the Red. It was pretty early in the evening, so neither of us had a real feel for how we were going to run yet. I had gotten off to a rough start, donking off about 1/3 of my starting stack, so I was sitting on about $30-35. Brian was ahead of me in chips, but I had position. I don't remember the board, but what it boiled down to on the river was I had called on every street with A-10 off suit, and the river put a flush or straight out there. Brian checked to me, and I moved all in. It was only about 1/4 the pot, but after a long think, he said "I just don't think I can be good here," and folded. He was good, but the line I took in the hand made him think that he couldn't be good. I played it like I was chasing, then played it like I hit. Brian decided not to make the hero call, and we went on with the evening. Part of my shove was an awfukkit move, where I found myself short and looking to rebuy, but the pot came close to doubling me up so I was back in decent shape.

The other hero call moment for me was against Nate. I was in the big blind, and Nate was under the gun. Not that position matters to Nate, but it frequently matters to his opponents. I hate playing Nate out of position, but have learned the tricks of it after years of practice. I'm pretty sure Jim the Knife raised, because it was his button, it was late, he had a bunch of chips and he'd played well all night. At one point he even commented that he was playing "sterling poker," and I gave him shit that after the 2-outer he caught on me, it was more like electro-plated. But I reciprocated by catching a 2-outer on Special K, so it was all good (at least to me, I don't think Special K caught a 2-outer on anyone, but that was his problem, not mine. If he'd play worse hands, he'd be able to suck out more :)). So I called the preflop raise with Ks-3s, because Brian called it and I figured if I called there would be a cascade of callers behind me, giving me odds with my shit hand. And in one of those patterns that makes people love my home game, it sparked exactly that cascade of callers.

So the flop came down 3-3-x with two diamonds, and I'm loving life. I check, Nate leads for $4, Jim calls, there might have been one more caller, and I raise to $10. Nate calls and Jim got out of the way. Turn is the Jd, and I lead for $10. Nate calls, and the river brings an off-suit duece. I fire another $15, and Nate moves all in over the top for another $52 or so. I go deeeeep into the tank, because while I have trips with a big kicker, the flush is out there. It's also not a bit beyond reason for Nate to have been calling me down with 2-3 or pocket twos and have filled up on the river. So I'm thinking. And thinking. And I think long enough to feel like I should apologize to the table, so I do. Then I ask Nate if he has the flush. He doesn't look at me. Then he looks at me like "what, I'm really gonna tell you?" Then I resume my think. Then I look at my stack. If I call and lose, I'm up $50 for the night. Then I look at the pot. There's well over $100 in the middle, so if I win, it's a gooood night for the home game. Then I think that thinking about booking a win is the wrong way to think, and I'm getting 3-1 on my $50 and if I can't call getting 3-1 on trips, king kicker. then maybe I shouldn't play poker.

Then I hit the thought that makes me call. Nate fired the river. Nate only raises when he thinks he has the best hand. He'll lead out at a pot to make people fold, and it's usually an overbet. But when he raises, he thinks he has the winner. And he doesn't wait to pull the trigger. So if he's raising the river, then that's the point where he thinks he has the winner. So either he thinks he's been ahead the whole time, or he thinks he got there right then. That takes the flush off the table, because if he'd hit the flush, he'd have raised the turn. So he's got a limited number of hands - A-3, 2-3,J-3, 2-2 and the like. Or he has the case three and a worse kicker. Or he has two pair and is absolutely crushed, which is not as unlikely a possibility as you would think, because Nate routinely overvalues two pair to his wallet's detriment.

So finally I decide to make the call, and he shows 9-3. I table my K-3 and rake a massive pot, bringing my win for the night to around $250 and putting my slightly back into the black for the year. I couldn't make that call in a casino. I couldn't make that call against many folks in our home game. But against that player, in that spot, with those relative positions, I can make that call. After a lengthy think.

Overall I played fairly well last night, with the exception of getting my money in as a 95% dog to Special K and getting there on the turn. I sucked out a few times, including flushing out Brian on the river, but I'd flopped the open-end straight flush draw, so I wasn't going anywhere at any point. It might not be mathematically correct, but I'm probably going to get my money in most of the time when I flop 15 outs twice. So I called him down, and when he asked me if I rivered the flush I told him and saved him the call. He said he didn't think he had that call in him, but I'm slightly looser a player than Brian. Slightly. There might be a comment or two coming on the use of the word slightly in that sentence. Let it be known that there is a variant definition of slightly that loosely translates from ancient Swahili into "astronomically." Then decide which definition I was using. So while I wouldn't say I played "sterling poker," I felt like I did a good job of picking my spots and capitalizing on my opponent's weaknesses. Like a weakness for playing good starting hands, leaving the crap flops to hit only me and Nate :).

It's all fun and games...

2009-03-26T21:34:00.002-05:00

Until somebody loses their job. No, not me. I'm still in good shape, and they show no signs of not wanting to continue to put up with me for a lot longer. But my company did become the latest to lay some people off today, and it kinda sucked. It really hit home to me what the leadership and population of our country did to our economy when friends of mine lost their jobs. Up until now, even when real-life friends lost or were afraid of losing their jobs, it didn't seem real. For the first time in a long time today, I was worried about my job. And that's not a good place to be in a single-income family.

Now, really, my job is as secure as anyone in the company, and the company is in no way close to folding. But we saw cuts in almost every office today, and that made some harsh realities come into focus for me. My offices were spared any layoffs, but the time may come when I am the person who has to make the decision of who stays and who goes, and I don't look forward to that day. I don't think it will come to that, I really don't. Our company operates with very little debt, and is very cash and inventory-heavy. But in a sales organization, when people aren't buying, it's hard to support a large sales force. So cuts were made today. And good people lost their jobs. I know, it's a reality that a lot of you have been seeing for months, and some of you have experienced firsthand, and for that I'm really sorry.

I hope that when we come out on the other side of this mess, and I have faith that we will, and in an America that is not terribly different than the one of a couple years ago when we went into this mess. I hope that when we come out of it everyone's opinions of money and the people that handle it are a little different. And I mea everyone - individuals, corporations and government. I hope that people in our country wake up an accept responsibility for their spending. I hope that corporations stop trying to cheat every nickel out of the system and just make and honest profit. I hope that our government finds a balance between oversight and free market that we can all accept and that will benefit everyone relatively equally. I don't really believe that all those things will happen, but I can hope. Right?

Sorry to sound so morose, I'm just a little shaken this evening. I've given my entire adult life to this company, and while I still have a job, and all my people are still employed, it still shakes one of the foundations of my life and livelihood to hear the word layoff associated with my company. So I'm a little scared. I'm a lot sad for the people that no longer work for our company. I hope that in a few months this will start to turn around and we can hire them back, and if not, that they'll find even better gigs somewhere else. And I hope all of you guys are ok.

Srsly? That's just cute!

2009-03-25T15:42:00.003-05:00

Cutest. Computer. Ever.

9" screen, 120 GB Hard drive. 1GB RAM. Windows XP Home. 3 USB ports. Media Card slot. Wi-fi.

Just precious.

By the way, when I install the Jands Vista software on this computer, and add the M1 control surface (below), this little laptop becomes the light board for the Avett Brothers tour. The tour lighting tech will walk into a theatre with the laptop and M1 fader wing in a backpack, unpack the bag and plug into the house system. For less than 8 lbs, I can control over 500 lights!

Heads Up

2009-03-24T08:55:00.002-05:00

So while I've been setting up computers and transferring files, I find myself with a pile of free time sitting at my desk in the home office. I can't really watch a movie or anything, because I only have so much processing power, and most of that is being used to move gig after gig of music and movies from one place to another. So every night I find myself firing up Full Tilt for a little pokery goodness.

And for a change, it actually has been good. I've been focusing on the Heads-Up SNGs, of the $10 variety, and have been pretty successful so far. I think I've run my $100 into about $170 so far, so I'm winning more than I'm losing. I don't track each SNG anymore, and frankly barely keep up with my progress in online poker, because most of the time I just don't care. But there have been some observations that I've made that I thought I'd share here. Please note that this is not a statistically relevant sample size, nor is there any real research put into this - it's just what I've seen. If you want well-written, thoroughly researched writing, check out Shamus. 'Cause it ain't gonna happen here.

1) The majority of the players at this level seem timid. I raise my button probably 90% of the time, regardless of what I'm holding. I want to put more money in the pot when I have position, and less when I don't. So I raise less when I'm out of position, and almost every hand on the button. My opponents don't seem interested in raising that often with the button, and not terribly interested in defending their big blinds, so I'm picking up a ton of orphaned big blinds.

2) There seems to be a lot of desire to get money in behind at this level. I value small pairs very highly at this level, as it's infrequent that both players actually hit a flop. I have seen several instances where an opponent will call me down on every street with no pair, and have picked up a few pots when my opponent got all their money in on a small flush draw with no pair. I tend to play pretty hard in these due to the passive nature of my opponents, but I'm also waiting until I pick up a pair at least to go to way. The number of people willing to go to war with nothing but a naked draw is pretty impressive.

3) It's easy to play these things one at a time, but I can't multi-table heads-up. I do much better when I can pick up betting patterns on my opponent, and I can't do that with multiple tables going. I'm pretty sure there's a simple mathematical formula that would make these profitable with less focus, but that's not what I'm interested in. I'm just killing a little time and trying to pad my roll a little.

Weekend that was

2009-03-23T15:00:00.002-05:00

So at one point Friday I twittered something to the effect of "Lee Jones is serving us homemade pizza in his kitchen while wearing an apron with sharks on it." Or something like that.

These are not words I thought I would be writing a few years ago. Aside from the fact that prior to watching the Moneymaker WSOP I didn't know who Lee was, I also would likely have laughed in your face if you told me that one day I'd drive 2 1/2 hours to play poker in a buddy's basement, then drive back the same night $100 poorer and happy to have done it. But that's exactly what I did on Friday night. I drove to the mountains of North Carolina to play poker and hang out with my friends. I was very successful at the hanging out part, less so at the poker.

But I didn't really care. Other than stacking off to Hot Brian the Red with my pocket Jacks on a K-K-6 board where he obviously had a king or else he never would have check-raised me there, I enjoyed the poker and thought I managed to avoid the worst of my typical errors. Except for betting with less than the nuts in Omaha. I will lose far less money in that game the day I learn to not get married to two pair early. But anyway, that day isn't here yet, so there it is.

I've been posting less and less, and not really minding. Because I've been pretty damn happy with the way things are going. Work is going well, life is good, and I just don't feel like I have a lot to get off my chest. So I post less. I keep meaning to work on some fiction, but I'm enjoying spending time with my wife on the rare occassions that I'm home. Maybe eventually.

I did finally get all my home media up and rocking along. I now have a Media Center PC going that's dedicated to music and video, with a bunch of TV shows and movies on it. And we won't talk about how they got there, will we? Good. I've got that jacked into an Apple Airport Extreme, with a 500GB external HD plugged into the Airport Extreme as a network HD. That was all 3 home computers can access whatever music is on the external disk. I have PlayOn installed on there as well, which allows me to stream Hulu, Netflix and CBS to my PS3, in addition to the other stuff on the Media Center PC. So far, so good with that. There was a period of difficulty when I realized that my earthlink email address (the address that I had my PlayOn code emailed to) was no longer any good since I switched over from earthlink to Roadrunner, but they sent it along to my Gmail, and we're good.

So in a little bit I'm gonna go home and watch Season 1 of Burn Notice. Because I can. And because Bruce Campbell is a badass.

Stupid Spambots

2009-03-13T14:18:00.002-05:00

Anyone wanna hazard a guess why I wasn't even the slightest bit tempted to click on the link when this warning popped up via Skype a few minutes ago?

Registry Scan
3:17 PM
WINDOWS REQUIRES IMMEDIATE ATTENTION
=============================

ATTENTION ! Security Center has detected
malware on your computer !

Affected Software:

Microsoft Windows Vista
Microsoft Windows XP
Microsoft Windows 2000
Microsoft Windows NT Server 4.0
Microsoft Windows Win98
Microsoft Windows Server 2003

Impact of Vulnerability: Remote Code Execution / Virus Infection /
Unexpected shutdowns

Recommendation: Users running vulnerable version should install a repair
utility immediately

Your system IS affected, download the patch from the address below !
Failure to do so may result in severe computer malfunction.

http://www.onlinecheck.cc/?q=scan

PS - if you guessed that I'm beta-testing Windows 7, you're off by a little bit.

Song I can't get enough of...

2009-03-13T12:32:00.001-05:00

Jessica Lee Mayfield was one of the openers for the Avetts New Year's Eve show. She sounds like a young Lucinda Williams, even if she's not old enough to get into some of the places she's booked to play.

Long strange weekend

2009-03-11T20:39:00.002-05:00

At some point I'll collect the Twitter updates from last weekend and put them all into a blog post. Until then, just accept that I drank a bachelor party's worth of booze, hung out with a bunch of college kids, and generally acted like a kid half my age. I've almost recovered now, and the simple fact of sleeping in my own bed for a few days has been a huge help. That's pretty much over now, as I've got a trade show tomorrow, a workshop on Saturday and then back to Atlanta on Sunday. I'll catch up with you soon.

For the ATL Bloggers

2009-03-02T13:53:00.001-05:00

The Falstaff roving party will be at Loco's Bar on North Druid Hills near I-85 tonight @7PM for pub poker. Come on out and join me!

A night of firsts

2009-02-25T13:07:00.003-05:00

So there was this long-haired hippy in town for a little more than a day before heading down to G-Vegas to prep for the Mastodon Weekend. After giving him directions on which sports bar along the light rail line would most likely show the soccer game on tv (I'll let Al tell you how he got lost between the light rail station and the bar that is 50 yards from the station), I finished up my workday, headed home to grab the Mrs., and then picked up Special K on our way to meet Al for a beer, food and more drinks.

Apparently there was some big festival going on somewhere in the world, so a lot of people wanted to go out and drink. Which was fine, but didn't bode well for finding parking in Charlotte's crowded South End district. After a couple of laps around buildings getting annoyed, I pulled into a parking lot that I totally wasn't supposed to park in and told the attendant we'd go in and get Al and then just head downtown (or uptown, or whatever they call it here, I get confused). He said that once the new manager came on they'd probably let people park there, just charge for parking. I asked him how he'd feel if I just gave him $20 and went on my merry way, and he didn't have a problem with that. He wandered off to deal with another car full of people, I stuck a twenty under his cigarette pack, and went into the bar.

We hung out there for a while, then decided to go downtown to eat. As we headed towards the car, the parking attendant said "As long as you're alrady here, it'd be easier just to take the light rail downtown and leave the car here." Figuring he was right, and since I'd already paid $20 to park, we trooped over to the light rail and bought our tickets. Al had an all-day pass, but Suzy, Special K and I had never ridden Charlotte's newest transportation device. So we picked up our tickets ($3 roundtrip, even though there was no one collecting the tickets or checking them) and headed downtown.

It's a light rail, pretty much like any other metro train system. Gets from point A to point B. Cheap, clean, not too crowded. So we got off at the 7th streeet station, which I had to confess I didn't know exactly where it was on 7th street. Then I realized that the big-ass parking deck that they built some years before the light rail ever actually happened and named the 7th street station parking deck was actually the location of the 7th street rail station. Al didn't forget to give me endless shit for not realizing this. Sometimes I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer.

So we headed around the corner to Mert's Heart and Soul, the finest soul food restaurant in Charlotte. Or at least that I've been to. Suzy and Special K had never been there, so it was cool to show them part of their town they didn't know, especially since they are both pretty much native Charlatans. The food was killer, then we meandered over to Dixie's Tavern for a few more drinks. None of us had ever been there before, either, so that was cool. Suzy and I aren't much of the go out downtown types, so there's plenty of places in Charlotte that we've never been to. Dixie's was cool enough, your basic dive bar with decent-looking bartender chicks and the usual assortment of douchebags. One guy in particular made me go over the douchebag checklist, and he hit pretty much all of them.

Soul Patch - check
Sideburns - check
Multiple Hair Products on hair roughly the length of BadBlood's - check
Popped collar on his North Face jacket - check
Fat friend with all the same characteristics - check

I'm pretty sure there's a picture floating around somewhere with him in the background, hopefully it turns up.

Alas, it was a school night, so we had to turn in early. We sent Al off to his fleabag hotel and hopped the train back to our car. Same homie watching the car, and we headed off into the night. Now just a couple days until I really make an idiot out of myself and try to behave like I'm 25 again. Can't wait!

On Frugality

2009-02-24T10:12:00.002-05:00

I know, two posts in two days. Don't even think about getting used to this. But I found some of my endeavors yesterday in reducing my monthly payments interesting, and thought some of you might as well. I'm not going to discuss too much my colossal fail at refinancing my house to a sufficient rate to make it worth doing (at least with Wachovia - I haven't given up hope entirely, but the ability to make a weekly mortgage payment by simply automatically transferring from my checking account to my mortgage account is pretty sweet).

But I looked at my cable bill, and again wanted to vomit a little. I do the digital cable thing, and I do the DVR thing, and I do the cable modem thing, so I appreciate the fact that I'm a pretty sizable consumer of their services. But I thought $134/month was a little excessive, so I decided to call and whine about it. After three or four phone trees and a couple of useless customer service reps I actually got to a guy who could help me, and when he looked at my bill he said that the best thing for me (assuming I wasn't planning on leaving my house or their service in the near future) was their new program that locks in pricing for two years.

Now this is a 2-year service contract, just like a cell phone. And it has a hefty early termination fee, just like a cell phone. But since I have no intention of leaving my house or Time Warner Cable's services within the next two years, a reduction of $30/month worked pretty well for me. i wouldn't do it if I were a renter, or if I thought I'd be moving any time soon. But since we've had digital cable for several years and have no real inclination to change, and I'm certainly not killing my cable modem any time soon, the potential to save $720 over two years was certainly worth it.

Then I moved on to XM Radio. After being one of the people who swore they'd never pay for radio, I quickly became addicted to XM when I got my Honda. Then I picked up a coule of SkyFi jukeboxes for $40/each at Best Buy, and signed them both up for service. So I was paying about $30/month for radio. Not bad, except that two of them never got used. So I called in to cancel the two portable radios, which will be finding their way to Craigslist soon. While I was talking to the customer service dude, he mentioned that they have a promotion going that would let me switch my quarterly 12.99/month service on my radio to a $30 every six months plan. So let me get this straight - I can pay $12.99/month, or I can pay $5/month? I'll take the cheap-o plan. Same service, just cheaper. Now it's a promotion, so I have to call back in August to extend the promotion for another six months, but it's worth it to me.

So there you go, a couple tips to save a little money. Cause a penny saved is a beer earned.

Ugh. Just Ugh.

2009-02-23T09:24:00.003-05:00

I sat around a table with some friends Saturday night, and there were chips and cards moved around, but I can't with any degree of honesty call what I did playing poker. It wasn't just that I was running bad, which I was. It wasn't just that I had a couple of bad beats, which I did (although I dished out as many as I took, not that you ever feel the memory of the beats you lay on someone quite as keenly). It wasn't just that I was playing perhaps the worst poker I've played in some number of months, which I was.

It was that all of those things were going on and I felt completely powerless to stop it. For much of the night, it was as if I were playing poker in a dream. I saw my hands doing things with chips, and as the sane part of me screamed "NOOOOOOO!!!!" from inside my head, my hands threw out ridiculous overbets, stupid call after stupid call, and shoved my entire stack into the middle more times than I care to recall. There was a tournament to start the evening, of which I recall exactly one hand - my pocket queens held up very early to bust Mark, who shipped it in over the top of my raise with pocket tens. We peeked at the burn cards later to find that both remaining queens had been burned, which was nothing more than an interesting factoid.

I didn't win. I didn't cash. I didn't even sniff the money. I don't remember how I went out, but I'm pretty sure I got it in bad. I coulda saved myself the $30 if I'd just done like Special K and showed up late for the cash game. Frankly, I shouldn't play tournaments with extremely low buy-ins. I don't play tournaments that well to begin with, and if I'm not gonna be able to focus on the play because the payout is too low to be interesting, then I should just avoid them. I won't, because typically the tourneys are hosted by my friends, but I can pretty much just chalk them up to a predetermined loss.

At one point in the cash game, I thought to myself - "wow, I'm playing like crap. And I can't stop myself. I should leave early or this could get expensive." And I didn't. And it did. At one point I was $210 into the $.25/.50 cash game, following buy-ins of $60, $50 and $100. Somehow I managed to struggle back to even, including my tournament buy-in, on the back of catching cards and actually playing one or two hands well. And really, that's about all I played well. I think there was a hand where I flopped a straight and Jim rivered trips that I got paid on every street. There was another hand where Brian the Red doubled me up, although I don't remember anything about the hand. Then, just as I thought "there's about 45 minutes left in the night, I'm even, or just a hair ahead, I should go into complete lockdown and get outta here with my skin intact" I picked up pocket Kings.

Now, Special K had just had his Kowboys cracked on an Ace-high board the hand before, so I thought ugly things about my kings. But I dutifully raised about 8x the blinds and got a couple of callers. I know T and Skoon hung around, and there might have been one more to the flop. Flop comes down Q-J-x, Skoon checks and I fire $15 into a $16ish pot. T calls and Skoon raises me $30 more. He's pot-committed at this point, so I'm 95% sure all his money is going in. I look around at T's stack and she's got about $60-75 in front of her. I raise another $50 on top to make sure that anybody in the hand with me is playing for all their chips. T folds, which I kinda hated, and Skoon calls. I ask him "do you have two pair?" and he shakes his head. Until the 6 on the river comes down and he says "now I do," and turns over Q-6o. I double him up, and feel a little grossed out.

Now comes the worst part. Instead of regrouping, getting my head straight over the next few hands and recapturing my losings, I go on drunken monkey tilt and call Jim's preflop raise the very next hand with 6-8o. Flop comes down 7-6-7, and I call his flop bet. Turn is a 7, giving me a boat, and he bets out strong. Of course, in the depths of my rational soul I knew he had an overpair, but the monkey tilt that was controlling my hands shipped all my chips into the middle. I ask him if he has the case seven, he says no and tables queens. I mention that I'm drawing dead, ship him my stack, and go home.

It's not so much the money, as the tilt. I've had a real problem controlling tilt lately, and I'm not sure what it is. I have a theory that it's money. Before I was paying attention to my real-world finances outside of poker, I'd go busto, reload, build my bankroll up, take money out for real-life things, whatever. My bankroll wasn't really a solid thing, just another fluid place to park money. Now that I'm trying to be more conscientious about my household finances, and now that my freelance writing money has dipped by at least $10K this year, I'm much more conscious of not going broke. And I think it's fucking up my game. A lot. I'm pretty sure that contributed to me playing like scared money in W-Vegas, and I'm pretty sure that's what made me try so hard Saturday night to force things to go my way. So I'm gonna take some time this week to try and figure out where my head is at about bankroll before I go off with the other mastodons this weekend.

And I apologize to the people who had to put up with my tilt Saturday night. It felt as bad to me as it did to you, I promise.

2009-02-19T13:58:00.002-05:00

If you're not familiar with the finest musical act to come out of Concord, NC in perhaps forever, then you owe it to yourself to get familiar. Especially since they just hired the finest lighting designer in my house to do their summer tour this year! Yup, I will be designing lights for the Avett Brothers summer tour, and couldn't be more excited. One of the things I've never done in lighting is a tour, so this presents a whole new set of challenges, and I get to work with some really nice guys who make amazing music. Check them out on YouTube and iTunes, they kick ass. My favorite albums are Emotionalism and Gleam II.

Nanny State

2009-02-17T12:30:00.002-05:00

I have allergies. They're not crippling, and it's not that there's any one thing that I'm allergic to. It's just a standard way of life that if I'm not medicated, and regularly, I'm a bit stuffy and sniffly. And since snot is no fun in a meeting, I take allergy drugs. I figured out that Claritin-D is the best thing for me, mostly because I'm a little clueless about most things and can't be trusted to remember to take anything more than once a day. Plus I don't want to be bothered.

Enter the nanny state. Because Claritin-D contains psuedoephedrine, and some folks can use psuedoephedrine to cook up a nice batch of methamphetamine, it's a regulated substance. So every two weeks when I buy my allergy drugs I get to go to the back of the pharmacy and ask for my drugs like I'm buying cigarettes at the grocery store. Then I get my driver's license scanned, sign the little box that says I understand that you can only buy so much cold medicine in a week, and go on my merry way.

Except this weekend. As I was packing for Atlanta, I noticed that I only had three pills left. Now I've run into issues buying my allergy meds in states that don't match my driver's license before, so I figured I'd pick some up on my way out of town. WRONG!

I go to my local drug store, and as the pharmacist scans my license, the machine beeps unpleasantly at him and refuses to sell me my drugs. Seems that since I had only bought these drugs a week or so ago (I had pills left, and had shared my allergy meds at a poker game where other folks were suffering) I couldn't purchase my cold medicine again because I was obviously going to cook up some meth. Fortunately for me the pharmacist wasn't a complete douchebag and he overrode the system, telling me to bring my wife's license in next time. So now I know that I'll have to alternate drug store chains where I buy my medicine so that I can actually continue to breathe easily. Fuckers.

The nanny-state mentality makes me sick. Wouldn't it make sense to just ask the checkout folks at the drug stores to think a moment before they sell someone a case of cold medicine instead of making it difficult for normal people to get their drugs? I mean damn, next thing you know they're going to legislate seat belt use for my own good, and make people wear helmets when they ride motorcycles. Oh wait...

On another front, I'm thinking of acquiring a handgun for the house. Any suggestions on preferred home defense handguns. I'm not looking for something to carry around concealed, I'm not that paranoid. But I think that it's probably time to have a pistol floating around somewhere in case of emergencies.

Interesting tidbit from W-by god Vegas

2009-02-10T13:17:00.003-05:00

This is really Special K's story to tell, but I don't see a write up from him, and he's off winning won in K-Vegas, so I'll recount an interesting event from our trip to Charleston a couple weeks ago. It's hard to find something I've never seen in a casino anymore, but this certainly qualifies. I'm going to write this from the perspective of someone who actually saw what happened, which is stretching things a bit, but you'll have to live with it.

So in the middle of a down, a replacement dealer wanders over to Special K's table, taps out the current dealer, and motions to some Mounties that want to have a chat with him. He walks over, talks to the cops for a few minutes, and then the cops turn him around, cuff him, and perp-walk him through the casino out the front door and apparently into a waiting ride to the lockup. It took a little while of quizzing subsequent dealers to get an idea what happened, but it seems that since the dealers there use a toke box that hooks on to the rail of the table, and they hook it onto the table directly behind the slot for the jackpot drop, this dealer had been just scooping the jackpot drop into his toke box instead of into the slot in the table for the jackpot.

So for a couple dollars a down, maybe $100/day in a good day, homeboy got himself escorted off the property, never to work there again, and likely will never work in a casino anywhere again. Not to mention the night he got to spend with his new boyfriends in the West Virginia lockup. Real smart, buddy.

It was the best of times...

2009-02-10T11:04:00.003-05:00

A tale of two home games...

So Friday night I rolled south to G-Vegas to play with Bad Blood, the recently un-retired from poker G-Rob, Otis, Lee Jones, Gucci Rick and a host of other degenerates. Over the course of the evening I managed to uphold one goal - to not get my money in bad more than once per orbit. That didn't stop me losing three buy-ins, but given the fact that I may actually have been a slight favorite (still behind, but a slight favorite) for at least half the last pot I lost, I think my PLO game might actually be improving by the most incremental of degrees. At this rate by 2020 I'll be a break-even PLO player.

So my love of PLO dims a bit whenever I pick up a big hand in early position, because I can't raise enough to get anyone to fold. So when I pick up AA72 with one suit under the gun, I can only make it $5 to go (1/1 PLO with a straddle). Several callers come along, but Lee makes my dream move and re-pots it. I'm fairly short already, and with aces and the hammer, I ship it in. Everyone else folds and we're heads up.

Of course he has the other two aces, and he's suited in clubs to my diamonds (or vice versa, but we each had one suit). Rainbow flop, no flush on the turn, but my hammer makes trips on the river to double through. Hammer good! That got me back to even for buy-in #2, and I don't remember how I lost the rest of it, but I'm sure I was overvaluing two pair chasing the boat or something equally inane. So let's fast forward to the end of the evening, in what became a pretty interesting hand. Otis raised it up preflop, and several of us called, including myself (10-10-J-9 with two crubs) and Bad Blood.

The flop came down with about everything I could ask for in a board - 8-9-4 with two clubs. I didn't have the open-ended straight flush draw, but I did have the open-ender and a decent flush draw. We had switched to PLO8 by this point, so I was less than thrilled about the two low cards on the board, but I led out anyway. My recollection is a little fuzzy, but I think I moved all in on the flop, Blood called and Otis moved all in over the top. I may have led out with a pot-sized bet, Blood called, Otis shoved, and Blood and I called. Either way, all the money ended up in the middle. I showed my crub flush draw and straight draw, Otis showed A-A-3-5 with the 3 and 5 of clubs, and Blood showed A-9-rag-rag for a silly call that I asked him about the next night. He didn't really defend it other than mumbling something about Grey Goose. EDIT - Mr. Blood has reminded me that he had A239 for top pair, nut low draw, so he made a good call for 25% of the pot :).

I had a pile of outs for half the pot, which I think made me around 60% to chop and around 20% to scoop. But the turn and river didn't bring me a 10, 7, Q or a club, and I was done for the night.Otis scooped the pot with his unimproved aces to get himself unstuck for the night. I think it was one of the less bad moves I made all night, but of course, I was working on a fundamental theorem of poker that proved to be faulty - crubs always get there.

The next night the degeneracy moved to my house, and it might be the fastest I've ever seen Nate blow through 5 buy-ins (at $60 per). I stacked him once in the first orbit when my flush got there on the river to bust his turned straight. Brian the Red stacked him later when his flush got there on the flop to crack Nate's pair (or maybe it was a smaller flush). It was actually kinda gross to watch as he just turned over second-best hand after second-best hand, which gets expensive in short order.

I had a rare evening at my home game where I bought in just the once, and built a ridiculous stack early, but bled off some of it late in the game. It was a jovial game, and great fun for all but probably Nate, who was busto by 10PM. I thought that in the absence of Special K and Jim the Knife that the game would play smaller, but every chip I had under $20 was on the table by 8:30, and I don't think we've ever had that many black ($20) chips on the table before. So it was a fun game, and I made back 2/3 of what I left in G-Vegas, so that's always helpful. I don't really remember many hands, but my reads were at least as bad as they usually are, and I resorted to suckouts on more than one occassion after I decided to call with crap because I was sire somebody was raising light preflop. They weren't, and I had to get lucky to win, but since I've given up on being good, I'll take lucky whenever I can get it :).

Lovin' the ATL?

2009-02-03T16:01:00.002-05:00

Not really. I don't dislike it, and I think I've located the hotel that I'll make my base of operations whenever I'm here, so that's helpful. It's a straight shot down 85 to the office, and there are plenty of places to eat around the hotel, plus it has the most important thing for me - comfortable beds!

But I promised the story of my amazing fall from grace in West Virginia, so here it is in short order. I spent the first four hours of Friday night on the most amazing run of cards I've ever experienced, picking up aces, kings, queens, jacks, tens and most of them multiple times. I also found action almost every time, which is always a bonus. My table started off a dream, several very loose-passive players, with a couple of gambooly bigger stacks. I managed to chip up from my initial $100 buy-in to $300 in short order, then doubled through the other big stack when I picked up aces for the second time in four hands. He didn't give me credit for yet another big pair, so he paid me off on every street with an inferior hand. He didn't show, but I'm assuming he had top pair on the king-high board. With him gone, I had the rest of the table covered.

No, add everyone's chips together, and I had them covered. Now it's not that I had that much money in front of me, about $650. It's that these guys were playing that short. I looked around and decided that I should probably rack up in a little bit, since only one other guy had more than $300 in front of him, and he was pretty tight.

Then I stacked him to bring my total chips up over $850. I was looking at a +$750 night, and didn't rack up when the table went to shit. It's all my fault, I could have gotten up, checked on the others, and maybe gone to the hotel early. Or not. Just gone south with my profit and tried the Stud game for a little while. Or just gone south with my profit and moved to a better table. Or played slots. Or whatever.

But since I don't often get the chance to play casino poker, it's hard for me to get up and cut my sessions short. And this time it got really expensive. Three young guys who could play all sat down at my table, then T and Special K moved over, and by the time the night was over I'd given away $500 in profits. So I learned a lesson - if I've got the table covered by such a huge margin, move on to greener pastures. At that point there was no significant reward left for me, just risk. And as I doubled up short stack after short stack, I kept on risking. So rather than doubling my bankroll on the trip, I finished down $100 after playing like ass the next day.

Yeah, winning $750 would have almost doubled my paltry bankroll. After some Christmas purchases, and the Macbook I bought last summer, not to mention a gross losing streak the last half of 2008, I've barely cracked a four-digit bankroll since October. At one point at Bad Blood's last month, I was within one buy-in of busto again before Brian the Red gifted me his stack a couple of times. So I'm trying not to play like as much of a dumbass without playing too much like scared money, which is a delicate balance. And really, I'm typically neither delicate nor particularly well-balanced. I'll keep you posted.

Well that was a first...

2009-01-30T11:31:00.002-05:00

None of my fantasies about me and a gaggle of nurses in the middle of the night start or ended this way. And yes, there's more than one. And no, I'm not going to share them with you.

I was in Chapel Hill for work on Wednesday, having driven up there for a 9AM Thursday meeting that was cancelled around 8PM Wednesday night, well after I had arrived in my hotel room. Lemon. So after a nice dinner with a buddy, I went back to the hotel, read a little bit, watched NCIS and went to sleep. I know, I lead an exciting life on the road.

But at about 4:24 AM, it got a lot more exciting. In all my travels, I've never had a fire alarm go off in the middle of the night when I was in a hotel. It took me a second to figure out what that noise was, then I did all the normal things you're supposed to do. I went to the door, and didn't smell smoke. I felt the door handle, and it wasn't hot. So I decided that the odds of me dying imminently were slim, and got dressed. I tossed on pants, shoes, shirt and my jacket. Then I thought about it for a second, and decided that since my death apparently wasn't an immediate concern, I put my laptop in my bag, put my ipod in my pocket and headed for the door. I did eventually decide that I wouldn't waste the time for socks or to pack the rest of my clothes in a bag, figuring that might be a little excessive.

By the way, in January, even in the south, 4:30 AM is COLD. So I walked down the stairs, thanking Marriott Rewards once again for honoring my "low floor" request, and headed out into the night with all my fellow hotel guests. Obviously most of them were more concerned for their safety, as quite a few of them were in their pjs with no shoes.

And no, none of the pjs were terribly interesting. I was also disappointed. I look around at the bevy of freezing women and announce "I brought my car keys. I'll be going over to the Honda to get warm. Up to four of you are welcome to join me." I had a pile of takers, four nice young women who were in town for a nursing conference on hyperbaric chambers.

Yep, it's the middle of the night and I've got four nurses in their pajamas in my car with me. No baby oil, no Twister, not even any peppermint hand lotion. And frankly, it was too damn cold to take anything off anyway. Not to mention that whole married thing, and the fact that two of the four were uglier than a bulldog chewing on a bumblebee. So we sat there for a few minutes before the fire department gave us the all clear, and went back to our respective rooms.

I know, it started out sounding like it was exciting, but really wasn't. Sorry, I'll try to do better on the hijinks and shenanigans front next time.

Media Management

2009-01-25T14:09:00.002-05:00

There will be a poker post coming about my trip West by God Virginia. For now, suffice to say that I need to learn when to get up and put money in my pocket. It suck to be up $750 in four hours and still finish -$100 on a two-day trip. It sucks more when it's against players that suck. I am becoming a big fan of West Virginia poker.

But anyway - here's a question for my geek friends (and you know who you are). I have a shitload of music, movies, TV shows, stuff like that. I live off my laptop, so I store all my stuff on a 500GB external drive. I would like to be able to easily view those TV shows, play that music, etc. on my TV. I have an Xbox 360 and a PS3, both of which can do something like this. But the networking is what is giving me issues.

Is my life going to be easier if I just set up a PC somewhere that is hard-wired on a network to my 360 and store all my media on that PC?Or is there a solution I don't know about?

What about an Apple TV? Can I play stuff on there that I don't buy off iTunes?

And what about stuff I download via BitTorrent? What do I have to do to get one of these devices to play unprotected avi and mpg files?

I'm obviously not averse to spending money on this shit (note ridiculously large TV in my den), but I'd like something that's at least a little bit seamless on the execution side of things.

Once upon a time...

2009-01-21T09:51:00.002-05:00

There was a really, really bad day in America. Some really bad men hijacked some airplanes and killed a lot of people. Some brave people fought back and crashed their airplane to keep them from killing other people. In North Carolina, a guy that had been pretty outspoken against the new President had only one thought, "Where is the President? We need a leader. Right. Now." And he decided to give the President that he did not vote for and didn't really believe had been elected in the first place his support. Because the country needed a leader, and he was the one we had, even if he wasn't the one he wanted. And in the first few days and weeks after those attacks, that President did pretty good. He exceeded the expectations of the vocal critic from North Carolina, and handled the worst crisis of my generation as well as could be expected. We won't discuss the seven years that followed, because they are actually beside the point.

The point is this - our country is now in a crisis of a different sort, but one that is no less real and will in the end directly affect more people than the first one. We have a new President, who has the opportunity to be a leader. I'd like to ask all my friends that didn't support Obama in his campaign and don't like anything he stands for to give him the same chance that I gave W. He might not be any good at anything. He might be just more of the same. He might be worse, and he might mortgage our future even more heavily to make today's balance sheet look better.

But he might be good for us. He might be able to do 1/3 of what he says he wants to do. And he deserves the benefit of the doubt for a little while. So give him a shot, even if you don't like him. If I can be big enough to do it for a President I hated, you can too. Then, if he screws up as bad as W, feel free to resume the hate.

Bad Read, Good Outcome

2009-01-19T10:53:00.002-05:00

That might have been the theme of my weekend. It was certainly the theme of two big hands I dragged the pot in.

Firstly - Special K raised preflop to $2.75 from early position. One caller before it gets to me on the button, where I had straddled to $1. I make the loose call of $1.75 with J6o, and the flop comes down a lovely J-6-x (x might = a king, but I don't really remember). K bets out, the other preflop caller folds, and I raise. I put him on AK or something of that nature. He thinks for a moment before he raised all in, and I call. He tables the first pair of aces he's seen since October (and I can attest to most of this, since I've been around for most of his sessions since October), and they've been cracked by some dumbass with J6o. The board doesn't pair and I double up.

Secondly - I don't remember any of the preflop action, but the flop came down with a king, and I had KJ soooted. Jim the Knife was firing on every street, and I was calling him down. I didn't feel like I could really re-raise with the Jack, but it was good enough to keep calling with. Everything finished out and Jim tabled a King as well, but no kicker. I didn't put him on anything that strong, but it was a good result. So my reads weren't spectacular, but the results were ok.

One hand where my read was good, and hand held up, went down a little like this. I'm in a blind. BadBlood raised, Jim called, and I looked down at 5d-2d. I remark that I have recently fallen in love with this trashy-assed hand, and make the call. The flop comes down 5-2-9 with two clubs, and I remark that I can't talk about how shitty my hand is, get a raggedy-ass flop like that and NOT bet out, so I bet out at it. Blood raised me, Jim moved all in over the top, and I had to have a nice long think about things. It took me a while, but I finally decided that Jim would make that move with a huge range of hands, and moved all in over the top for my last few pennies. Blood got out of the way, and Jim turned over the best and worst of all possible worlds for me - Kc-7c. I saw the flush draw, and did something I practically never do: I offered to run it twice.

It shows how snakebit I still feel about the last half of 2008 that I even offered to run it twice when I was a 64% favorite to win the hand. Jim agreed, and the board ran out club-free both times, leaving me to drag a huge pot. I finished up pretty significantly on the evening, making up for an awful showing the last time we had a game at my house. I thought about it later, and am still intrigued by my own offer to run it twice. It probably stemmed partially from playing at Blood's house the night before, where running it twice when there are big pots on the line is a fairly common occurence. It also stemmed from a sense of impending doom that goes back to last year, but the fact was that I was only on buy-in #1, and that's a pretty rare place for me to be that late in the evening.

So all in all it was a good weekend of poker, with me logging a rare pair of back-to-back winning sessions to put me back in the black for the year. It looks like the home game is on the road this weekend as your intrepid heroes head north into real hillbilly country to take on the games at the Tri-State race track in Charleston, WV. Lemme know if that's close to your neck of the woods (literally, woods) and we'll grab a beer.

My first post of the new year

2009-01-15T23:38:00.002-05:00

Is lame. I'm alive, but still have nothing interesting to say. Work is keeping me busy, and I'm actually pretty happy about that. I'm writing a good bit about the Aussie Millions over on PokerNews, so that's good. Caldwell resigned, that's kind of a bummer. I like John, and his cute wife and baby too. even though I haven't met the baby. But really, what's not to like about a baby?

I've played a little poker. It's all kinda sucked, so I'm stuck already. Headed south tomorrow night to play in a game where I am absolutely going to be one of the softer spots at the table. But who cares? I get to hang out with Otis, G-Rob, BadBlood, Brian the Red and Absinthe. And I hear there's some dude coming down from the mountains who might have written a thing or two about poker himself.

The Christmas Lights

2008-12-23T12:21:00.000-05:00

Every year, the day after Thanksgiving, when all the women were running around to the mall looking for the latest sale on this or that, Jeremiah Green would get up early, go to the garage and get down the cardboard boxes of lights. Then he’d get out the ladder, the hammer, and the extension cords and set to work. He’d work most of the day, with a break around lunchtime for a sandwich made from yesterday’s dried-out turkey on white bread with French’s yellow mustard and Miracle whip and maybe some celery on the side with salt sprinkled on it. He’d sit on the porch in his old flannel shirt eating his turkey sandwich and celery, and crack open a Pabst from the cooler in the garage.

Helen didn’t cotton much to drinkin’ so he only had himself a beer on those rare occasions when she was gone and he had the house to himself. Most years a six-pack bought after the Fourth of July would last the rest of the year, then he’d allow himself another beer or two for New Year’s after Helen had gone to bed. She’d long since given up caring about watching some silly ball drop, figuring that she could tell it was a new year when she looked at the calendar the next morning at breakfast. The day changed every evening without her help; she didn’t need to stay up past her bedtime just to ring anything in. Jeremiah liked to watch all the commotion on the tv, so he usually stayed up and had himself a beer or two while that Clark fella nattered on until he fell asleep. Then he’d wake up sometime in the middle of the night and go to bed.

Then once he finished his turkey sandwich, Jeremiah (not once in his eighty-two years was he ever Jerry or Jer, or God forbid, Jed) would lean the ladder up against the side of the house and start to string the lights. By the time Helen got home from shopping with her sisters it would be full-on dark, and Jeremiah would be back inside watching Wheel of Fortune or Jeopardy if she ran particularly late. Once she got home and got all her prizes deposited in the front bedroom for later wrapping and distribution, they’d go out in the front yard together and take a minute standing on the lawn of the house he bought when he got home from the war, a time he never really talked about, not even to Helen. They’d admire his handiwork, Helen would remind him to put the ladder away before they went to bed, and he’d reply that it would get done eventually, and anyway, what if there was a light burnt out? Then he’d go up to the outlet he had installed on the porch by that Reynolds boy down the street just for this purpose, and he’d plug in the main extension cord.

With that, the whole front of the house, roofline, bushes, little cedar tree by the driveway and all the porch railings burst into white light, and the whole neighborhood could tell that the holidays were upon them. There were never any colored lights, at least not since 1973 when Jeremiah shaved off those sideburns. There were never any flashing lights or strobe lights, and never any plastic Santas and reindeer on the roof. There was just a bright white celebration of the season. For over fifty years, from the time the armistice was signed and Jeremiah came home from Korea, he dragged that ladder out of the garage every November and lit up the night sky in a celebration of the season, of family, and of just being alive.

Until this year. When Helen passed in August Jeremiah sat down in that vinyl recliner in the den with a Pabst, probably the first time in thirty years he’d had a beer in August inside his house, and it seemed like he didn’t move from that chair for months. Neighbors would come to visit, to see how he was holding up, and he’d tell them, in the stoic way that octogenarian men who’ve seen young men die have, that he was doing about as well as could be expected.

As well as could be expected didn’t really amount to much, he thought to himself after the well-wishers, the pastors and deacons, the neighborhood widows and friends of his children that had moved away years before and were back in town visiting their own parents had left. As well as could be expected was getting up three times in the middle of the night to pee and being confused every single time when he went back to bed and there was no one there. As well as could be expected was fixing his own breakfast every morning and finally going into the garage to drag out the old coffee pot that Helen had wanted to toss out back twenty years ago when they got the new programmable kind but he wouldn’t let her for fear that just this thing would someday happen and he’d have to make his own coffee and be too old and near-sighted to read the instructions on the damn thing and besides, what does a coffeepot need all them damn buttons for anyhow? You just put the coffee in it, put some hot water in it, and it turns into coffee. It doesn’t need a clock in it, much less more buttons than one for off and one for on.

So as well as could be expected wasn’t really very well at all, if he would take the time to think about it. Which he didn’t, because Jeremiah was never a man to spend too much time in deep contemplation. But now, at 83, there wasn’t a whole lot left for him to do except sit. And think. And since thinking was less appealing, he managed to lose himself in some of the seventy-six channels if eternal drivel that spouted from the 19” color television that sat in the living room on top of the old console tv that had finally breathed its last some eight years ago. So Jeremiah sat. And watched tv. And that’s how most days went. He watched tv until bedtime, watched the late news and went to bed, where he lay awake listening to the silence beside him until sleep finally took him off for a couple of hours at a time.

So on this Friday after Thanksgiving, instead of listening to Helen get up at the crack of dawn to go shopping with her sisters, then getting up to drink the coffee she left for him in the machine he never did figure out how to operate, then heading out to the garage to start on the decorations, he sat. He turned on the tv and watched a little bit of that, then fixed himself a dry turkey sandwich with Miracle Whip from the leftovers from the turkey that the Methodist women brought by on Wednesday.

He ran out of mustard last week and kept forgetting to put it on the list that hung on the refrigerator. If he didn’t write it down, he wouldn’t remember to get it when he went grocery shopping this Sunday, either. He had taken to grocery shopping at eleven on Sundays so he didn’t have to worry about seeing any of the church women in the store. Helen had always been real active in the church, but with her gone he didn’t see much sense in him going. He figured he and God still had a few things they needed to sort out from about fifty years ago, but they were the sort of things a man needed to talk through with his maker face to face, and going to church wouldn’t do him a whole lot of difference one way or the other.

As he was sitting, not really enjoying his mustardless sandwich but not really not liking it either, he started to hear some rattling around in his garage. The neighborhood, which had been full of young veterans when they moved in all these years ago, had seen its ups and downs, and was currently on the beginning of one of the up periods, which was to say that there were a lot more people living there at the moment who could be considered down than up, but in general they were hard-working people who didn’t cause too much trouble. The people on the tv liked to talk about it as a neighborhood “in transition,” but Jeremiah just thought that was a fancy way of saying there were some poor people that lived there, some white people, some black people and some Mexicans thrown in for good measure. There was some crime, sure, but in general it was decent place to live. But when he heard somebody rattling around in his garage, he didn’t run out to go look and see what they might be stealing.

It’s not that he was afraid that whoever was in his garage might hurt him. He’d known pain at different times in his life, you didn’t make it past fourscore years on this earth without getting hurt more than once, but he just really wasn’t that interested. And as the day wore on and the noise in his garage continued, he finally decided that if there was something worth taking out there they should have already took it and left him alone, so he went to the back door and stuck his head out to yell at whatever hooligans were back there. But by this time whatever perpetrators there had been were already gone, so all he saw was a closed garage door and a q quiet back yard. He went back inside and dozed in front of his tv for the rest of the afternoon, watched a little football, not that he knew or cared anything about any of the schools playing, but it was something to pass the time, and napped a little more.

Along about seven o’clock, he started to listen for Helen’s sister Mary’s car, and then remembered that Mary didn’t drive anymore after she got so blind they took her license away last summer, and besides, she wasn’t going to be dropping Helen off tonight anyhow. But as he stood in his kitchen alone, feeling once again the lost feeling of someone who is missing something that he just can’t quite put his finger on what it is, there was a knock at his front door. He had left all the porch lights off to keep folks from coming by to check on him since he didn’t really feel like sharing another afternoon of how you holdin’ ups with somebody who he didn’t really give much of a damn about and he figured didn’t give much of a damn about him either, so the knock was a little surprising. He figured it was a kid, since they weren’t usually smart enough to figure out that when the porch light wasn’t on it meant that the body inside didn’t want to be bothered.

So he made his way through the darkened house to the front door, and pulled it open to find an empty porch. He looked around for a minute, confused, before he saw it laying over to the right of the door. It was an orange extension cord with a red bow tied to the end of it. On the bow was a card, and Jeremiah reached down and pulled the card off the end of the card and read it.

“Dear Mr. Jeremiah,

We are sorry that your wife died. We are sorry that you are sad, and that you didn’t want to put your pretty lights up this year. We hope we did it good and it will make you a little happy.
Feliz Navidad,

Jose y Hector Garcia (from across the street)”

Jeremiah stood there for a minute looking around, not really knowing what to think, when he looked up and saw two boys looking out of a living room window across the street. The bigger one looked like he was about thirteen, and the little one looked to be maybe eight. The big one just watched him, but when the little one saw him looking, he waved excitedly, indicating that Jeremiah should plug in the cord.

So he did, and he walked out on his lawn to see his house lit up just like it was every year, with white lights on the little cedar tree by the driveway, on the porch railings, on all the bushes on the front of the house, and even on the roofline, although how those little boys got all the way up there he had no idea. Until he saw his ladder leaning up against the side of the house just like he did every year until after he got everything working just right. He stood there for a minute imagining he could feel a smaller hand in his own as he stood there on his lawn not quite as alone as he’d been a couple hours before, then he turned around, nodded to the two boys in the window, one waving like his arm was one a spring, and one nodding back solemnly, gathered his ladder, and put it away in his garage until after New Year’s.

Day 1

2008-12-22T13:18:00.003-05:00

In an effort to force myself to write more, and to take more pictures to decide if I can justify the expense of a digital SLR camera instead of the cheap-o Kodak digital I've been rockin' for the past year, I've launched the picture a day plan. This is kinda ambitious, so I reserve the right to fail.

I want to take at least one picture every day for a year of something I see. Most of the time I'll write about them, so hopefully this will spur me to write more. Here's today;s entry.

This was the window dressing that my employees put up in my office when I was at LDI in October. I came home to a lovely set of My Little Pony drapes in my office. I've left them there. It starts conversations, alright. And says a lot about the industry I work in.

Is Twitter killing my blog?

2008-12-20T20:43:00.002-05:00

Well, it certainly hasn't helped it. I do find myself twitttering all the short, random shit that I would typically post here, and with work getting busy I'm having to retrain myself to post more regularly. This week was certainly interesting, with getting back from Vegas, being home for almost 48 hours then taking a work trip across the state, managing to injure myself along the way and then spending 36 hours practically bedridden.

So we got out of Vegas before the snow, and I made my tight connection in Chicago with about 10 minutes to spare. I won the exit row lottery on both my return flights, and there was no one in the middle seat from Chaicago to Charlotte, so that was a comfy flight. I don't really remember the Vegas-Chicago leg, because I was asleep before our wheels left the ground and was barely awake when we landed. So I got home ahead of Suzy and Bonnie, and they got in safely, and all was right with the world.

Tuesday was my only day in the office, because I had a meeting planned in Manteo on Thursday afternoon. Manteo is about as far away as you can get while still being in North Carolina. When they called that part of the world the Outer Banks, they weren't kidding. So my plan was to work Tuesday and Wednesday, drive halfway to Manteo Wednesday night, and finish the trip for a 1PM meeting Thursday. Except my project manager's wife sprained her ankle over the weekend so he had to drive her to work every day. Which precluded him from making a site visit in Greenville (NC) on Wednesday. So I took that visit, which cut out my planned Wednesday in the office. The site meeting was fine, just a basic walk-through with the electricians, and then I was off to Manteo.

The Lost Colony is one of the longest-running outdoor dramas in the US, if not the oldest. It tells the story of the first colony on Roanoke Island, and the first English child born in the US, Virginia Dare. It also explores the mystery of the vanished colony on Roanoke Island, without giving us any answers, because frankly, we don't know what happened to those people. We helped them with a major infrastructure renovation last summer, so they want us to work with them over the next two years to fully renovate all their lighting. So I headed out there to meet with the Executive Director and several guys from the National Park Service (because Roanoke Island is a national park) to talk about the plans for that.

It was a good meeting, and we've prettty much got the gig, and it was neat to walk around that facility, that's seen the work of several theatrical giants. Terrence Mann (Les Miserables, Beauty and the Beast) has directed there for several years. Andy Griffith got his acting start there, and the current costume and production designer is a little guy who some folks in the theatre world might have heard of - William Ivey Long. William is one of NC's most famous theatrical sons, with 5 Tony awards to his credit. So there's a lot of history there, and the absolute coolest back stage I've ever been on. It backs up right on the water, to the point where if the wind is blowing over the water, you get wet standing back there. There's probably 10' from the back stage area to the water, so that's pretty cool.

Then I drove most of the way home, waking up in the middle of the night with a screaming pain in my right foot. I made it through the night sleeping intermittently, and then drove the 4 hours back to Charlotte and went to an urgent care joint. Turns out that the tendon that extends my big toe has become inflamed from all the driving and walking that I've done over the past two weeks. So the doc gave me one of the dorky post-op shoes, some anti-inflammatory drugs and told me to stay off it for a day or two. It's mostly better now, as long as I keep the Cataflam in me, so hopefully I'll be able to finish my Christmas shopping tomorrow night. Or at least start my Christmas shopping tomorrow night. Suzy gave me her list, so I've got some guidelines, just need to get the wheel back in shape so I can do it.

So today was all about catching up on my movie watching, which so far consisted of War, Inc. (highly recommend), one episode of Numb3rs, which I had never seen before (not bad), two episodes of Eleventh Hour (which I am oddly enamored with), two episodes on NCIS with Suzy (which we both love) and Stealth (which was every bit as cheesy as I thought). Tomorrow we have Christmas with Suzy's fam, then some shopping, then the Sunday Warm-up on Stars, then the huuuuge Sunday night game with the Panthers and Giants. Then back to work for another short week on Monday. I like short work weeks. Unless I have a bunch of stuff to do, in which case I hate them. But I've lined most of my stuff up so I don't have too much cooking until the first of the year, so we should be good.

This is not a WPBT trip report

2008-12-17T18:42:00.002-05:00

Just a few disjointed thoughts from the weekend.

I got in a few hours ahead of Suzy and my sis Bonnie, who was making her first-ever plane ride, and got completely bomber at the IP. Thanks to everyone who bought me a drink, thanks to everyone who drank with me, and damn you all for how I felt Friday morning (and early afternoon). Overall the whole weekend was a great success, I thought. We all got together, we all drank a little (or a lot), some of us got married, one of us won a poker tournament, some of us won money, some of us lost money, but we all had a good time in each other's company.

Thanks to all the friends, old and new, who I saw this weekend. You guys inspired me to write again, if not significantly more frequently. I am always amazed at the feeling of closeness I have with people that I see for only a few days once or twice a year. In one of those rare quiet islands of thought right in the middle of the chaos, Iggy and I stood in the middle of everyone at the Geisha Bar, looked around, and just shook our heads at the insanity of what we are. We're a group of incredibly disparate individuals, who, almost by accident, became something bigger and better than ourselves.

Walking back to the bus after Gracie and Pablo's wedding, I was trailing along in the back of the pack and could overhear Pablo talking to his mom, and one thing that he kept saying really resonated with me. He said more than once "we're so blessed." He was incredibly touched that a pile of people would ride in a bus down to the magistrate's office in Las Vegas to see them get married off, but it's a lot more than that. I feel blessed to have you people in my life. I know that you're out there, my invisible internet friends, and that if I ever need you, all I need to do is call. It's really amazing the strength of the network that we've built.

Sure we might not all play the blogger tournaments. Some of us can barely be considered poker bloggers with all the other stuff we write about (yeah, I mean me). But the connection is real. We've laughed together, cried together, drank FAR too much booze together, raised money for good causes together, and made compete idiots of ourselves in public together. But this weekend reminded me that somehow, with all the different lists, and generations of bloggerdom, and groups within groups, that just walking up and saying "I'm (insert blogger name here)" and being a decent person is an instant ticket into something really kinda special. Something I'm honored to be part of.

I'll ramble more about the weekend at some point, but right now I'm in the cadillac of Fairfield Inns in Williamston, NC (I don't really know where that is, either), and it's almost time to look for food. I slept in my bed for two nights in a row, which is kind of a big deal lately, and now I'm on the road again. I think it calms down for a week after this, but then the Monday after Christmas I'm back in the ATL. So if any of you boys down there wanna sling some cards early in that week, let me know. I'll be there Monday and Tuesday nights, driving home for New Year's.

Not bad for a first day...

2008-12-08T21:05:00.002-05:00

It went pretty well, I think. I'll admit to some trepidation coming into this meeting, but I think I got across the point that I'm not here to replace anyone, and that no one will lose their job because I'm working here now. The office has done well, but I think that I can help them find some new markets to explore, and work on increasing profits. That's the kind of thing that I'm good at, finding new ways to do things in our industry and maximizing the amount of money that we make. I also think I managed to convince them that I'm going to support them, and not try to change everything that they're doing just for the sake of change.

So I'm in Atlanta until Wednesday afternoon, when I drive home to pack for our trip to Las Vegas. Then it's a weekend of drinking and degeneracy with my invisible internet friends. We've got about 70 people lined up for our Tourney at 3PM at the Venetian, and I told them to plan for 90 or so, so if you wanna play, show up.

Looks like I'm gonna be back in the ATL every couple of weeks for the foreseeable future, with my next trip coming the week between Christmas and New Year's. I'll likely get down here Sunday night and leave on Wednesday again, so if anybody wants to get together for a drink or some cards, lemme know. I didn't try to get together with anybody this trip because I was unsure about how the trip would go, so we'll have to hook up next time. Now I'm in my hotel room watching the Panthers/Bucs game (which might decide the future of the entire NFC), and getting ready for tomorrow.

Yeah, it was a Facebook/Twitter tease...

2008-12-05T10:23:00.002-05:00

When I said I could talk about my promotion and then didn't talk about my promotion. Thanks to everyone who sent congrats, and thanks again to everyone who sent congrats (and/or incredulous comments about the longevity of my marriage, I'm just as baffled as you are) on our anniversary yesterday. All I can really say to that is that a bunch of you have met my wife (and if you haven't she'll be the short blonde I'm hanging around with next weekend, introduce yourself) and you know she's a doll. She's a doll with the patience of Job to put up with my sorry ass and all my degenerate gambling and travel.

Which leads me to the promotion, because that travel is about to increase, at least for the next couple of years.

Jeez, I've reached the point in my life and career when I can reasonably project a quantity of work for more than the next two weeks. Never thought I'd see that shit.

A lot of you know what I do - I'm the Systems Division Manager for a large theatrical lighting company, which means that I design and install lighting and rigging systems for theatres, churches, high school auditoriums, tv studios, high-end architectural projects, casinos, etc. Well, for the past several years I've been the head of the systems group for our Charlotte office. This week I accepted the promotion to head up the Atlanta office's systems group as well. Atlanta has been without a systems manager for a couple of years, and since the two offices are run together as one company (it gets complicated), everyone decided that I would be a good choice to lead that office for the near future.

Which is cool. It's a whole new set of challenges, a whole new set of personalities to learn, a whole new set of opportunities to help folks grow and flourish. It also means that I'm going to be spending a lot of time in the ATL in the foreseeable future. Like one out of every three weeks is kinda what I'm thinking for right now. Might go to half a week every two weeks, might be less, might be more. As we all get comfortable with each other and start to figure things out, we'll figure out how much time I need to have boots on the ground.

Which also means that I will not be doing much theatre for the next little while, because week-long trips out of town really bite into the whole rehearsal process thing. Good thing I was trying to take a hiatus, huh? Since now I'm going to be taking a hiatus regardless.

I'm looking forward to this. It's the first time in a while that there has been something staring me in the face that's actually really challenging. The guys in Atlanta have done a great job without my help to this point, so hopefully I won't screw up their groove. The hope is that I can cross-pollinate some ideas between the two groups and boost sales and profitability for both teams. My first trip is next week, Mon-Wed. So if I look like I REALLY need a drink when you see me Thursday, then it didn't go well. Or I'm just beat from the week/weekend which includes the following schedule.

Saturday - Get up, recap LAPT and APPT for Pokernews. Go get oil change. Go get haircut. Get tires rotated, too. Go perform in final show of Elegies for Angels, Punks and Raging Queens. Go to cast party. Try to drink with the cast, most of whom were in grade school when Suzy and I got married (that realization last night sucked).

Sunday - Get up at a ridiculous hour for a Sunday and cover the World Cup of Poker for PokerStars. Recap the LAPT and APPT. Nap. Cover the Sunday Warm-Up for PokerStars. Drive part of the way to Atlanta.

Monday - Wed. - Meet with my new team in Atlanta. Try to let them know that no one is fired and they all rock, I'm just there to make them rock harder. Wednesday drive home to CLT, pack for Vegas. Cover EPT Deauville for Pokernews while I'm there.

Thursday - Go to Vegas. Party like a rock star. Avoid getting wheelchair drunk.

It's that time.

2008-12-01T11:08:00.002-05:00

No, not the time that we all get together and get drunk in Las Vegas (although that time is coming fast upon us).

No, not the time that we eat too much (although that is also true).

No, not tech week for another show (Elegies for Angels, Punks & Raging Queens, opens Thursday).

It's time to do something nice for somebody else. I don't know about the rest of the world, but this weekend saw the beginnings of winter-type weather in North Carolina. And there are people out there who are cold. And hungry. And folks that can't buy Christmas presents for their kids.

And that sucks.

Since I obviously am willing to spend more than my fair share of money on myself (note new television, Xbox and home theatre system) I decided after reading the paper this morning that it's time to spend a little of my money on other people. Or more to the point, to give it away. So I'm gonna donate some of the money that I get from this here blog this month to the Salvation Army. And I've put a widget on my blog to let you do the same. It's called an online red kettle, and the money goes to help people who can't help themselves.

The economy sucks right now, and it's the duty of all good bleeding hearts like me to help out the folks that are a little more screwed than we are. So if you've got a few bucks to spare, please click on the link and help out somebody who needs it. It's good karma, and we could all use some of that. And frankly, there but for the grace of whatever you believe in go you and I.

So lend a hand. Thanks.

After all that...

2008-11-26T12:06:00.002-05:00

It's a statement on how sick I ran earlier this year to realize that as badly as I've run since July that I'm actually still in the black playing poker for the year. Goals for December's trip to Vegas -

1) Don't play 2/4 unless it's in the same way as I play blackjack or pai gow - as pure entertainment.

2) Ditto blogger mixed games.

3) Play NLHE when it's time to play real poker, and play it like I've got a little bit of sense.

Frankly, if I could do #3 more often I'd be way more ahead than I am, particularly in home games. My biggest leak is tossing just a buck or two in there (again and again and again) for the ridiculous factor if I hit with those crap cards. I'll never take a home game as seriously as an opportunity to take money from strangers, but when the stacks are $300+ deep at a home game, perhaps I should treat it with a little more caution and respect my dramatically reduced bankroll with a little more respect.

So Far...

2008-11-25T16:28:00.002-05:00

This is who I have for the tournament at the Venetian in a couple of weeks. If you're not on the list, let me know if you wanna play. A few people that I haven't heard from yet include -

Miami Don
Chad
Carmen
Pauly
Change100
Mr. Subliminal
PokerGrump
Iggy
Derek
Trooper

So let me know if you're not one of the folks below and still want in -

CK
Snuffy
Joanada
PirateLawyer
Falstaff
F-Train
Alceste
Bad Blood
Astin
Yestbay
Rooster
Grubette
Grubby
Linda
April
Ian
CA April
STB
On THG
Jordan
Vin
Bakini Mary
Mattazuma
Astin's Buddy
Gracie
SSP
Bdidde
Dawn Summers
Chilly
Schaubs
Katitude
DonkeyPuncher
Buddy Dank
Muchtim
GMoney
Joe Speaker
AlcantHang
Alan
OhCaptain
KuroKitty
Gnome
Shamburglar
Zeem
Garth
shrike
RecessRampage
Johhny Hughes
PokerPeaker
Columbo
Dr. Chako
TheHotWife
LJ

So if I've forgotten that you emailed me or left a comment, please do so again. I drink a lot this time of year and have been known to forget things. If you wanna play, but haven't let me know, please do so quickly. I'm giving Tim at the Venetian our list on Monday the 8th, so if I don't have your info by then, you're SOL. If you're on the list, and mentioned a friend, I have that info as well.

See you in a couple of weeks!

And you plan on playing. Even if you're a "maybe," it's better to set it up for too many people than to have too few seats.

Looking forward to seeing all of you!

Then there was poker...

2008-11-24T15:49:00.002-05:00

Of a sort. Most of the gang was out of town, so we played 5-handed at Brian's joint this weekend. It was fun, if a little gassy. With no chicas in the room, the boys felt even less restraint than normal, and I'm just glad no one lit a match. And that pillow I was sitting on? Yeah, sacrificial cushion. It should be burned. I finished the night down by about $40, nothing tremendously notable happened except me picking up aces in back-to-back hands. Me and Jim got it all in preflop and his Queens didn't find a friend, so that was the night's first rebuy.

There were many more. Almost all of them by me & Jim. It could have been ugly, but we mostly passed the same money around the table for 5-6 hours. Sunday I cracked open Assassin's Creed for the first time (new Xbox 360) and whenever I got ill watching the Panthers game (which was often) I switched over to the game. Badass. I'm taking recomendations on what I should put on my Xmas list. I currently have Fable 2, Assassin's Creed, Elder Scrolls Oblivion (I think, whatever the Elder Scrolls game is), Lego Indiana Jones and Kung Fu Panda (they came with the Xbox, don't ask). I want Left4Dead, but not sure what else is badass enough. I have GH3 for Wii, so I'm probably gonna get World Tour for that. So make your recommendations.

Sunday was also all about moving heavy shit. When we got the LCD tv for the den (which is actually for the bedroom but is currently in the den, don't ask) we decided to give our old TV to Suzy's dad to replace his 1980-ish tv. Which was great, except that a 32" Sony Trinitron WEGA is a monster of a TV, so it was all Tim and I could do to get the TV into his apartment. If there had been more stairs it probably wouldn't have happened. Then I had to hook everything up, because that's kinda my gig. So I did that, got all hot and sweaty, then went home to see my team get crushed by a division rival and move into 2nd on the division (since we currently lose the tie-breaker with Tampa based on an earlier loss to Tampa).

This weekend we have some distinguished visitors from up north in the region for turkey day, so I'll be rolling south to Greer to play cards. Check out Bad Blood's blog for the lineup from hell.

Continuing the streak

2008-11-18T15:15:00.002-05:00

Of a post a week, whether I needs it or not. Really, there are even things going on. I've even played a little poker. Wanna hear about it?

Didn't think so.

Still don't care. Here goes.

At long last, the Falstaff home game made a resurgence Saturday night with a table full to overflowing. T, Jim, Nate, Brian, Little Nick joined the party, as well as you intrepid host and a couple of bloggers from around town and from down south. We even had an old friend Carver show up for a little while, but he hit his stop/loss mark early and packed it in.

The night started off poorly for yours truly, as I bled out my first two buy-ins in short order. Nothing really spectacular happened, I just picked up a lot of second-pair hands and missed a lot of draws. I reloaded for a hundred (first two buy-ins were for $50), and decided I might want to play a little poker at some point before I gave away ALL my money.

Nate started the night like Nate starts, by running over the table. I picked up a decent pot from him on a hand where I called him down with second pair, decent kicker because I knew that it was good, then I hit him with an absolutely sick beat. I picked up Q-J in late position and called a raise from Nate, because his raises mean either he has a small pair or that he has any random ace. Well when the flop came down K-J-X and Nate led out for a huge bet, I assumed that he probably had either a small pair or a worse Jack. I moved all in for not much more, and picked up a Queen on the turn.

I said "I now have two pair." Brian looked over at Nate and said "that's not enough." I tabled my two pair, and Nate turned over pocket Jacks for the set. At this point Jim doomed Nate by saying that he folded a Queen, and sure enough, the case queen hits the river and I go runner-runner one-outer for the double-up. It was only fair that Jim return the favor, since I did the same thing to Special K earlier in the night when Jim was on a flush draw and behind K's hand when I mentioned that I folded the same flush draw. Boom, club on the river and K goes for a rebuy.

I picked up a couple other decent hands, and dragged a couple of big pots (or at least 3/4 of a couple of big pots) in Omaha to finish the night up a bit after being stuck bad early. I think most folks had a good time, even though nobody hit hands like Jim did. Looking like a couple of game possibilities this week, assuming I make it through the work week. Got a monster of a project that I'm pricing out, and if I get this one, my quota for '09 is pretty secure.

Winter Gathering Tournament Update

2008-11-11T20:59:00.002-05:00

Here's the deal -

Private Blogger Tournament
Venetian Poker Room
Saturday, December 13th
3PM
$135 ($100 buy-in, $25 juice, $10 toke)

Please email me your real name and blogger name if you want in. I need to let Tim at the Venetian know by a week beforehand. If you have FOBs (friends of bloggers) who want in, let me know how many.

You have to have a Venetian Player's Card to play, so if you don't have one, get there early.

Bring knockout bounties, that's the coolest part of a blogger gathering.

In which we write about poker for a change

2008-11-07T13:54:00.002-05:00

So there have been a couple of trips to Vegas since I last regularly updated this here blog (yeah, sorry about that, been a really busy time in the non-blog life, and not much going on at the home game, so not much fodder for the blog. Hell, you should just follow me on twitter, I ramble less there anyway), so I figured I should probably write about them at some point.

I went out for Sir Brian the Red's 40th birthday, hit a high hand jackpot and still lost $1,600 in five days.

That one's out of the way, at least.

Most of it was only due to moderately donkish play, but a lot of bad situations that I should have been good enough to get out of, but wasn't. It happens. Meh.

Then I went back less than two weeks later for work. I took Suzy along so she could mooch free meals off of manufacturers and we added a day off on the front end and back end. I covered the front end and Suzy's tournament success in another post, but the day at the back end was a lot of fun and pretty relaxing, actually. We got up whenever we felt like it and wandered over to see the tiger cubs at the Mirage. They were every bit as ridiculously cute as you would expect, and the baby dolphin was also adorable. We had a good time with that, then wandered down to the Bellagio to see the fall decor at the conservatory.

In addition to being a costumer, Suzy loves the flowers, so she was in hog heaven. The fairies and watermill were very cool, and the big tree with eyes that followed you around the room was pretty spiffy. Nice lighting, too (it is, after all, kinda my gig). Then we watched the fountain show, which never really gets old for me. We had a decent, if less extravagant than the business dinners we'd had the previous three nights, and I headed down to the poker room at the IP to see how life was going there. We were stuck about $650 for the trip, and I wanted to make a last surge and book a win before we left. I sat in the open seat at a 1/2 table and bought in for $100. I've taken to buying short while I try to figure out the table, and if it's soft enough, I build that up quickly enough. If the table's tough, I probably blow through a hundy pretty quickly and just head off in search of greener pastures.

This looked like a pretty good table, with one kid wearing the whole getup, iPod, noise-cancelling headphones, sunglasses at night, the whole deal. I figured he was either going to double me up or stack me, because that's kinda how you earn your Junior Douchebag merit badge nowadays. He was a decent player, and he and his buddy were in town from Colorado. That actually helped me evaluate how to play him, since Colorado also has no legal real poker (but they did just pass a law allowing you to bet up to $100, I think, which should help the games there quite a bit), so he either was an online guy without much live experience or just a kid without much live experience. I pegged him as someone who was very impressed with himself and figured I could take advantage of that a little.

I was right and wrong. He was impressed with himself. He didn't have much live experience. And he did double me up. But he was a good player, and I got lucky to get money out of him. The first time we tangled I picked up Aces in middle position and raised to $11. The table had been pretty tight, and my "yo to go" raise was a little stiff. I was pretty surprised when Junior re-popped me to $45, but since I had about $150 in front of me, I shrugged and stuck it all in the middle. He thought for a long time before finally laying it down, and by the way he agonized, I narrowed his range to just a few hands. He claimed Queens, and I believe it. He was a little too proud of the laydown for it to be anything smaller, and only a very few people fold Kings preflop.

A few hands later he went on uber-tilt when he folded what he claimed was pocket tens preflop in the face of a raise and a three-bet and the flop came out 10-high. The three-bettor's aces held up, and Junior was pissed. A little bit after this I picked up A-10 in late position and called a preflop raise. Flop came down Q-J-9, and I called a small bet from Junior looking for my gutshot. A player behind me went all in for not much more, and Junior and I both called. The turn was an 8, and I had to double-check to realize that I'd actually been double-gutted and now had the second nuts with a redraw to the nuts.

The action checked around, and when a King hit the river, I led out with a bet of about half my remaining stack. Junior went into the tank for a bit before making the crying call, and whined about his K-10 getting cracked by me hitting a 3-outer on the river. I might have mentioned something about him not being allowed to cry when he checked the turn and let me get there, but my recollection was a little fuzzy. I thought about playing more to try and exploit his tilt, but when I almost missed my straight on the turn realized that I wasn't thinking straight and racked up. So I made a nice little comeback, due in large part to a couple of lucky hands, but that's kinda how that happens.

Conservative does not equal bigoted

2008-11-07T10:54:00.002-05:00

I was a little disturbed to see this article on CNN today. Obviously, when you lose a bunch of seats in Congress and a presidential election, a party is going to be a bit in disarray. But I think this is a little wrong-headed -

Pointing to measures in California, Florida and Arizona barring same-sex marriage that passed Tuesday, Perkins said President-elect Barack Obama's election did not mean the country had embraced liberal social views.

"There was clearly no mandate to shift the country to the left on social issues," Perkins said. "What Tuesday was, was a fact that people wanted change, and it's a rejection of a moderate view."

This bugs me a little. I know a lot of conservatives (and on some issues am one myself), and I know a lot of bigots. They aren't mutually exclusive, but by no means does being one automatically grant inclusion into the other group. In my never-ever-humble opinion, a big chunk of what you saw this week had practically nothing to do with social issues, and was almost entirely about economic issues. People saw a Republican in the White House, their 401(k) plan in the shitter, and voted in the other direction. It certainly didn't hurt that Obama was the most inspiring political speaker I've seen in my lifetime, but if we'd been cruising along with cheap gas and a Dow over 12,000, it may have been a whole different outcome on Tuesday.

But the politics of hate are not going to be successful much longer, and that's what Prop 8 was about. If the Census Bureau is right, then in 2042 (significantly less far away than it once seemed) non-white people will outnumber white people in the US. That means that if you're only appealing to white people, you're going to increasingly have issues in the upcoming years. And the narrow Gingrich/Rove politics of the recent GOP will continue to have issues.

For the record, I'm not a Democrat. I'm a fiscally conservative socially liberal registered independent who voted a split-party ticket for both state and local elections, and I'm a little disturbed to see the huge Democratic majority in my local government now. I think it's better when there's some dissent, and would like to see the Republicans take back at least one house of Congress in the mid-term elections to create that dissent. I know a lot of people consider my support for Obama to not be fiscally conservative, but I at least hope he remembers what it was like to be broke, and tries to look out a little more for lower-income folks than McCain, who has never been poor. But hey, the only thing I'm really an expert on is my opinion, so there it is.

The Day

2008-11-04T09:44:00.002-05:00

Today is the day. The day that (unless we have a repeat of the ungodly limbo of 2000) that all the noise will be over. So maybe tomorrow we can all be friends again.

I apologize to anyone who I have hurt by my words and opinions through this election season. It was never my intent. I think that it was very easy to get caught up in the fervor of the moment and cast broad aspersions that hit closer to home than I intended, and for that I'm sorry.

I hope you get out and vote. I don't care for who. If you wanna vote for the old white guy, go for it. If you wanna vote for the less old black dude, go for it. If you wanna vote for Bob Barr, then go for it.

I stood in line for over 6 hours on Saturday to vote, and would do it again. I saw people that were inspired by politics for the first time in their life. I saw people who were re-energized about what role they could play in deciding the leadership of our country, and all that was very heartening. I hope they paid as much attention to the local races as to the national one.

That's what unfortunately gets lost in the hype of a presidential election - the races where your vote not only counts, but is critical. The county council races, the state senate races, the gubernatorial races. Those are the races where you can affect real change, and the ones where you should pay the most, not the least, attention.

I had a moment to chat in line with the chairman of the Mecklenburg County Commission. She was out campaigning on Saturday and pushing for the bond referendum. I told her that while she still had my vote, I was unlikely to vote for the bond package because I thought that this would be a terrible time for the county to borrow money. She then explained that the bond package was merely asking permission to borrow money at a later date, and that the county manager had already told the commission, who agreed, that they shouldn't borrow any money until 2010 at the earliest. I then told her what a crap job they had all done selling the bonds and that given that information, and the fact that I like the greenways we have for me to ride my bike on, I could vote for the bonds at that point.

We also chatted briefly about her compatriots on the Democratic At-Large ticket, and she expressed high hopes that these new folks would be elected. I told her I would likely be voting a split ticket, as I think Dan Ramirez does a good job on the County Commission, and that a lot of people would likely do the same. But that got me thinking - why do people vote a straight ticket? I have actually never voted a straight-party ticket and always felt like it was the province of the true believer (or the truly brainwashed) within a party. Since I think 99 44/100% of all politicians are assholes, I can't really be considered a true believer in either party.

But I realized something today that I hadn't really thought of (and feel free to respond with a "DUH!") - it's also the province of the lazy. People that don't want to take the time to think about individual candidates can vote a straight-party ticket and not have to do all that troublesome reading. You can decide whether you want to be an ass or an elephant, blue or red, and just vote that way. To me, it's a copout. If you're true believer that's one thing (but there's probably a little copout there, too), but if you're not a dyed-in-the-wool whatever, isn't part of your job to study the candidates for office, or not vote for that office?

I admit to not voting for judges in this election because I hadn't researched them. T gave me a list of Republican judges so I could vote the other way if I wanted. but all the flyers people were passing out in line talked about judges who were for "change." Well, call me crazy, but I don't want a district court judge who's looking for change. I want a judge that's looking to uphold. As in, uphold the laws that other people write. I know, what kind of liberal am I if I don't want activist judges? But I don't.

There was probably a point there somewhere, and if you find it, let me know. Anyway - go vote. It's your job.

This is how controversy gets started...

2008-11-01T20:32:00.003-05:00

So after I spent 6 1/2 hours waiting to vote, and I'm finishing up, I notice a woman being turned away and told that she can't vote because she doesn't have the right documentation. Now, I wasn't asked for any documentation, but I've been a registered voter in Mecklenburg County for a long time, and this is (I think) the 3rd presidential election that I've voted in since moving here. And we had one of the volunteer voting dudes (I don't know what the board of elections volunteers are called) come outside and explain to the crowd the following -

If you are registering to vote today, you must have photo ID and something the proves you reside in Mecklenburg County with you.

Now North Carolina allows you to register and vote the same day if you're doing early voting, which I didn't know until I looked up the early voting sites online. But if you're registering to vote, you have to have proof of residence, and a photo ID.

All good, right?

Now if you're a registered voter and you've voted in your county before (like me) you only have to prove your identity by telling them your name and address.

I did find it interesting that I was not asked to provide my birthdate, while the guy beside me and the woman behind me at the sign-in kiosk were asked for this additional piece of information.

Now the controversy begins here - If you are a registered voter and you have not voted in this county before, you must show a photo ID to prove that you are you. But according to the poll observer outside (because he was kicked out by the lady running the voting room over this disagreement) that is only to prove that you are you, and is not required to match the address given. For example, you could use a passport, which is a government-issued photo ID, but does not display your address. According to the woman in the voting room, if your photo ID does not show an address in Mecklenburg County, and you don't have proof of residence with you, then you can't vote, even if you have a voter registration card showing you're registered in Mecklenburg County and a photo ID showing that you are you.

So at least a couple of people waited in line for hours today only to be told that they couldn't vote because they registered early and only had their driver's license with them. Now we'll ignore for the moment the fact that you're supposed to immediately get a new driver's license when you move to a new state, and just say that this is the kind of thing that makes a fuss. Especially when the poll workers are all one level of pigmentation and the voters turned away (and asked to provide birthdays when I wasn't) are another level of pigmentation. I choose to believe that it is a misunderstanding of the finer points of election law rather than some underhanded desire to prevent people from voting, but I'm not the media types.

I just put it on the internet, but that's not media, right? Interestingly enough, there were no McCain supporters to be found anywhere in line around me. Are Republicans scared to vote in my neighborhood even in broad daylight? I thought they had all the firepower?

I can't imagine

2008-10-30T16:07:00.002-05:00

Being a fat guy, and riding a bike (albeit far less than I should), it was inevitable that I became a fan of the Fat Cyclist blog. If you haven't read it and have any interest in cycling, you should check it out. But right now he's going through about the worst thing I can imagine - he's watching his wife die of cancer. If you've got a minute, stop by and wish him well, lend him a little of your strength. Right now he needs it.

Return of the grievous degenerate

2008-10-29T19:49:00.003-05:00

With apologies to Gram Parsons, of course. There's a valid question at the end, so skip ahead if you want.

I'm back in Charlotte-town after what seems like a month away, when in reality it was more like a week. I was back in Vegas, this time ostensibly for work, but at a trade show in the entertainment industry, that often equates to a fair amount of play. Not to be so this time, I was at the show or in meetings/dinners with manufacturers for 12-14 hours every day, leaving very little time for the pokering.

Suzy and I headed out a day early, in hopes of getting some festivities out of the way before the festivities began, as it were. We met up with CK and F-Train for lunch, and along for the ride was surprise guest brdweb, who was just finishing up some training for work. Or at least that was the claim. And he didn't look like he'd been rolled by a hooker, so I guess he was telling the truth. We dug in at the Pizza Palace at the IP, which at $5.50 for two slices and a soda, is the best lunch value on the strip, then wandered downstairs for some gambool. We lost a little at let it ride, then a little at craps, then found the douchebaggiest dealer in the world at a 3-Card Poker table (or maybe Suzy and I played 3-Card alone, and the d-bag was at Let it Ride, I can't remember). So after we lost a little there, decided to wander over to the Mirage to see the baby tigers.

Yeah, that was the idea, anyway. So we met up with John and Barry, two of my work buddies who had just gotten in and were starving since they were still rockin' the East Coast time and felt like it was dinner. We'd just eaten two hours earlier, but really, do you think I miss many meals? So we hung with them at Japonais at Mirage for a bit and managed to crush our way through $400 worth of sushi pretty easily.

If there's a cheap but good sushi joint in Vegas and you want to make an excursion there in December, lemme know.

So after that we ambled over to the poker room where F-Train and brdweb were playing 3/6 and CK took a seat in a 5/10 Omadraw game while Suzy and I got on a 3/6 list. We ended up getting seats, but then everyone else wandered off. We played for a little while until some asshat at the end of the table decided he didn't approve of all the "conversation" at our end of the table. You know, obviously out of hand things like my wife asking me "how much is it to me?" and "can I raise?" that kind of stuff. So since the old asshat made a stink about us talking, the dealer instructed Suzy to ask questions only to her (which is correct), but I still racked up as soon as Suzy felted the old fuck and he had to rebuy. So we took his money and left.

Now I realize that there are regulars that a casino has to cater to somewhat, and I don't have an issue with the dealer doing her job. My issue, and it's becoming more of one the more I play casino poker, is with the old fucks. Don't get me wrong, I like some older people, and I'm making a generalization here, but there's a bunch of nasty old fucks at a poker table. If you want proof that I like some old people, ask Jim, or better yet, Nate. He's older than Moses and I like him just fine.

But you get these old fucks who show up and buy in short, don't ever give any action, and shoot every fucking angle they can think of. I see a guy in WWII ball cap, and I assume I'm gonna see a slowroll at some point. These assclowns call you down with bottom pair, no kicker, and then bet out when they hit their second pair, but don't want to turn their hand over at showdown until after you table top pair and they know they're good, regardless of whether they're acting in turn or not. They'll fold out of turn, fake a bet and check, grab chips to fake a call to induce a check, fake a muck and bet, all kinds of rinky-dink asshattery that slows down the game, but they'll be the first to jump on you if you do something they don't approve of. Because they are the arbiter of the game, of course.

And they're not there to haver fun. They're not there to make money, because really, at the lowest limits, limit poker in a casino is pretty much unbeatable mathematically. They exist only to spread misery and bide their time until they die. So I'm at the point know where once an old fuck makes is oldfuckedness known to me at the table, I try to win one big pot off him, and then rack up. There's enough poker in the world without having to play with doucheballs.

Don't worry, there's plenty of young fucknuggets out there, too. And one of them was responsible for me tripling up my last session at the IP, but that's for another post.

So the valid question - if the Venetian was willing to host another tournament for us in December, how many of you would be willing to play? I sent an email this afternoon inquiring, despite my earlier protestations of not organizing anything. Our rooms are booked for the MGM, since there was a killer deal. I get in Thursday afternoon, and my wife and stoner sister are getting in late Thursday. So if anybody's holding, and would share, hook up with my sis on Friday or Saturday, she'd really appreciate it since she can't carry on the plane. And if you know what I mean, then I'm talking to you.

Honest Question

2008-10-18T20:58:00.002-05:00

Can one person make a difference in our country by running for office? Or is our system so corrupted by partisan politics and pork that one person of principle cannot make a difference, regardless of party affiliation?

This question has nothing to do with the election in 17 days, and everything to do with the one two years from now.

You're an educated bunch, and some of the smartest people I know. So tell me, does one person have the power to change anything?

And if not, what would it take for one person to make a difference?

I live

2008-10-17T13:14:00.002-05:00

And at some point I'll write up last weekend's Vegas trip. Let it suffice to say that two winning sessions and one high hand jackpot are not enough to make a profitable trip out of 4 days in Vegas.

Things I learned this trip -

1) The Venetian is superior to almost every room in town on almost every level.
2) The 10/20 game at Mirage is not a bad game
3) Don't call big raises from anyone over 65.
4) The Hard Rock poker room is pretty nice, and the dealers typically have big tits.
5) AQ is not enough of a favorite of K7 to keep me in the Venetian noon tourney.
6) The play at Harrah's is almost bad enough to justify the $6/hand for rake and jackpot drops

I'm headed back out next week, this time for work, so I'll have less time to gambool (which is probably safer), but I'll have a proper post at some point that will regale you with tales of Purple Hooter shooters, 2-outers, puking and a great dinner for our buddy Brian's birthday.

As our waitress at Hofbrauhaus said "It's not Friday night unless the ambulance gets called."

A pleasant surprise

2008-10-09T07:08:00.001-05:00

I'd forgotten that I'd submitted the story of our wedding to Pauly for Truckin'. If you've never read the silly story of how Suzy and I got married on my lunch break, head over and check it out. As always, I'm in the company of writers I don't deserve to share the page with, but I'll take the talent by association.

So this is not really up for discussion here...

2008-10-07T11:49:00.002-05:00

But if you want to chat about it over a beer, I'm all in favor. This post is designed to outline why I'm voting for Barack Obama for President in a little less than a month. It's not designed to tell you to do the same, nor is it intended to sway your opinions. These are my opinions, and if there's anything in the world I'm an expert on, it's my opinion. Feel free to leave comments, but don't waste your time in silly attacks. If they annoy me, I'll delete them. It's my blog, after all :).

There are a few reasons that I'm supporting Obama in this election, and I probably won't get to all of them here, but I'll try.

1) He comes across as a real person. Yeah, I know the classic line "sincerity? I can fake that." But Obama presents a sincere face. He has me convinced that he still remembers what it was like to be poor. I also remember what it was like to be poor. Yesterday. And maybe again tomorrow. I can relate to this guy, and that counts for a lot with me. After years and years of political figures that seemed so detached, having a candidate who seems much more down-to-earth is huge.

2) He's eloquent. I'm sorry, but the last two presidents we've had either were (W) or sounded like (Clinton) stupid rednecks. There's no question in my mind that Bill Clinton is a very intelligent man, but he frequently sounded stupid. There's no question in my mind that W has the IQ of a houseplant, and he frequently fails to live up to that low standard. I want someone who can stand up in front of the world and present himself well. He's put-together, clear-spoken and eloquent.

3) He's willing to sit down with bad guys before we bomb the shit out of them. War is, in my opinion, the ultimate failure of diplomacy, and someone who comes out and says "Yes, I will sit down and talk with _________________" insert name of despotic dickweed here. Is the kind of leader I want. I don't want a leader that will commit the lives of our troops without exhausting every single diplomatic alternative first. If we are attacked, then bomb 'em back to the stone age. But if not, then I want someone who will talk first, and shoot later.

4) He's young and healthy. I don't think a man who is 10 years past the age of his first Social Security check has the stamina to run our country. Almost every president we've had looked like death warmed over by the time they left office. McCain is a cancer survivor, POW survivor and generally an old man. Regardless of running mate, I want the candidate I vote for to have as good a chance as possible of living out the full term. And there are some sectors of public careers where 72 is the mandatory retirement age, not the time to start a new career.

5) He's willing to look at alternative energy sources. I'm tired of hearing all this stuff about drilling. By the time we can get new wells built, we could have spent that money building wind farms, solar farms and other alternative fuel methods and it'll take the same time and money! I'm enough of a hippie to want cleaner air, so that means less oil, domestic or otherwise.

6) He wants to end the war in Iraq. And fast. Since I was never in support of the war in the first place, obviously that's gonna be a big one with me.

7) He favors stem cell research, which is huge with me. Too much Alzheimer's in my family for me to not pay attention to this as an issue.

8) My taxes would not increase under Obama's plan. I don't make more than $250K in a year, so my income tax wouldn't go up. I also wouldn't see any breaks, since I itemize and don't have any kids in college. But my taxes wouldn't increase. According to the Tax Policy Center, my taxes would actually decrease under both candidates' plans, but Obama's plan would save me about $200 each year. I got that from CNN/Money, so insert liberal bias statement here.

9) Better backup. This isn't a huge point with me, since I'm voting for a president and not a VP, but I think Biden is a political lifer and no better or worse than most of them. I think Sarah Palin is an abject idiot who should never be allowed back into the contiguous states, so it matters a little.

10) I do believe in change. And I used to think John McCain would be the guy to do it. Before his own party killed him off in SC in 2000, I was a big McCain supporter. But after the Republicans killed his campaign, he stepped into line with whatever the big boys told him to do, and has done so for the past 8 years. He used to be a maverick, now he's just another old rich white guy ready to fuck up my country. So I'm gonna give the brotha from Chi-Town a shot. Seriously, it can't get any worse than the past 8 years.

These opinions are completely mine, and they're my opinions, so you don't really even get to tell my I'm wrong. You can tell me you disagree, but it won't matter. I'm not an undecided, so unless video shows up in the next few days of Bill Ayers teaching Obama how to build pipe bombs in his den, I'll pretty much stick with this plan.

Yeah, another political post

2008-10-06T13:17:00.003-05:00

But this one has nothing to do with Obama or McCain. Or about the fairly entertaining debate between Joe Biden and Tina Fey. But here's the question - what's wrong with tax and spend as a governmental philosophy?

Now let's make things very clear - I don't like paying taxes. I don't like giving my money away to the government, event though there are things that I do want the government to pay for, like armor for soldiers, airplanes with missiles to defend my house, and teacher salaries. Not to mention garbage pickup. That's kind of a big one for me. And yes, my taxes do pay for garbage pick up in Charlotte. Not my federal taxes, but taxes nonetheless.

But I hear a lot of people griping about "tax and spend Democrats" while claiming to be fiscally conservative. Now my question is - what is more fiscally irresponsible, taxing and spending, or just spending? Our government seems hell-bent on spending trillions of dollars every year, and the last time I checked, that money has to come from somewhere. So either we pay for it in taxes, or we borrow it from other countries and pay for it in taxes later.

So while I'd prefer to pay less in taxes, and certainly agree that there are a lot of government programs that could be cut (and yes, I believe the NEA is one of them, regardless of the fact that I'm an artist), I realize that our government spends money like a 17-year-old with daddy's gold card, and I'd rather have someone say "The government is going to do these things, and here is how I'm going to tax you to pay for it." At least that way I could decide if I liked those things, was willing to pay for those things, and vote accordingly. But everybody now is giving me bs lines about how they're going to cut my taxes while spending a couple trillion bucks on economic rescue plans and war. And I don't believe any of it. You can't continue to cut taxes and increase government spending, the math just doesn't work.

So either tax and spend, or don't spend. But don't not tax and keep spending, that's just bad math.

The Contest

2008-10-02T23:43:00.003-05:00

So I promised a flowery, embellished account of my wing-eating contest with Jordan. And it's coming. And since John Juanda won't just fucking put Stanislav Alekhin away at the final table of the WSOP-E so I can finish this recap and GO TO BED, now's as good a time as any.

Hey, at least I haven't been covering that thing for 15+ hours.

So our hero spent the afternoon preparing for battle, forgoing all sustenance in favor of libations (or, I didn't eat much and drank a lot) in light of his upcoming battle. It was sure to be an epic confrontation, the litigator versus the lighting designer, the Jew versus the Gentile, the North versus the South, the... you get the picture.

It was with no small trepidation that our hero sallied forth onto the field of battle. He was the Goliath of the match, facing a smaller, nimbler opponent. Frankly, an opponent that looked a little like an appetizer himself.

I did mention that I'd stopped eating early in the day, right?

The plates of battle were brought forth, and extra libation was provided for the competitors. The mighty Jordan applied his headgear, a bandana of intimidation +2, and forsook the option of a chair, choosing to stand and attack the wings. Our hero sat, napkin tucked into his t-shirt, calmly waiting the go-ahead nod.

And it began - 10 wings - as hot as the kitchen could make them - to the finish or to the vomit! Jordan did indeed leap out to an early lead, largely on the strength of his two-fisted attack. Our hero waded in gamely, methodically, like there was no hurry. Because there wasn't. Slow and steady was the plan, and when the bones began to hit plates, we were even. Around wing #4 there was a moment of concern as a series of volcanic mini-belches wracked my frame, threatening with an explosion of wing from mouth, nose, ears, and other places that food was not supposed to explode from. But I prevailed, the fate of our team and the pride of my Southern heritage riding on this one contest.

As Jordan turned his back on me to play to the crowd, I picked up my most challenging wing - a massive drumstick with far more skin than was necessary. I knew if I could get through this wing without losing much speed, I was in good shape. I didn't lag much, and as Jordan turned back to me, I had a 1-wing lead. I grabbed a flapper, and showcasing a talent developed by years of eating a LOT of chicken, sucked it clean in a second, giving myself a solid lead and becoming comfortable in the bout. Jordan found himself hung up by his grab and stuff tactic, with two hands full of wing and more chicken in his mouth than he could chew, while I just plowed through the wings without pause. As I grabbed for my last wing I saw that he had one in his mouth, one in his hand, and one on his plate, and I knew that victory, at long last, was mine. I sucked the last wing clean, stood, spiked the bones into my plate and raised my hands in victory.

The other benefit to my slower approach was that I was a little cleaner than Jordan at the end of the match.
Now I never mentioned to anyone the real reason that I felt I was the clear leader in this event the whole time. It's not because I outweigh Jordan by a good 40 lbs. It's not that I'm a redneck. It really all goes back to my childhood. I grew up on a chicken farm. My parents had something in the neighborhood of 8,000 of the little bastards when I was a kid. And one pecked me when I was very small. Ever since that day, I've eaten a fuckton of chicken, and I see that feathery bastard's face on every piece of chicken I eat.

It's personal. It's payback. And with that kind of Freudian shit going for me, Jordan never stood a chance. He kept it close, though, and for that, good game, bro.

Photo by Bam Bam

Bash Semi-Report Vol. 1 - The tourney

2008-10-02T07:27:00.003-05:00

Since I suck at trip reports (let's face it, I'm no Jordan) I've just got a couple stories to tell about my Bash experience. But suffice to say that it was great seeing everybody again, especially the folks I've had far too little time to hang with at these gatherings in the past. It was also great to see everybody that's worked so hard all summer getting a chance to blow off a little steam - one of my favorite images of the weekend will always remain Otis pogoing to "My Own Worst Enemy" without a care in the world.

But there was a poker tournament, and my table certainly led the charge in rebuy early and often. Al leapt out to an early rebuy lead when he kept his word of shoving all in blind on the first three hands. I caught up pretty quickly when I shoved, not blind, on the following three hands, one of which was Riggs crushing me with a runner-runner inside straight draw as he peeled off a six on the river. Let's all remember that it was Riggs dropping a deuce on me on the river against The Luckbox when we were heads up at the Bash tourney two years ago that gave his Hammer a pair against my Korean Jew to cripple me. So, new Bash tradition - Riggs deals Falstaff dead.

But who cares? It was during the rebuy period! Rebuy! And on rebuy #5, things started to go my way. First I got aces. I got no action to my under-the-gun shove, but I got aces. Really? You laid down AJ to ME of all people preflop during the rebuy period? That was a bad beat. But then the same guy doubled me up when he called the next time he picked up AJ and I shoved. I had AQ, I got more chips. I doubled up again before I got moved to another table, where there hadn't been nearly as many rebuys (Al, Drizz and I were up to 14 at that point). So there weren't that many chips at my new table, and I didn't know as many of the players, but I managed to pick up a monster just before the end of the rebuy period to stack Vinnay and Evy (I think they were in the hand) with 7d-6d. I was in a blind, Evy raised preflop, Vinnay called or re-raised, I looked down at soooted connectors and jammed. They both called with A-10, I hit a 6 on the flop and rivered the straight. I had mucho chips.

Once the rebuy period was over, I played the hand of the weekend against Vinnay, who I've now busted a few times with donk moves, not that this was one of them. Apparently the first time we played together, I stacked him with the Hammer at a blogger gathering. This time I called his 3x BB raise from the big blind with 8h-5h. Flop comes down 7h-6h-7x, and I've made a gutshot straight flush draw. I check, Vinnay bets, I raised 4x his bet. He thinks for a minute and says "you did this the first time we played together."

To me, I thought he meant that I got uber-aggressive and tried to steal his chips, which is highly likely. But, since I'm an ass, and I wanted him to fold, I responded with "Did I stack you that time?"

"Yes."

"Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it."

I mentioned I'm an ass, right? He thought for a moment more, and made my second preferred move from him - he shoved. I had a bunch of outs, and a bunch of chips, so I called. I was actually better off than I thought, since he shoved with Ace-high. I hit a 5 on the turn to take the lead, and the 6h on the river made my straight flush. Vinnay gave me the BEST. BOUNTY. EVER. when he whipped out an XL Captain Hammer T-shirt from Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, and I was a happy Falstaff.

I remained a happy Falstaff until we got to the final table and it got to be past 3AM. By that point I had over 25% of the chips in play, and the Rooster, the other big stack, with almost as many chips, had just been moved to my right. It only took a couple hands for him to come over the top of a preflop raise for all his chips, and I had found my moment. I looked down at A-Q and snap-callled. Rooster showed A-10, and the short stack showed A-5. A 5 on the flop, no help for the Rooster, and I had about 50% of the chips in play.

And then I blew it. I couldn't adjust my game enough to stay alive with the blinds escalating amazingly fast, and I tried to continue playing the same patient game that got me to the chip lead with 6 players remaining. I should have just put people to a decision on every hand, but I couldn't find that gear, and when I doubled up a short stack, I found myself back in the middle of the pack. I picked up pocket sixes on the button, shipped it in, ran into tens, and went home. I was pretty frustrated at the implosion, and a little frustrated that the guys changed the timing on the levels on us at the final table, but I understand why. It was ridiculously late, no one expected the event to go as late as it had, and they needed to get out of there. I was still grumpy, but got over it the next day when I found out that our donkishness raised close to $2k for the Boobie Charity. And that was the whole point, anyway. That and my kickass new t-shirt.

So a good time was had by all, and Herb and Veronica did a great job of managing their short stacks at the final table to chop first place. Herb, incidentally, was my nemesis all night, being the guy who laid down AJ to me preflp when I jammed with Aces in the rebuy period, then being the shorty I doubled up to find myself with a medium stack, then knocking me out an orbit later. Homeboy had my number all. night. long. Good people, good time, and good eats!

Don't worry, the legendary tale of Sir Falstaff vanquishing the Evil Jewish Lawyer in a wing-eating contest is coming soon. It's a tale worthy of the Bard himself, as our very own Shylock bathes in wing sauce in an Achilles-like attempt to become invulnerable, but I become his hillbilly heel to take down victory. Yeah, I know, Jordan's already written the story up very well, but I plan for a lot of thee's and thou's and fairy tale flourishes. Plus I'm bored today - I'm home playing chauffer to Suzy as she gets 4 teeth pulled and then has to go back to the orthodontist later this afternoon. Yep - festive.

Ah, home. Ah, shit!

2008-09-30T15:18:00.002-05:00

So my first twitter today was something like "Welcome home from vacation. Your bank has failed, there's no gas in your city, and you've got $350K worth of quotes due today. Welcome back!"

Well, fuck. That about sums up my glowing return to North Cackalack. But there will be some stories forthcoming. Here are a few highlights of the trip -

I took the chip lead in the poker tourney at about the end of the rebuy period and held it to the final table.

Then I bubbled when the blinds went high and I went card dead while not shifting gears enough.

I crushed Jordan in a wing-eating contest.

Then I bobbled the snap on the Car Bomb Relay and my team never recovered.

After the wing-eating I headed back to the hotel for a little poop n' rally.

The Bash was glorious, with good tunes, more booze, hot chicks making out, and hanging with some of my best friends in the world.

I think I found the worst poker players in the world in Charleston, WV.

And still lost a buy-in. But I will return, oh yes, I will indeed...

Then got home yesterday to some other random silliness about falling skies, dropping Dows, and Wachovia being bought by Citi. Meh. I keep a lot of cash and can afford to pay my mortgage, so it'll be months before the effects of all this mess are felt at the Casa de Falstaff.

I'm in the office for a total of one day this week, then a couple days next week before I head out to Vegas for my buddy Brian's birthday! I'll try to hook up with anybody out there who wants a beer or seven.

Real recaps to come, including the tale of my legendary conquest of Jordan in the wing-eating conquest, but for now I must look busy.

Destination Bash

2008-09-26T08:21:00.003-05:00

Made it. I'm sitting in my room at the Courtyard Collegeville listening to Suzy shower up and thinking about water conservation...ahem, anyway. We got here around 11 last night after about 10 hours of driving, making following the GPS instead of Google maps the first (and hopefully last) truly poor decision of the weekend. I didn't know exactly how long and how stupid traffic can get north of DC at 6:30. The answer, if you've never driven from DC to Baltimore at that time of day in the rain, is LONG and STUPID. We lost at least an hour in traffic, but still made pretty good time. Suzy was a real trouper, putting up with my most minor of pee and beverage breaks until we were just outside of B'more and stopped for a quick sandwich. I think that 45 minute break at Panera Bread was the longest we were out of the car 'til we pulled in here. So I got her settled in the bed, fired up the Macbook, and banged out my last story of the week for PokerNews. And now I'm on vacation.

This weekend marks the first time in a year that I've asked for time off from everything. There have been a few times that it's fallen just right and I haven't had anything to do except enjoy myself, but it feels different to actually request, and be granted, time off from day job and freelance job. It's a nice feeling. I'll admit to a certain level of insecurity in my freelance work, which sometimes leads me to not turn down anything for fear I won't have the chance to take the next gig. It is, after all, freelance work. But now that I've been doing this writing thing for a couple of years, I've gotten to where I trust the people I work for to keep throwing me work, and they trust me to generally keep throwing them good content. I know I bitch from time to time about having to work too much, but I get bored if I don't have anything to do, so two jobs is about the minimum I can stand having.

There have been a couple of things I've knocked out this month that I was pretty pleased with. The profile on Tom Schneider when he won his WCOOP bracelet was good, I thought, and there were a couple of recaps for PN where I tried some different things that I thought added to the piece. Last night's was one of them, where I took the focus a little narrower and dialed in on three young internet studs who bluedgeoned each other at the tables. I found their rise and fall interesting, and hopefully the readers do too.

But for now, I'm off, and I'll see you guys on the other side. I've convinced Suzy that Charleston, WV is a great halfway point for our route home, even though it's 2 hours out of our way. They just added poker to the casino there, and I wanna see what that's like!

Continuing the streak...for a little while at least

2008-09-24T11:48:00.002-05:00

So Sunday I fired up the internet poker box again (can you tell that it only takes a little success to rekindle my interest in the online game?) and signed up for three tourneys. I took a shot at a $24+2 deep stacked, turbo knockout SNG on FTP, a $5 HORSE tourney and a $10 NLHE tourney. I tripled up on my first hand in the NLHE game, and ground out a decent stack in HORSE while spewing my chips in the expensive event because I'm good like that. So I busted from the $24+2 in short order, but final tabled both of the other events. And I have come up with a couple of keys to long-term success in tournament poker, based on my two days of success in 2008.

1) Win coin flips. If you can't come out on top a couple times when you're 52-48 to win, you're not going to do well.

2) Don't brick out in Razz. I'm convinced, through tons of study and long seconds of pure speculation, that Razz is the most luck-based of all the HORSE games. So don't catch bricks.

3) Run good when the blinds get high. This is not the time to get unlucky, so channel all your lucksackery to the later rounds.

There you go, those are the tips that have turned me into a hundredaire in just a few short hours. Then to maintain that status, don't multi-table LHE above your bankroll just because it's Happy Hour on FTP.

I'm just sayin'.

Suzy and I leave tomorrow for The Bash. I have no great expectations for my performance in any gambling activities that may ensue, I'm just there to drink, see my friends, and have a good time. I have been drafted into the Pub Olympics, and think my best event might be the falling down. See you soon!

Who are you and why are you playing my Full Tilt account?

2008-09-22T15:00:00.002-05:00

That's kinda what I have to ask after this weekend. I know $400 isn't a huge score by even my standards, much less the standards of people who actually play online tournaments routinely, but this run was pretty good in my less-than-humble opinion.

5 tournaments played
4 cashes
3 final tables
1 5th-place finish
1 3rd-place finish
1 2nd-place finish

No, I didn't actually win any of these tournaments, but I can't remember the last time I actually played 5 MTTs in a month, much less a weekend. And I certainly can't remember the last time I cashed in more than one MTT in a month.

Saturday evening I was hanging out finishing my articles for PokerNews and the PokerStars blog, and Suzy was watching some chick flick on TV that I wasn't interested in being a party to, so I looked around at FTP to see what was going on. I found a $3 NLHE tourney about to happen and a Pot Limit HA Tourney (1/2 Pot Limit Hold'em, 1/2 Pot Limit Omaha). I signed up for both of them, with a total investment of $8.80. Given that I had a little less than $60 in my Full Tilt account, that was about all I was willing to spend. I then kicked back with a new collected graphic novel (X-Men: House of M) and generally ignored the game unless I picked up a big starting hand.

Really, before I knew what had happened, one of the tourneys was on break, and I was floating around average chip stacks in both events. I hadn't gotten the start times quite right, so they didn't both go on break at the same time, but that was my only complaint. I don't really remember too much about anything, just winning a few coin flips when the blinds got high, and then realizing that I had busted in 30-something in the NLHE event and that I was at the final table of the HA tourney. Cool, I'd forgotten about the changing background when you get to the final table. No really, I had. It's been that long. There weren't a ton of players in the HA tourney, so 5th place only got me about $44, but adding that to the $6 I got out of the NLHE tourney I had doubled my FTP account in a few short hours. Felt good to get on that horse and actually ride for a while instead of just getting kicked in the head. And boy, the low buy-in tournaments have some abominable play.

Tomorrow, we'll look at my much more succesful run on Sunday afternoon, but for now, here's your poker tip of the day, brought to you by me and our friends at Bodog - Omaha is hard. Four tables of Omaha is four times as hard. And if you see me online at a cash table. just get in line, there's money being given away. I donked off about $30 Sunday afternoon playing O8 before I realized that I was playing too fast, too many hands, too irritated, too sober and about 7 more "toos." So play fewer tables to reduce your toos.

Two more days of the day job before Suzy and I drive north for the Bash. If they're all like today, I'm moving in with Al.

Plugging Along

2008-09-17T19:41:00.002-05:00

So nothing terribly exciting going on here, nothing noteworthy, but that will ALL CHANGE SOON!

Not really, but it made for like half a second of exciting typing anyway. This weekend was the 5th Annual Metrolina Theatre Awards, and I was nominated for Best Lighting Design in a Drama for my work on The Diary of Anne Frank. The whole show was nominated, but another show called The Pillowman swept the drama category. I saw both shows, and The Pillowman was a great show, but some of the awards that it received were trickle-down awards based on the strength of the lead actors and the directing. Yup - I'll put it out here in the interwebs - I think I got fucked. I have seen shows that I've gone "Yup, that was better than mine." This wasn't one of them. The lighting was okay, but my work for Anne Frank was better. But a group of my peers who voted on the awards disagreed, and that's that.

I had a couple of bigger issues with the awards, and since I'm venting, here they are.

1) Backstage, at least for the first presentation, was a clusterfuck. The kids who were supposed to bring us the awards were always slow getting stuff to us, and sometimes brought us the wrong awards - which is a bit of an issue when they were bringing us the envelope with the winner's name as well! One time there was a tie in one award, and they didn't bring us both awards at the same time. So I went backstage to ask the accountant folks if there was a tie, and was told, unequivocally and repeatedly "No." So then ten minutes later the emcee got to go out by himself and present the second award, because the folks backstage didn't have their shit together.

2) Where's the fucking food?!? Every year up to now, there has been a buffet at the after-party.This year, because we missed dinner, Suzy and I actually bolted out of the awards a hair early to get to the after-party early and grab some food. I usually end up working the event and never get to eat, but this year I was off the hook. We got there - no buffet. I corralled a waiter and asked what the deal was, and there was no provision for a buffet - so no free food. I was more than a little grumpy, but we ordered food and got something to eat, then had to wait a year while the overwhelmed wait staff tried to deal with 300 people descending on them to eat.

The whole vibe this year felt a little "off" for me, which was disheartening, as I helped create the event with an idea of bringing the theatre community together, and I'm not sure it does that. Of course, part of this might be my views on the organizations as a whole spilling over, because I'm afraid I've turned into that guy who sits around and says "in my day, it wasn't like this." I also feel as though my long-time contributions to the organization have been ignored or forgotten, as have those of a lot of other people, so it's led to a general disgruntlement with the organization and a limiting of my involvement.

But on a more interesting front, last night's interview of the winner of WCOOP Event #11 turned into a phone conversation with the guy, who turned out to be Brent Carter, #7 on the list of all-time WSOP cashes and a 2-time bracelet winner. Very nice guy, and you can check out the profile here.

Ugh

2008-09-13T10:44:00.002-05:00

Headed to pick up my repaired truck today. Total repairs - $2800.00. Kelly Blue Book value - $3800.00. And I need to get it detailed before anyone in their right mind would buy it. Hopefully at this point I can get $3500 out of it, so that I realize a puny amount of profit on the deal. Yucky.

Maybe I should ship it down to Texas - compared to a lot of vehicles down there this morning, it's worth a gold mine.

Honestly, though, I hope everybody I care about down it Texas just got a little rain and wind. From all reports, it was supposed to turn back east before dumping too much on the parts of the state where you guys are. I hope so.

Breathing room - I has a little

2008-09-09T15:53:00.001-05:00

Just a little, but thought I'd toss up a quick post. Since the beginning of the month I've covered the following events for Pokernews -
APT Macau
APPT Macau (yep, the event names only differ by a P)
APPT Macau High Rollers Event
PPT Main Event

And I've profiled three WCOOP winners plus pitched in at the last minute to live-blog a few hours of Event #1 so that Otis could focus on other stuff for a few hours at least. Wish I could have been more help, but it was a school night and all. So that's 17 articles in 9 days with an average of 600 words. There's math there, but it's a bunch.

It's not really much compared to what my cohorts that are live-blogging the WCOOP or reporting live on these PokerNews events are churning out, but I defend myself by saying that I'm also working a day job and in tech rehearsals for a musical while I'm doing this writing work. So it's been a little hairy.

And my new windows came in, so we've had guys in the house for two days putting those in. And tomorrow they'll be done. Which is great, because we have new windows. But it sucks, because now I have to write them a big check.

And the new windows, because they're vinyl replacement windows, do not come with a full new casement and tearing out of a bunch of existing wood. They come with essentially an insert of a new window in the hole made by removing the old window. Which makes for a smaller aperture of window. Not really noticeable, because our windows were ridiculously wide.

Except that now the height is different. Which means that some of my window unit air conditioners do not fit. Since it is September in North Carolin, the idea of going without A/C is not really an option. At. Fucking. All. So in addition to the new window treatments that I get to purchase for pretty much every room, I get to buy a bunch of new window units. Like three. Today. And more to come tomorrow.

And what's a window treatment, anyway? They're new windows, it's not like they're sick and need treatment. I just need curtains. And some blinds to go over the A/C units. I don't get what I'm treating, unless I'm treating any possibility of ever having money, because that symptom is certainly treatable by home improvement.

But tonight is pretty much final dress rehearsal, since tomorrow night is the gala season-opening preview with a fuckton of VIPs from all around town. So I don't really get to change much after tonight. Which is good, since I stayed at the theatre two hours after rehearsal reprogramming the entire crucifixion sequence last night and don't really want to do that again tonight. But I can see light at the end of the tunnel now.

Hope it ain't a train.

This weekend and next week looks better - only one event going for PokerNews, and no rehearsals, so I may actually get to play poker at some point. I think I remember how. As much as I ever knew how. Alright, I'm done whining now, I did ask for the work, after all. And it all pays for the trips to Vegas in October.

And window treatments.

BTW - I think I want to unload my iPod Touch - 16GB with updates. Anybody interested? $250 cash (or negotiable), Xbox 360 with some games if you've got one you don't want anymore, or something cool. Lemme know - you know how to find me.

I enjoy talking politics

2008-09-04T10:39:00.002-05:00

I really do. It's one of the few things left in the world that you're allowed to actually disagree about. And I disagree with several of my good friends on politics. And we can still be friends! It's ok to disagree.

For example, Easycure has a post up about the "liberal hack job" that Us weekly is doing on Sarah Palin. I commented, and StB replied to my comment. Instead of adding yet another wordy comment, I thought I'd just post here.

My Comment -

I just think she's a bad choice overall. This bit takes the "moral superiority" card off the table. The TrooperGate BS takes the "reform politician" card off the table. And her two years experience running Alaska takes the "my opponent has no experience" card off the table. She may be a very nice person, but politically she takes away valuable ammo from the McCampaign.

I don't doubt that she's a fine person and a good mom, even though her stand on abstinence-only education seems a little retarded now. But she was not the right call for the McCampaign. They would have been better off with any of several more visible, more viable female candidates.

StB's response -

Troopegate takes the reform card off the table??? That is laughable. Sure, let's put aside her ousting her own corrupt party members. No big thing there. How she didn't get pushed around by "big oil".

The experience card is gone because of Obama's experience doing what? Leading a city? Leading a state? It must bother you that Palin has more experience that Obama. That she has accomplished more than Obama. That she has taken on bigger challenges than Obama. Refute that.

See this pick is so much better than Biden that everyone feels the need ot bash it to bits.

As writers you should be concerned about Obama's attacks on free speech. But that isn't the cool thing yet so ignore it.

Now there are a couple of good points here, so I'll address them.

1) To me, Troopergate, unless it's resolved quickly and Palin is absolved of any innapropriate use of authority, does indeed take the reform card off the table. If she is found to have fired her employee because he wouldn't fire her former brother-in-law, then she's not much of a reformer. If she did indeed get a bunch of pork-barrel for her state by the same tactics that every other politician in the world has used for decades, then she's just more of the same. Not saying that the folks I've chosen to support are necessarily better, just that if those things are true, then she's no reformer.

2) The experience card is off the table because she has actually less experience in national-level politics than Obama. Yes, she has led a city. And she has led a state. She has the most chief executive experience of any of the four people on either ticket. She has more chief executive experience than her own running mate. And she still has never had to deal with any type of international politics, or make any decisions for more than 700,000 constituents (based on 2006 Alaska population stats). Obama, in his role as senator from Illinois, represented nearly 13 million people in the US Senate.

Now I'm not going to argue that there isn't a difference between governing a state and being a senator. Obviously the two posts are very different, but you can't really play up chief executive experience when your own lead dog doesn't have any. And since she's got less foreign policy experience than Obama, the card is off the table. And it was the best card the Republicans had t play against Obama.

And yes, she has accomplished great things, becoming the first female governor of Alaska. Raising a family while she's doing it. More power to her. But really, how much more has she accomplished than the guy who came from a broken home to make it to Harvard, then on to the Senate, and to become the first black dude to get on a major party ticket for president? I'd call this one a push on personal accomplishments. Now if we're talking accomplishments in office, we're probably gonna go with a push there, too, since neither of them spent enough time in office to actually make any lasting changes. Obama is a first-term senator, so he's not managed much. And Palin's been governor for less than two years, not nearly long enough to make much sweeping change. But I could certainly be wrong, and am prepared to concede this point if I am.

3) She is a much better pick than Biden. Hands. Fucking. Down.

StB, you picked yourself off the floor yet?

I've never been thrilled with Biden's selection, although I see it for what it was - a move to get some old white guys on board and shore up a weak foreign policy background. Even though I think Palin is totally unqualified to be one more tumor away from the White House, I still think she's a better pick. My gripe about John Edwards four years ago was that he didn't swing for the fences. The Palin pick is swinging for the fences, and that's the kind of moves McCampaign needs to make to win.

But she's just getting the same treatment every other candidate got through the primary season of upon their emergence into national politics. She certainly would have seen this same level of scrutiny by the Republican power machine if she'd run for the big chair herself. So she's getting tagged for having a knocked-up unwed daughter. Well, some of us (myself included) think that's what you reap when you sow abstinence-only education. Unfortunately, she's reaping a dose of reality about the fact that teenagers like to fuck! And the Troopergate thing is just like the Clinton land swindle. It's a pile of BS that the opposing party is bringing forward to make her look bad. Yup, it's BS, but it's no more or less BS than the fact that Obama sat on a board of directors and took $200 in campaign contributions from William Ayers.

TrooperGate is 99% likely to be a pile of crap. And Obama is 99% likely to be completely uninfluenced by the fact that William Ayers was a domestic terrorist. But the 1% makes it worth looking into. Which brings me to the most disturbing allegation - that Obama is attacking free speech. So I googled it, and it looks like the Obama campaign is pissed about some attack ads featuring his connection to William Ayers. And they've asked for a big DOJ investigation into the ads in the hopes of getting them blocked as “a knowing and willful attempt to violate the strictures of federal election law,” according to Obama's general counsel.

This is stupid. It's a terrible move on Obama's part and makes him look too much like the people he's fighting to depose. Srsly, he needs to get back on message and drop shit like this. It does need to be talked about, which might mark a record for number of times I've agreed with StB in any political discussion.

But I do think that Palin was the wrong call for the McCampaign VP slot. If she was a grab for Hillary voters, someone with no national or international-level politics is going to get it. If she was a grab for gun-toting anti-abortion voters, just run another war hero ad and get someone with more experience who has no surprises floating around. But it's gonna be interesting.

Somedays it's too bad I play within my bankroll

2008-08-28T19:25:00.002-05:00

Cause I'd have loved to be playing 3/6 or higher when this happened.

The Hero Call

2008-08-28T12:31:00.002-05:00

We've all heard about it, most of us have made it, but what exactly is a "hero call?" I've got a couple of ideas, so I thought I'd put them down on electrons and see what you folks think. Basically, a hero call consists of making a tough decision, typically after going into the tank and deciding to take a stand, trust a read, or pick off a huge bluff.

There are multipe types of calls that all fall into the same style as the hero call. There's the "I've got a read this hand and I'm gonna go for it" call. There's the "I've played with this opponent a bunch and based on experience I'm pretty sure I'm good here" call. And then there's the "I'm too stupid to lay down top pair" call. All of these can be considered a "hero" call, a "crying" call, or whatever adjective you want to apply. Typically we call something a hero call after the fact if it works out perfectly, and a crying call if it works out poorly, but they're really the same thing.

The most startling, and most "heroic" of these calls is when you've got a read. It could be as simple as your opponent announcing his bet amount instead of just flinging chips out. It could be something funny in the betting line your opponent has taken. It could just be how he's sitting in his chair. But we all want to trust our reads. We don't want to talk ourselves out of a read, and making the hero call with a read is one of the most satisfying things I do at a poker table. It's rare that I get a good enough read on one hand to make a big call, but I can frequently pick up enough to get myself out of harm's way in a hand.

The experience-based hero call is the one I'm most familiar with. After you've played a lot with the same people, you get a good idea of how they play, and those experience-based reads give you a lot of room to make big calls with inferior hands that you might not be able to make against unfamiliar players. For example, Nate the Elder has a betting pattern. It's not 100% accurate, but it's good about 80% of the time. A limp into the pot, then a lead out for $3-4 means that Nate has hit, at best, middle pair. Two weeks ago I called Nate down on every street with second pair, top kicker, and it was good. I get a chance about once each week to make that call on Nate, and only very rarely is second pair no good there. I've played enough hands with Nate to know that making those long calls are ultimately profitable there, because I can make a big call based on experience.

BadBlood made a similar move a few weeks ago at my house, with less stellar results. He made a big call on the river with pocket eights on a Queen-high board, and I had fired on every street with second pair, Tens. Blood has played enough hands with me to know that I'm perfectly capable of three-barelling with air once I've taken the lead in a hand, or betting a strong draw on every street then bluffing the river when I miss. He thought for a long time before making the hero call, and that time around, it wasn't good. The experience-based hero call will be good probably 80% of the time against weak players, and about 50% of the time against decent players, because a decent player will change up their style. Malcolm Gladwell's book Blink talks a lot about thin-slicing, which is how we subconsciously process information and make decisions based on past experience. I don't want to play much poker against Malcolm Gladwell.

The worst kind of hero call is often attributed to "a read," when it's really just a players inability to lay down an overpair or top pair, top kicker in the face of a strong betting line that indicates their hand is no good. Understanding your table is key to knowing which players are going to make those calls against you, so you don't give them the opportunity to make that hero call. Nate the Elder is one of those. There's no point bluffing Nate, because he's incapable of laying down pocket threes on a straightened, flushy board with three painted cards out there. So against Nate, I just sit back and pick my spots. He's gonna win some big pots over the course of a night, but he usually goes home broke, so I don't mind giving up some pots to him.

So figure out what you're really doing when you're making a tough call, and really evaluate whether or not you're making a call based on a read, based on experience, or just based on your status as a TPTK donkey, as the BWOP calls 'em.

Yay! A counter-point.

2008-08-26T15:27:00.002-05:00

Special K has posted his thoughts on my thoughts on the presidential candidates. I don't agree with all his ideas, but I don't disagree with all of them, either.

One note in response to several comments - I understand that the federal government doesn't handle a lot of this things I listed in my blog post that are paid for by taxes. My point was that there are things in the world that I want, and the government in general pays for them. I also want some specific things that the federal government does pay for, like Medicare for my parents' hospitalizations, to name one very specific case.

Special K makes what I consider to be the most valid point I've seen anyone make for voting for McCain, however, in the final bit of his post.

I'll probably vote for McCain as an obstruction to the other party so that only the plans on which there is some agreement make it into law.

This is the most valid argument for a McCain vote that I've heard. Our government is built on a system of checks and balances, and our current two-party system is so locked into party politics that the only way those checks and balances can occur is if there is dissent between the executive and legislative branches of government.

Here's a concrete example. Prior to the Democrats taking a majority in Congress in 2006, George W. Bush vetoed exactly 1 one bill. Since the beginning of last year, he has vetoed 10 bills, and used the power of the pocket veto once. So we went six years with only one disagreement between a company's board of directors and it's CEO? Yup. That's what happens nowadays when the President and Congress all sit on the same side of the aisle.

So do I want Obama to lose? No. I think he's the better man for the job and for our country right now. I think even a potentially empty message of hope is more in line with what the country needs when so many people are feeling beaten down and punch drunk from the economic turmoil of the last 8 months (and I still stand on my soap box claiming that it's equal parts the fault of the lenders, the borrowers, big business and the media that's blowing everything out of proportion, but that's another debate).

So I'd like some dissent between Congress and the President, but I don't want Obama to lose. I think the Democrats in Congress have shown themselves to be pretty ineffectual in the past two years, and can't foresee them doing too much harm with a carte blanche from the White House. And if they do, we get to elect new Congressfolk every two years. So as long as we pay attention, we can change 5-6 seats in Congress and move the majority in the other direction. I reserve the right to be wrong about the number of seats the Democratic majority now consists of. I didn't feel like doing the research.

So there's my response to Special K's well-expressed rebuttal. I'd like to find that patriot, too. Eight years ago I wanted nothing more than a McCain-Colin Powell ticket to win the White House, because I wanted a change from the constant grind of hearing about how awful the President's morals were. Now I want Obama (still unsure about Biden, but that's the baggage I get) because I want a change from the constant grind of saying how awful the President's policies are.

I got a change eight years ago, even if wasn't the one I wanted. I'll get a change again this year, and who knows if it'll be the one I want?

Got Hope?

2008-08-26T09:29:00.004-05:00

warning - political post ahead - if you're not interested in my choice for president, or can't respond with logical discourse, you should click somewhere else.

Never before have I worn my political affiliations on my sleeve (or in this case, chest). But I did head over to Barack Obama's website today and buy a Got Hope? T-shirt. This is going to be a tight presidential race, and if I can help influence a couple of votes to the candidate of my preference by wearing a T-shirt, then I'm good for that.

I think it was unintentionally telling that almost all the T-shirts on the McCain website were white and boring, while the Obama website had a bunch of different colors and styles.

I'm just sayin'.

And for the record, I was at one time a McCain supporter. Back when he was a maverick and stood up to the party, I was all for him. I probably would have voted for McCain over Gore in 2000 had he not been torpedoed by the Bush campaign. But in the past eight years he seems to have lost a lot of things. His political balls, for one. I really do think if McCain is elected, it's another four years of the same behind the scenes assholes running the country that have been running it for the past eight years.

That's what I'm hoping for with this election - that Barack Obama wins and brings in new assholes to run things behind the scenes, and that maybe those assholes will do things a little more in line with the way I want things done. I have no illusions about one man's ability to run the country. I know it's all back-room deals and shady shit.

But this election is about putting people into the back room that line up with your views, and I think Obama's back-room guys are gonnea get fewer poor American boys killed in foreign countries than McCain's back-room guys. I hope that Obama's back-room guys will cut our dependence on foreign oil with a multi-pronged plan for drilling and developing new energy sources, rather than using a drill everywhere approach that will only hold us over for a few years. I hope that Obama's back-room guys will stay a little more the FUCK out of my life than the back-room guys who advocate smaller government but have done nothing but give the government more power for the past eight years.

Yes, I know Democrats are going to raise taxes. I want higher taxes.

No I am not insane.

Well, a little.

But there are things I want my government to do for me. I want them to pick up the garbage, educate the kids so they can count out my change properly at a store, handle the sewage, put a LOT of cops on the street, pay for new fire engines and have enough tanks and airplanes to defend our country in case of an attack.

Tanks, fire trucks and garbage trucks are expensive, and I want my government to have money to pay for them. And I want my government to spend less than it makes, so we don't have to borrow from other governments. If that means a "tax and spend" policy, that's a lot better in my eyes than a "borrow and spend" policy, which is what we've done for years.

So yes, I do think that Barack Obama will raise my taxes, and I'm not only voting for him in spite of that, I'm voting for him partly because of that. No, I don't trust him. If you trust anyone running for major political office in this country, you're insane. Jimmy Carter was the last trustworthy man to achieve the office of President, and you see how well that worked out. So I don't care if Obama is everything he claims to be, or everything his wife claims he is. I'm sure he's forgotten most of what it was like to grow up in a single-parent household and be broke, and I don't blame him for trying hard to do so. I don't expect him to be perfect. I don't want perfect, I just want the best man in the race.

And I think Barack Obama is that man. So he's got my vote. And $20.08 for a t-shirt.

Must be Monday, cause my balls ache

2008-08-25T20:00:00.002-05:00

Wow - what a great big back of suck today was. After staying up to the ass-crack of dawn last night live-blogging the Sunday Million for PokerStars, then getting up and heading to a decent meeting this morning, the wheels fell off my day when the mechanic called.

Oh yeah - there's a mechanic story. So Saturday morning, after sleeping for a hair over two hours post-poker, we got up and headed to the flea market. We got close to the interstate when Suzy's truck started to overheat. This had been a problem before, but adding coolant would fix it. All I really wanted was for the truck to limp along for a few more weeks until I could sell it, but that obviously was not to be. When we found out that not only was the truck not good for the 25 miles to the flea market, but that AAA will not tow a pickup with a bunch of cargo in the bed, we limped it home and went back to bed for a bit. I got up, limped the truck down the street to the mechanic, and made the move to see what it was gonna cost to get the coolant situation fixed.

That answer came in this afternoon - $2,000. With my AAA discount, that's only $1,800. Nice for a truck that I'm hoping to sell for $3,500. Oh, and that doesn't fix the AC. Or the handle on the third door. Or the center console. Or the seals on the doors. This might be a break-even proposition (at best) in selling the truck.

So that sucked. Then I came home for what I thought was a brief errand, loading a bed frame into a friend's car. Except she was late. And it was raining. Then she was lost. Then she was later than ever. And it was raining.

So that sucked. Then I make it back to work for an hour or so and get a call from an electrical contractor that I had put out a bid to a few months ago. We were low. They were low. WAY low. So low that there's probably a few things missing.

Like $35,000 worth of rigging from my proposal. So I get an angry call from this EC as we try to come together in a way to make the numbers not suck horribly for each of us. So that sucked.

Then I drove around town to three different SunCom stores to get my wife a new cell phone since AT&T doesn't work in my house. It works in my yard, but not in my house. But I got Suzy a new phone, and the monthly bill will drop from $70 to $35 (not sure what the bill will look like after tax, probably $40, but still an improvement) so that helps the monthly bottom line. It should take me about 6 months to amortize the early cancellation fee, but I was stuck under contract until September '09 otherwise, so that is an improvement long term.

So my day sucked, and I came home and lost a few dollars playing poker before finally deciding to just watch football. I don't have any money on it or any emotional investment in the Seahawks or Chargers, so it can't really suck. Hope you're all well.

A week that was

2008-08-23T15:16:00.002-05:00

Yeah - I've been MIA for the week. It's been kinda retarded, and honestly, I get into a little funk every year right after my birthday and don't really feel like writing. So I'm back now, and here's what's been going on.

Monday - nothing impressive. I don't really remember anything specific that went on, so there it is.

Tuesday - meh - average work day - meeting in the morning, quotes in the afternoon, again - nothing impressive. I played a little on FTP - won a SNG, doubled my bankroll there.

Wednesday - played the warehouse game again and tried a different approach to the game, and failed miserably. I shot for a small-ball approach, and splashed around in a lot of pots. That didn't go well and I busted before the first break. I'm sure that it's an effective strategy in a deep-stacked tourney with long levels, but in a relatively short-stacked tourney with quick levels, the standard TAG approach I had taken in past weeks is more effective.

I played the cash game later, and that went about as well as everything else has gone in August. I dropped a couple of buy-ins, and the only real saving grace is that even though it's a 2/5 game, the average buy-in is $200. Had I played a real 2/5 game, I couldn't even have bought in twice, much less lost two buy-ins without vomiting. I felt like I played fairly well, but one brief period of impatience cost me most of my stack.

My defining hand came against the biggest donk at the table, a kid that never saw a starting hand he didn't like. He went at least 45 minutes playing every single hand at least to the flop, and usually to the river. I picked up AQ off suit in late position, and made it $25 to go preflop. I got a couple of callers including the kid. The flop came down Q-2-x with 2 spades, and I fired out $50. Two callers with one of them being the kid. Turn is a blank, and I fired out $75. The kid was my only caller, and the river was my absolute nightmare - the As.

Kid checked, and instead of checking behind in fear of the flush, I decided that if he'd made a flush he certainly would have bet out, so I pushed a stack of reds into the middle. I thought the obvious value bet would make him fold a small flush, but the kid made the call with the wheel straight and the baby flush. Kid had 4s-5s, and couldn't let go of the baby flush, and stacked a bunch of my chips.

Not long after that I pushed in with 2nd pair, top kicker over top of an aggressive player's flop bet, he called with a flush draw, hit it on the turn and IGHN.

What a week

2008-08-18T21:26:00.002-05:00

It's not many weeks I get to play poker three nights in a row, but this was one of them. Unfortunately, there isn't a lot of good to report, as my game fell apart all three sessions, but that's kinda been my August. I remarked to a friend today that at the stakes I play, it's remarkable that I had a session +$500 on the second of the month, and managed to get stuck $100 by the 18th. Pretty impressive, I think.

So Wednesday I made my way back to the warehouse game, and took fourth for $200 on a $85 buy-in. Would have made me feel a lot better if I hadn't held 40% of the chips in play when we got to 4-handed, but one bad beat and a pile of hyper-vagtastic play on my part, and I was glad I'd agreed to a save for fourth. My bad beat was flopping a set with Queens and losing to Broadway, but there's no excuse for me letting off the gas when we got to 4-handed. I sat back and tried to play small ball when I should have been wielding my big stack a LOT harder. And that cost me a pile of profit.

Then Thursday I went back to the $110 tourney, and performed admirably. If by admirably we mean awfully. The Thursday tourney has a $5 bounty on everyone, and the levels are only 15 minutes long instead of 20, and the contrast in structure was huge for me. I needed the extra 5 minutes per level, and I needed to catch some cards. Didn't go well and couldn't get the cash game going, so I went home even over the two nights. I would have been stuck, but I won $15 off the dealer playing stud before we got the tourney going.

Sunday was my birthday tourney (actual birthday was Thursday, but we could get a game going on Sunday, so there it is). That was also somewhat less than spectacular, as I got nothing going at any point in either the tournament or the cash game. Nothing terribly interesting on any front, just a whole lot of me making moves that got picked off or betting draws that never got there. I don't know that I played a single hand particularly well or poorly, but it ended up expensive. I chatted wit Special K and Brian the Red a little after the game, and it just seems like my game is a little broken right now. I'm still certainly up for the year, but the month of August has been pretty ugly so far. I'm probably going back to the warehouse game Wednesday to see how that goes, but right now I've got to figure out what the issue is.

Maybe I need some new poker music - any suggestions?

Wasabi Poop

2008-08-13T11:42:00.001-05:00

This is what happens the day after my buddy ate a marble-sized chunk of wasabi, followed by another chunk the size of a robin's egg.

Xavier Neuro
12:36
AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

John
12:36
wasabi shit?

Xavier Neuro
12:36
the only thing that can be said from the back end of wasabi

John
12:37
you might need an ointment

Xavier Neuro
12:37
nah
gonna hardcore it

John
12:37
careful - don't want any explosions in the plumbing

Xavier Neuro
12:37
too late

John
12:41
I'm gonna blog this whole IM conversation

Xavier Neuro
12:41
lol
niiiice

John
12:42
do you need a cushion with a hole in the middle like for 'rhoids?

Xavier Neuro
12:42
no
i make holes in my own pillows thank you

Another way to make a few pennies

2008-08-12T12:30:00.003-05:00

So a few months ago I blogged about Text Link Ads, which generates a little of $120/month for me in ad revenue just for having a few links on my blog.

Yes I know the almighty Google doesn't approve, but I have Adsense too, and it generates nothing like this kinda revenue.

Well, there's another site very similar to TLA called LinkWorth, and I make nearly double each month on LinkWorth what I make on TLA. It took a lot longer to get rolling, because I think LinkWorth hasn't been around as long, but the payouts are better. All in all, these two sites generate over $300/month for me, which means that just by having a few links on my blog, my wife's car payment is made. So give LinkWorth a shot, and I hope you have similar success.

The weekend in tweets - Flea Market edition

2008-08-11T09:21:00.003-05:00

This is a list of the Twitter updates I sent out as Suzy and I embarked on our adventures in flea marketing this weekend. I have a long and storied history of selling shit at flea markets that dates back to high school and college (there was one weekend when I paid my rent for the month selling $5 posters of Billy Ray Cyrus and the original Dream Team), but Suzy had never done this before. We rented two spots at the Webb Rd. Flea Market in Salisbury, NC, and loaded up the pickup and Element with as much shit as we could cram in there. We bought a pop-up canopy at the Mart of Wal for $95, and paid $32 for the weekend rent on two spots (each spot consisted of a 10' x 10' area outside with two tables), so our overhead for the weekend was $127.

So here's the tale of the Tweets -

Ugh. Up at 5 to write and sell stuff at flea market all day after poker til 1.

6:50 am - honda element and pickup truck loaded to the gills. 20 min behind schedule leaving. Time 2 make the donuts.

Been standing outside 15 min waiting to have my space assigned. Novelty is wearing off and I still smell like cigars from last night.

8:15 am - ez-up canoppy definitely misrepresented itself.

8:45 am - two booths with 4 tables full o crap set up. Sales so far - $4. Expenses so far - $131

9:50 am - total sales so far - $20. Another few bucks and the rent is paid.

10:24 am - Guy in the booth next to me decided to leave early. Gave me everything he didn't want to pack up. Too stupid to say no, I have a new $1 rack

11:30 am - gross sales $92. Potential for profit now looks reasonable. Especially if I sell this truck.

12:18 PM - In case you were wondering, the mullet is alive and well in Salisbury,NC.

12:43 PM - Just used flea market pisser. Flushed with foot and sneaker melted.

12:59 pm - we have achieved profit! Since we prepaid for both days, tomorrow is a total freeroll.

1:40 pm - packing up

1:57 pm - loaded up and headed home. Could likely condense to one vehicle tomorrow, but getting good leads on selling truck.

5:37 PM - Operation naptime a success. Today I got up at 5:15. Then 12 hrs later I got up at 5:30.

6:08 am - time to head to day 2 of project flea market

6:29 am - time to head out again. This time with everything I forgot the first time. Working on 2 hrs sleep today.

8:10 am - my setup is done, suzy still working on jewelry display. Already up $125 on the morning. Happy sunday, indeed

Final day 1 tally - $191 gross for $56 net profit. Freerolling today and looking for $200 profit on the weekend

9:15 am - have already sold the heaviest two items in the car. That's a jackpot right there. $220 so far.

10:12 am - Big items moving better on sunday, but def need to improve mi espanol if we do this regularly. Pretty sure I'm leaving $ on the table.

10:35 am - Latinos with chihuahuas and rednecks with harley tats. Welcome to sterotype day at the flea market.

11:10 am - have passed yesterday's total by $100 already. Meat is back on the menu!

12:33 pm - the flea market experiment is over for this week. Net profit about $ 450. Can't bitch about that one.

We actually had a great time selling at the flea market this weekend, cleaned at least a carload of shit out of our house, and made enough to cover Suzy's car payment and the power bill, all on extra cash. I got home yesterday and crashed amazingly hard, sleeping until 9:30 PM. Which was kinda the plan, since I covered the Sunday Million last night, and knew I'd be up until at least 2 with that, so the afternoon nap (sleep?) was vital. And the tourney didn't end til closer to 3:30, so the only way I'm at work today is by sleeping all yesterday afternoon.

So we're gonna hit the flea market again next weekend, this time going for three or maybe four booths. We're gonna add another pop-up canopy, but we were able to buy that out of profit from this weekend, so our only expenses will be rent on the booths, food and gas. I think our nut for next weekend will be around $50, since we're only doing Saturday. But it was fun spending the couple of days with Suzy, out in the world and not stuck in the house or a theatre. And we got rid of some clutter.

Adventures in Ink

2008-08-08T09:02:00.003-05:00

So most of you have seen at some point the tattoo on the inside of my left forearm. It's nothing special, a couple of kanji symbols that loosely translate into "seize the day." Words I try to live by. Well, I got that done the winter after my 30th birthday, and lately had been getting the itch for more ink. Probably because it took 5 years for the sense memory of the friggin' pain to subside. Apparently the guy who did my arm had something to prove, because it hurt like a mofo.

So I found my artwork, and shopped around for months for a tattoo studio. Last week my friend JW got a new tat at a place called Nikki's Custom Tattoos on Monroe Road. I was pretty impressed by the work on his arm, and thought I'd go in and give it a shot. I went in, and the guy there (Jason), told me that the piece I wanted would take about an hour and a half and would cost me $250. Since that was half the time and $100 less than I'd been quoted, and since I liked his portfolio, I dropped the deposit and set my appointment for last night.

So I headed over there after work, and we started the process. He brought out the sketch he did based on the artwork I provided, and it looked great. He did a lot of neat things with the flames for the wheel in the cross, so I thought it would be pretty badass when finished. I laid down on the table, and he got to work.

Yep - the last guy obviously had something to prove, because the tat on the back of my calf hurt FAR less than the one on the inside of my forearm. And Jason was surprised at that, because he expected it to be much more painful, especially since it was much larger. I'll admit the that first few strokes of the needle were pretty flinchy on my part, but after a couple minutes I just found a little zen point and chatted with Jason through the whole thing. I lay there for about an hour fifteen listening to his life story (fairly interesting) while he inked my leg. Just about the time I started to get really bored and need to pee, he wiped down the back of my leg and said "You're done."

I was really surprised. The two chinese characters on my arm took 45 minutes and hurt like a motherfucker, and this piece, much larger and much more detailed, took only 1:15, and hurt a lot less. I got my care instructions and drove home to unveil to Suzy. She liked it, because I'd told her what I was getting done, but hadn't mentioned that the flames would be in color, so she liked the contrast. It hurts a little today, kinda like a bad sunburn on the back of my leg, and you really don't know how many things hit the back of your leg until you don't want the back of your leg hit at all, but it's really discomfort more than actual pain. But thank god for boot-cut jeans.

So here it is - my new leg -

The Celtic Cross is because of my mongrelized British Isles heritage. The claddagh in the center symbolizes me and Suzy, and the ring of fire is (what else) my love of music, and an homage to the late great Johnny Cash. I'm really pleased with it, but it'll be tough for anyone else to see, unless they ride even slower than I do! But now I have even more reason to get a new kilt.

And by the way - this tattoo brought to you by Compatible Poker, who renewed their ad this week, Thanks, guys!

Clawing and Scratching

2008-08-07T14:17:00.003-05:00

That's what last night was all about - clawing and scratching my way out of big holes, little holes and just to stay alive. I ventured back to the warehouse game last night, and managed to lose a lot less than I could have thanks to a late surge in the cash game, which was playing at 1/2 instead of the usual 2/5. Good for me, since I'm not really comfortable at 2/5, even the short buy-ins that these guys usually do.

Interesting side note - BadBlood's home game plays more like a 2/5 game than a 1/2 game, and I'm perfectly comfortable playing there, but I'm not completely at ease playing in an actual 2/5 game that behaves more like a 1/2 game. Not sure why that is, but it might have something to do with knowing and trusting at least most of the people at the table.

But anyway, last night was a $75+5 tourney with 7,000 in starting chips. Plus 1,000 if you RSVP and show up on time, plus 2,000 for a $5 dealer toke. So it's an $85 tourney with 10,000 chips. I shucked and jived for the first hour and finished with 15,000 at the first break. My most significant hand in the first hour was against Jim, who along with T accompanied me to the game. I picked up QJo in late position, hit the Jack-high flop and called all the way down to his well-played pocket Kings. He kept the bet sizes small enough to keep me in, and not so small that I felt froggy, so he pretty much maximized his value there. After the second break people started dropping pretty quickly, and I chippe up to a little over 20K when what had to be the most ridiculous hand of the evening occured, which led to a three-way all in and two people (myself included) bounced to the cash game.

I'm in late position with blinds of 500/1000. After UTG limped, small stack in early position raises to 3K, leaving himself about 8K behind. I assumed he was pot-committed, because I certainly would have felt that I was at that point. Big stack two to my right flat-called, and the player immediately to my right with tear-inducing body odor folded. I looked down to find Kd-Qd, and shoved all in. I had played very few hands with the big stack or the shorty, and figured my fold equity was pretty good.

Until the Small Blind shipped it all in, and the UTG limper moved all his chips in as well. I leaned over to Angelo the dealer and muttered "oops." Shorty went into the tank for a long time before he folded what he said was pocket sevens, which is no way a fold I could make with all that money in the pot, and the big stack folded as well. Also not necessarily a move I would have made, since were his cards even live, it would have been worth 20% of his stack to send three players to the rail in one hand.

Of course I watched my outs dwindle to vapor when the SB tabled Queens and the UTG limper tabled Aces, but the flop jacked me back up to 12 outs twice when it came down 8-9-10 with two diamonds. No diamond or Jack on the turn and river, and I was out, although the 7h on the turn made Shorty puke a little in his mouth. I don't hate my move there, since I thought I was in pretty good shape with good fold equity, but I ran into two monsters and headed to the cash game.

Where the hits just kept on coming. Within the first two orbits I missed with 99, 10-10, Ad-Qd and A-10. That put a $100 dent into my $200 buy-in, and I spent the next couple of hours trying to rebuild. The table was pretty sickly loose, with two players behind me that had a huge tendency to overvalue middle pair, so when I was finally able to string a few good hands together, I finished up $35 from the cash game. Add that to the $105 I dropped in the tourney ($85 plus a $20 last longer with Jim), and I was only stuck $70 for the night. Pretty good considering the number of times the drippings of my cash game buy in were all in the middle.

Home Game silliness

2008-08-06T10:42:00.002-05:00

So this time last week I hadn't hosted a home game in a month or more due to theatre stuff, so the regular band of retards gathered at my house on Saturday night to sling chips and drink beers.

Note to self - maybe drink less beers and more people will sling chips in your general direction.

I don't know that I played more than three hands well all night, and I'm pretty sure I never strung together two good hands in a row. My play was for shit, and my results reflected it. If ever I've deserved to lose a couple of buyins, it was Saturday night.

Some people may have had the same to say about Friday night as well, and I'd be hard-pressed to argue, but I didn't, so there.

I did manage to hang on to my first buy-in for three hours, which usually means I'm going to have a killer night. But since I didn't win much after the first orbit, all I was doing was hanging on to my first buy-in, not really doing anything with it. I did manage to triple up in a hand where I tilted Special K by cracking his KK with 10-8 sooooted. He couldn't stay too tilted for too long, since I was quickly back into my pocket for buyins 2-4, while he actually managed a meager profit on the night.

And for the record, I shoved with my shitty suited one-gappers, I didn't call with them.

But my one good hand, the hand that allowed me to finish the night only down 1.8 buy-ins, came in Omaha. I picked up some great starting hands once we shifted to Omaha, lots of K-K-10-x suited, A-K-10-x-double suited type hands, but couldn't make anything happen with them. So I pick up 9-9-x-x and limp in, because limping was the flavor of the table, and I see a flop of 9-6-4 with two hearts on it. I fire out $10 into the $4 pot, because that guaranteed me at least two callers, and Big Nick popped it to $35.

I had about $100 behind, and I had kinda been hoping for just this action. I figured everyone between Nick and I would fold, and since we were on the next-to-last hand of the night, I didn't mind the possibility of putting all my chips in the middle. I figured Nick had a heart draw, and maybe an overpair, so when the action folded around back to me, I shoved. It was $66.50 for Nick to call, and he went into the tank for a long time before finally making the call. He turned over 6-4-J-5 for two pair with the heart draw, I dodged the 8 non-boat hearts and doubled up.

Yeah - not terribly exciting, but it was my best hand of the night, so there you go.

I did indeed play the Tao of Poker 5th birthday party event last night, and performed about as well as I expected. I went out before the first break on a coin flip when I called off all my chips preflop with AK and didn't improve against pocket 10s. I did outlast Hoy, Waffles and Special K, so I wasn't Gigli. Congrats to Garry Gates on taking down the tourney and the Borgata package.

NC Ink

2008-08-05T12:45:00.003-05:00

No, it's not yet another tattoo show, although I admit to being fascinated by LA Ink. I'm just saying, chicks with ink are hot!

So I got my first (and currently only) tattoo for New Year's a few years ago. I don't remember if I got it when I was 30 or 31, but anyway, it's been a few years. Well, several friends of mine have added new ink in the past week, and that, coupled with the fact that I've had my design ready for several months now and have just been waiting for the right time, piled on top of the fact that my 35th birthday is next week, led me down Monroe Road last night after my production meeting looking at tattoo parlors.

I did a bunch of research on tattoo parlors in Charlotte, and decided on Nikki's Custom Tattoos, mostly because I liked the philosophy of Nikki, the owner, the openness of Jason, her new artist, on his web bio, and because my friend JW got his tat done there last week and it looks really nice. So I went in and talked with Jason, and showed him my artwork.
I really like this particular celtic cross because of the claddagh in the center, and I'm having him do the cross in black & grey, and take out the lines on the wheel and turn it into a ring of fire. The ring of fire (obv. Johnny Cash reference) symbolizes my love of music, the cross itself is for my heritage (hailing from the British Isles from way back in my family's history), and the claddagh is for me & Suzy.

I had originally thought about putting it on my upper arm, but since I'm less bicep-prone than some people, my arms are a little short of real estate. So he's gonna put it on my right calf, since my calves are significantly larger than my arms (although that would likely change if I pedaled with my arms). My appointment is for Thursday after work, so I should have new art to show off for the home game this weekend!

And my birthday tournament is next Saturday, if anyone is around and wants to join in, lemme know.

Happy Birthday Tao! and Easy!

2008-08-05T09:48:00.004-05:00

So today marks the 5th Birthday of Tao of Poker, and to commemorate, the doc is throwing a birthday tournament on PokerStars. Which is great, except I have .27 on Stars.

Frankly, I have practically no money on FTP, either, so I'm not even looking for a swap. I'm looking for someone to gift me $5.50 on Stars to play the event. If I win, I'll give it back. If I don't (which I won't) I'll buy you a beer sometime. So go ahead, transfer $5.50 to jhartness on PokerStars, you know you want to.

There's really only about a 40% chance I'll remember to play, in which case I'll refund the mobney. But it's really cool of Pauly to set up this tournament, which has a trip for two to the Borgata with a buy-in to the $5k event there built in for first place.

Badass.

And Happy Birthday, EasyCure! Leos rock!

UPDATE - So I actually looked at the PokerStars cashier, and saw that they now do Echecks. So I dropped $25 on there, and I'm signed up. Somebody gonna call me to remind me to play?

More frugality from Falstaff

2008-08-04T12:49:00.002-05:00

So since I've been on this kick of reducing debt and accumulating extra income I've been on the lookout for additional ways to make a nickel and/or reduce the cost of things that I'm buying. So read about Ebates.com on a personal finance blog and decided to check it out. Turns out that there are a bunch of rebates out there on stuff that I buy all the time, and this site will help me capture them.

For example, the chair in my home office has had it. So much so that we've thrown it out. Now I've been putting off replacing it because office chairs are kinda spendy, and with not a lot of writing work since the WSOP ended, I haven't felt like it was enough of a priority to use the cash on that particular thing right now. Well, one of my advertisers renewed for a year today, so I had a little cash, and went looking for chairs.

So I went to Ebates first, and saw that they had a 3% cash back offer for Office Depot, and a 6% cash back offer for Office Max. So off I go to Office Max, and I find that they're running a new deal where you can pay via Paypal, and get 15% cash back on orders over $100. Well, the chair I decided I wanted only cost $70, and it wasn't worth it to me to spend $30 to get $15, especially since I was already getting $4 back via Ebates. So I ordered my new chair, and that $4 will get added to my Ebates account. In 3 months, I'll get the mobneys in my Paypal account.

Yeah, $4 isn't much. But it was something I was going to have to pay anyway, and OfficeMax delivers for free, so it's not like I paid more by going online. I'm not sure how much of a change this will make in the way I shop, but I get $5 for every one of you guys that signs up, and you get $5 just for signing up. So go to Ebates.com and sign up, and maybe we can both make a few pennies. This was not a sponsored post, just an idea that I thought I'd pass along.

On a semi-unrelated note - here's food for thought: if the current financial troubles that many companies and people are experiencing cause companies to rethink their lending practices and people to rethink their borrowing habits, won't it be worth this momentary pain? I mean really, the root of it is that companies loaned money to people who couldn't pay it back, and people borrowed more money than they should have. Both parties were stupid, and if they learn from it, there's value, right? Of course, with the gubmint standing there ready to give handouts to both companies and people who did these stupid things, it's gonna be hard for them to learn from their mistakes. Maybe the gubmint should take a little more of a mama bird approach and let people fly or fail on their own merits.

Yeah, I know - if you're not a liberal before you're 30 you have no soul, if you're not a conservative by the time you're 40 you have no brain. Some smart guy said something very similar that I've moderately butchered.

Warning - Poker Content Ahead

2008-08-04T10:14:00.002-05:00

Yes, with the end of my summer theatre season, this weekend I actually played poker. And a couple of lengthy sessions, not just a few hands here and there between scenes backstage. Friday Special K, Brian the Red and I cruised down I-85 to the House of Blood for some beers and cards with the G-Vegas boys. As always I had a great time, and as usual, I had a couple of less than stellar plays to report.

I managed to stack off to our host on the second hand of the night, because I'm just that damn good. I don't remember our positions relative to the button, except that we were in early position, and Blood was immediately to my right. I picked up pocket eights, and put out a little raise ($8) preflop. There were several callers, and my eyes lit up when there was an eight in the door. They dimmed a little to the two hearts out there, and I wasn't exactly thrilled with the 8-J-Q flop with two hearts, but I fired out $50 when Blood checked. Everyone else got out of the way, and Blood called. He checked again when a third heart came on the turn. I died a little inside with the third heart, but fired out $100 anyway, because I'm only so bright, and in this equation "only so" = "not very."

Blood called, and insta-shoved when the fourth heart hit on the river. I had the 8h, and with only about half my first buy-in left on hand #2, I made the crying call. He shows Kh-10x for the flopped open-ender and the four-flush that was significantly better than mine, and I was the first rebuy of the evening. There are so many ways that I misplayed this hand that I can't count them all, so let it suffice to say that I was happy to scratch my way back to even for the night by the time my next Hand of Note occurred.

Of course, this happened about two minutes after I realized I'd gotten back to even, which is how these things happen, right? I picked up 6-6 in early position, and limped in. There were a few limpers, and then someone behind popped it up a few bucks. I called, as did several others, so we were probably 5-handed to see a flop of 6-3-2 with two clubs. I was a little more excited with this flop, since I'd made top set instead of bottom set, and the other two cards were less likely to be in anyone's hand, so I led out for $75 (again, about a pot-sized bet). Action folded around to Rocket, who I'd never played with before, and he moved all in over the top.

I couldn't tell exactly how much he had in front of him, but it was close to my stack, if not more. Otis thought for a long moment before folding, and then Blood got out of the way as well. I went deep into the tank, because I had no idea about his game. If he had a smaller set, I'm in amazing shape. If he had a pair and a flush draw, which I considered his most likely holding, I was in pretty good shape. If he had an overpair, I'm thrilled. If he had 4-5, I'm fucked. Finally I decided that I couldn't put him on the one specific holding that I was behind, and I called off the rest of my chips. He had me covered by about $45, so it was a $550 call for me to make with top set.

He tabled 4-5 suited for the flopped straight, and I needed one of 4 outs to save my evening. Turn was nothing, but the 3d on the river gave me my four-outer and a $1200+ pot. It was a rough beat to put on him, but most folks at the table said there was no way they were laying down top set there. I almost did, because I felt a little snakebit after losing my first buy-in to Blood so early, but finally made the call, got my money in behind, channeled the Luckbox, and raked in a decent profit for the night. I don't think I played particulary well all night, but I got lucky there and in a couple of key spots to take down a nice profit on the evening. Unfortunately, Special K and Brian got their asses handed to them, but the unfortunate thing about poker is there has to be a loser to the same amount that there is a winner.

I continued my streak of bad play on Saturday, with less lucksackish results, but that's a tale for a little later in the week.

I might be wearing a tinfoil hat, but at least it never goes out of style

2008-08-01T13:58:00.002-05:00

So when some folks mysteriously disappeared from Google's radar last month with no explanation, it was a pain in the ass. Since I was one of them, it was a bigger pain in the ass. Since I saw my traffic cut in half in a matter of days, it really pissed me off. When I lost a couple of advertisers and some regular revenue to the circumstances, it REALLY pissed me off.

But now that the stakes have been raised, I'm starting to get a little paranoid. These might be unrelated issues, but when Bill, Otis, me, Nat, Mookie and a bunch of others that I'm sure I'm missing were disappeared from Google's radar, it was one thing. When the Good Dr. and others had their blogs frozen completely due to a "possible violation" of Google's T&C, I started to have an unpleasant thought - could this be some type of odd belated fallout from the UIGEA?

I know, it sounds paranoid. And the fact that there are non-poker blogs on the hit list seems to make it unlikely, but I'm gonna wear a colander in my motorcycle helmet* just in case.

* Bonus points if you name the movie in comments.

24 Hours of Booty 2008 Report

2008-07-30T10:50:00.003-05:00

Yeah - you're all tired of hearing about my booty, I know. But this was a great event, and I want to take a minute to thank all of you who donated money to this year's ride. I raised nearly $1500 this year, and rode 30 miles. That's considerably less than the 100 I had hoped for in my goals for the year, but given that I haven't been exercising at all for the past several months, I'm still pretty pleased with my progress.

So thanks to the following -
BWOP
Special K
Instant Tragedy
StB
MondoGarage
Brian the Red
EasyCure
Drizzt
Uncle Bracelet
Gracie

You guys rock!

1200 people signed up for the event, and this was an incredibly supported event. There was plenty of food and water throughout the 24 hours, with meals all through the night, including a midnight pizza party, which was just the thing for me, since I didn't get to the ride until 11:30 PM.

Yeah, once again this year I helped set up then headed over to the theatre for a show. Since I was in Richard III, I didn't get out of there until after 11PM. I got to our campsite around 11:30, and did a few laps of nighttime riding, just to see how things were gonna go. I have to say, it went pretty well. The one long hill felt a lot shorter this year, which makes me think that even though my fitness level has decreased dramatically since the winter, I'm still a much stronger rider than I was this time last year. It also helped that I was riding a road bike that weighs less than 20 pounds instead of a 35 pound mountain bike. And the road bike is geared better for what I was doing, so I had a pretty good mechanical advantage going on.

There's a lot of beauty in riding at night, and my favorite moment of the night was cruising down the long straightaway in front of Queens University looking ahead and dozens of blinking red taillights all the way down in front of me. It was very peaceful, cool and comfortable riding. I did five laps that night, then made the poor decision to head back to the theatre and party a little more. Yeah, after working all morning, setting up our campsite all afternoon, performing in Richard III and riding 15 miles, I decided to go back to the theatre and drink.

I never claimed to be a rocket scientist, but I think I get my degenerate card punched after that one. So I partied with the Bad Idea Bears til about 4, then went home and crashed for a while. That made it after noon when I finally made it back to the ride on Saturday, and I didn't get a ton of riding in that afternoon. I logged another 15 miles, and then gave in to sore legs and a chafed ass (my new-ish bib shorts fit me way better 10 pounds ago, so I gotta get back on the bike now that my shows are over).

But as I was cruising along Saturday afternoon, I pulled up behind a father and daughter riding a tandem bike. I thought to myself "that's neat, spending a little father/daughter time together" as I got closer. Then I saw that in addition to their jersey numbers, they each had an "In Memory of" sign on the back of their jerseys. The little girl's sign said "In Memory of my Mommy," while the dad's said "My Wife." That kinda brought it home to me what we were all riding for. It wasn't just a good time, although it was that, too. It wasn't just a chance to get some good exercise and push ourselves a bit, although it was that. It was a chance to be part of something bigger, a chance to, in our small way, rage and fight against the injustice of little girls with no mommies and husbands raising children on their own because of a disease that we haven't solved yet.

My sore legs and ass were worth it if the money you all gave help one family deal with cancer, and I'll keep riding until there's a cure. And you can, too. There's another ride coming up in September, this one in Columbia, MD. So all of you in the DC area can ride in your own 24 Hours of Booty event. And next year, the plan is to add four more sites nationwide and take the efforts all the way across the country. So thanks for donating, and if you're anywhere near Maryland, you should go for a little bike ride.

Returning to normalcy

2008-07-29T09:43:00.002-05:00

Last night was a little odd. After the past several months of running around like a chicken with my head cut off between writing, working and rehearsing/performing, last night after work I...went home. And had dinner with my wife. And worked in the yard for a few minutes. And watched tv. And went to bed early.

Suzy remarked that I seemed a little distant, and I told her that it would just take me a few days to get adjusted to actually being at home and not having a ton of things hanging over my head. I have a few weeks before I'll start work on my next theatre design project, and there's not a whole lot going on that requires my writing talents (but if anyone's hiring, I'm really available for August).

Shakespeare Carolina's second season went better than we could have imagined, and it's pretty official that my role will be reduced in season three. This year kicked my ass, so I'm going to step aside and let someone else direct next summer. I may act, or may not, depending on my writing schedule. If it looks like I'm covering the WSOP again, I won't take a major role in either show, and I'll use my skills on the production side to make sure we have good technicians, stage management and promotion.

We were all amazed at how well we did financially, and the shows turned out well, too. Those two things, while not mutually exclusive, do not necessarily go hand in hand, either. We did about triple the ticket sales this year that we did last year, and I remarked that more people saw Twelfth Night in one performance (125 at our high-water mark) than saw all the performances of Hamlet last summer. That's a bit of an exaggeration, but I do think that we beat Hamlet's run in two performances of Twelfth Night. If we can figure out what happened to cause the growth in audience and keep that going for next year, we will suddenly find ourselves as a viable entity. We're already in good financial shape, as we started this season with about $2500 in the bank, and we'll finish the season with about double that.

Yeah - we just managed to produce two fully staged productions for $2500. Here's how you do that in a few easy steps -

1) Find a venue that will take a cut of the gate instead of cash for rent. When Off-Tryon closed I had a bunch of lights left over that I didn't want to sell. So I went to Theatre Charlotte and cut a deal where my lights would be on permanent loan to TC for as long as Shakespeare Carolina was in residence. Add to that a revenue split on ticket sales, and Theatre Charlotte got a couple dozen expensive lighting instruments and some more dimmers, and Shakespeare Carolina got a summer home.

2) Produce royalty-free shows - Shakespeare's been dead a long time and he doesn't have an agent, so we don't have to pay the fees associated with producing a contemporary play. This cuts at least $1,000 off the cost of doing theatre.

3) Find a bunch of people who will work for free. In Charlotte, actors sadly don't expect to get paid, because most companies historically haven't been able to pay them. So we can get great actors who will work for free. Toss in a lighting designer who hasn't had a lot of exposure around town and will work for free just to get her name out there, and a couple of lunatic directors who will work for free just to have the freedom to do whatever they want, and you get a pretty dramatically reduced salary situation.

4) Go for super-simple sets. We used just a few platforms and a shitload of black paint. Next year we'll probably work on improving our production values, but that wasn't where our priorities lay this year. And it might not be next year, either. But we made some money this summer, so we can afford to do a few things better next year.

So that's how we did theatre on the super-cheap, and became pretty damn profitable along the way. We'll see if we can keep the momentum going now.

You can't be CEREUS!

2008-07-25T08:58:00.002-05:00

Ok, so I'll admit I checked the date when I saw the announcement on Pokerati. After all, how could it be true that Absolute Poker and Ultimate Bet were going to merge in a blatant attempt to distract consumers from the amazingly bad publicity that both sites have garnered in recent months for being havens to cheats, superusers, jaywalkers and other really, really, bad people.

But it's apparently true.

So let me get this straight - just days after the Kanawhakemakeyousweat-aahh Gaming Commission sends out a press release saying "hmm, it looks like bad things are going on there, we should look into this. And we will. We promise. Just as soon as we're done counting our mobneys" Abso-cheat and UltimateTheif announce that they're merging into a new super-site that will immediately become the #3 online poker site in the world. Wow, that was subtle. And really, who announces that they're #3, anyway? Nobody really remembers #3. Who finished 3rd in the Indy 500? For that matter, who finished first, but you get the point.

But really folks, is this nothing more than a way to avoid bad search engine hits when prospective customers try to research CEREUS? So just in case anyone out there finds this while researching Cereus poker's new online poker site, here's a little bit of info. Cereus Poker is the blend of Absolute Poker and UltimateBet, two sites where a bunch of people were ripped off for millions of dollars in 2007 and 2008 by unscrupulous people who at the very least had highly placed friends within the company and had access to programs or loopholes in the software that let them see opponents' hole cards and otherwise lie, cheat and steal from their opponents. Both of these sites were pilloried in the online press, and now Cereus Poker is born out of those ashes without anything ever being cleared up as to who exactly was responsible and what was done to correct the issues.

I wouldn't play on Cereus Poker with your money. I wouldn't play on Cereus Poker for play money. I wouldn't play on Cereus Poker if it were the last online poker site in the world and Jesus Christ himself promised me that it was safe.

Ok, maybe is Jesus said it was okay. But no one else. Unless it was Iggy. I'd probably trust Iggy, too.

Bad Idea Bears

2008-07-24T10:06:00.002-05:00

If you haven't seen Avenue Q, you need to. Mostly because pretty much everyone I freely associate with is the type of person that would enjoy the hell out of it. What's better than watching a puppet sing about internet porn, or wanting to go back to college and fuck a T.A.? Not much, that's what.

After watching the show, my friend Karen and I decided that two of our castmates that seem to always be at the center of trouble are now better know as the Bad Idea Bears. Wikipedia defines them as: The Bad Idea Bears - A duo of adorable but sinister teddy bear-like characters who are out to get people by getting them to do irresponsible deeds.
The boy is blue and the girl is yellow.

Pretty much sums up the people who I stay late at the theatre drinking with. Their reputation is only enhanced by the fact that while Blue Bear was in the scene shop playing poker with me during the show, Yellow Bear went to the liquor store for some refreshments to get us through the show. A bottle of Jack Daniels and two six-packs of beer later, we finished the show and managed not to kill anyone. Although I think my liver may be vacationing somewhere with Al's lately. This is the same pair that engaged in a short-lived fistfight at a cast party last weekend (although is it really a fight is a guy encourages the chick to hit him as hard as possible in the mouth, and after ten minutes of cajoling, she finally hits him, cutting her knuckle as his tooth goes straight through his lip?). This is the same pair that led a rousing game of "Never Have I Ever" backstage (yes, the median age of this bunch is 30).

So yes, Shakespeare Carolina now officially has our very own Bad Idea Bears.

I can has day off now?

2008-07-22T15:51:00.002-05:00

Well, not really. So I don't have shows on Sunday, Monday or Tuesday of this week. Sounds like a great time to catch up on sleep and anything stored on the DVR for the past couple of weeks, right?

WRONG

Sunday, despite the hangover and being up til 5AM drinking and bitching with theatre folks. Because that's what we do. We drink. Like frat boys. And bitch. Like the hosts of The View. So if frat boys hosted The View, that would be theatre people.

Hmmmm, that's kinda deep. I wasn't planning on waxing philosophical here. Shit, I don't even wax may car. But I do occasionally wax my rod.

Anyway, after staying up way too late on Saturday night, Suzy and I headed where? To the theatre, of course! We hosted a baby shower for our friends Iesha and Tadd, who are flying to Ethiopa to adopt a couple of babies once the show is over. Yeah, I mentioned that FedEx would just deliver, but they thought I was being crass.

No, really, poke a few holes in the box, they'll be fine. And cheaper. And after the shower, we headed over to my boss' house for spaghetti and tent building fun. See, there's this little bike ride I'm doing this weekend (scroll up for banner, because I'm too lazy for linkage right now, deal). And since it's going to be roughly as hot as the surface of the sun out there, we're building a massive tent to hang out under. 24' x 12' massive.

I'm not sure what my boss is compensating for, and I'm not going to look that closely at his bike shorts to find out.

Fortunately they managed to get the tent erected without my help or supervision (because helping guys get anything erected is not on my list of fun afternoon plans). So all I had to do was drink, eat pasta and help tear it down. That's pretty much the resume of any redneck - drink, eat and tear shit down. We've got that covered. Fixin' stuff - that might be tougher, but we're all born with an innate ability to tear shit down.

Then last night we went to see Batman with some more folks from the show. Best. Comic. Book. Movie. EVER. Holy shit. I was marginally bummed when I heard Heath Ledger croaked, because I really liked A Knight's Tale. Now I'm REALLY bummed, because he was fucking amazing. He was even better than Nicholson, and I really liked Jack's Joker.

Then tonight we're going to see Avenue Q, and meet up with some folks from the show for drinks afterwards.

So to recap, on my three days off from my shows, I've now spent every evening with people from the shows, and two or three of those days in one theatre or the other. Nice break, huh? Good thing I like these people.