An Open Letter to Jason

Jason,

Matt's a dick. And you know, he just won't shut up about it either. I never really read him until a couple weeks ago when I got Bloglines and they "recommended" his site, but he's a royal prick and I'm sorry you got flamed by him. You don't deserve it.

I really didn't read too deeply into either of your arithmanalyses (like that?) of the hand in question, so I'm not going to say there's a right side and a wrong side. I don't care. I'm not really that smart anyway. What I will say is that you definitely shouldn't let a fucktard like that bug you. You're a good egg, and he's a raving egomaniac. Let him have his fun at your expense (you are anyway), but know that those of us that give a crap don't think that much of him anyway.

I hope you're back writing soon. And I really hope it wasn't Matt that was even the straw that broke the camel's back leading to the hiatus. Then again, everyone needs to take a step back sometimes to see what an anal licking puppy fucker they're being to someone who's basically a complete stranger.

Wait, that last part wasn't directed to you.

Take care. Hit me back if you want to complain - god knows it's the one thing I'm fantastic at.

-BG

Get Me Donna Chang!

Just for point of reference from yesterday, that’s my dog. I tried to clip his nails yesterday, and only succeeded in pissing myself off. Let’s do the math… thirty minutes of effort, five claws of eighteen actually clipped. I need to sedate my dog.

Do you think when your company’s corporate communications department is instructed to produce a photo showing workers doing whatever it is workers are doing in your company, that they consult some sort of strategy guide to make sure they’re showing images that reflect “diversity?” I mean, is there some sort of formula that has become the generally accepted standard in imagery to communicate diversity?

(White lady + Black guy + Hispanic guy + Asian lady + young White guy) * Business Attire = Appropriate

(50ish White guy) * 4 * Business Attire + Board Room + (Asian man + lunch delivery) + (sex-kitten secretary on someone’s lap) = Inappropriate

Do they hand out cheat sheets for this stuff in B-School?

I didn’t take many classes in corporate communications, but even I know you’ve gotta have the Asian lady. ”Where’s Chang? Donna Chang! We need Donna Chang! Someone get her out of Accounts Receivable and have her borrow a sport coat from someone, we need her in the picture!”

You know where we’re going to end up in a few years, right? The young White guy in the picture is going to be replaced by a wispy young White guy wearing a pastel scarf tied neatly around his neck while making love to the camera. You’ll also be seeing Indian I.T. guy, and some woman whose ethnicity you just can’t really quite peg. And I’m surprised more of these pictures don’t trot out Wheelchair Dude at this point. He’ll soon get his turn in the sun. TIMMY!

What I find highly amusing is that although Rich Fiftyish White Guy is still running most every company in the country, Rich Fiftyish White Guy only gets trotted out in commercials that illustrate how fat bloated bankers can’t compete with Ditech dot com. I worked in a bank. That guy doesn’t exist.

And don’t get me started on the whole bullshit thing about “banker’s hours.”

Seen on a resume this week from a welder/skilled tradesman:

OBJECTIVE: I want to lead a Fortune 500 Company.

Aim high my friend, aim high.

Me? I just want to get through these next thirty years and retire so I can have more time to respond to all those emails that obviously need me to update my banking information or help some Nigerian royalty get a few million dollars out of the country effectively.

Why are old people so gullible? I mean, I generally trust people, and I’m generally starved enough for conversation that I’m willing to listen when a fantastic offer is thrown my way. That being said, who can’t see these things coming from a mile away?

My favorite scammers are The Travelers. I really admire their work. The Travelers are a roving band of Irish gypsies who go from town to town defrauding and sometimes robbing people while engaging in bogus home repair jobs.

I could be a Traveler. For one, I love a good road trip. Second, I really have very little in the way of a conscience. Third, I’m incapable of doing a decent job when it comes to home repair. If you paid me $10 right now to mow your lawn (okay, maybe not right now), I guarantee you that you’d want $8 back at the end of the day.

I’m the guy who spent twenty minutes fighting with a screw while assembling some IKEA furniture before the ex discovered I had the drill turned on “reverse.” I’m the guy who was paid by a big, imposing FBI agent neighbor to mow his lawn and half assed it so bad that I think he wanted to do me physical harm. Don’t ask me to help you build an entertainment center or assist you in your move. You’re just going to end up mad at me by the end of the day. I don’t even do “just hold this for a second” very well.

I’d make a great Traveler. If I did a knowingly poor job fixing your roof, and still took a couple hundred dollars from you, trust me… I’d still be able to sleep at night.

Plus, I like Irish beer. So I’ve got that going for me.

Maybe the lack of conscience thing has grown since becoming a poker player. I mean, don’t we all have a little bit of that I BUST CHUMPS mentality waiting for an outlet? I’m glad I get that (on the rare occasions I get cards) on PartyPoker, because I wouldn’t feel the least bit bad taking buggy wheels from an Amish minister if he bet me his clan could get that barn up by sundown. The second that sunset became official, I’d be jacking my Buick up on those big boys and riding home in style on wooden rims. It’d take that motherfucker a long time to whittle himself some new wheels, and I’d be laughing my ass off all the way home.

Take that Pennsylvania Dutch!

I don’t know exactly what it is I have against the Amish, but there’s definitely something bubbling up under the surface. Maybe it’s the way they’re rocking those Brigham Young beards.

I seem to get a lot of searches coming around these parts because of a post I did a long time ago listing some famous Mormons. Today, for example, someone has already landed on my site searching for “Jimmy Superfly Snuka and Mormon.” Glad I could confirm that for you. I also think Sergeant Slaughter was a Baptist, Andre the Giant a Catholic, and Koko B. Ware a fully functional retard.

The very first day upon moving into a house with my then-fiancee, we were visited by one of our two neighbors. His name was Jimmy. Jimmy, like Koko B. Ware, was a functional retard.

Now, I’m a pretty liberal guy. I’m accommodating, reasonably pleasant, and am not one to get all worked up and uptight about much. But when I see some old guy doing the Marty Feldman hunchback shuffle across my front lawn to come by and squawk out his “welcome to the neighborhood” greeting in a six minute, eleven word symphony of unintelligible stammering grunts and wheezes, I tend to get a little unnerved.

Jimmy just wanted to bring me the mail and say hello. BG just wanted Jimmy off his porch.

Jimmy wasn’t alone in the neighbor house though. It was a “Group Home.” Jimmy’s roommate was Michael, an autistic black guy the size of Michael Clarke Duncan. I mean just huge. Now, Michael never said a word. He would just take a toy outside and pace up and down the property line for a few hours before retreating back inside the house. But one night I was driven almost to the point of murder.

Actually, it would have been ruled “Justifiable Homicide” or maybe even self-defense. One night in the dead of summer, I’m awakened at 2AM by this horribly loud and grating scratching noise. It sounded like someone was taking a metal rake to a cement slab over and over and over again.

I got out of bed, and you know what? That’s exactly what was happening. Michael was on the slab in his backyard fulfilling his uncontrollable need to rake. I opened the window and yelled, “Michael! Go to bed!” No dice. He kept raking. And raking. And raking. I thought maybe he’d grow tired, but it wasn’t happening. An hour passed. Ninety minutes.

I finally called the cops.

You know, I would have called their case worker (or whoever was over there during days), but that person was never kind enough to introduce themselves. Probably in anticipation of a 3AM “Michael is raking the cement and you’ve got to make him stop” phone call.

It wasn’t the last time I had to call the cops on Michael.

The other time, and I’m chuckling as I write this, big huge Michael was jogging around the back yard of the house (fenced in) in just his drawers with one hand down the front side. Yeah, that’s what he was doing, but he was doing it “on the move.” Must be part of some new age exercise program, may have to give that a try. I really didn’t know whether to laugh my balls off or be horrified.

Seeing as we had an uber-religious family on the other side of our yard, I had to opt for the latter. Cops came, Michael freaked out, and his case worker got an earful from the officer.

Man, I’m going to hell.

The third time we had to alert the authorities came one night when we were sitting on the porch having a drink. We heard a POP come from inside their house, and all of a sudden Jimmy comes ambling out at (his) top speed, waving his arms so frantically I thought he might throw his balance off mid stride and catapult himself into traffic. The “conversation” went a little something like this:

EX: What’s wrong Jimmy?

Jimmy: Gah! Bah! Pbbffftt! Pow!

EX: Slow down, slow down… Do you need help?

Jimmy: (while nodding) Bah! Dah! Furrrrr…

EX: What?

Jimmy: Fur! Fur! Bah!

EX: Fur? Fire? Is there a fire?

Jimmy: Gah! Yah! Fur! Fur!

And then he took a dead legged lap around the yard yelling “Gah! Fur!”

Apparently, a light bulb had popped and had scorched the wall, so there was no fire to extinguish, but we knew we had saved the day for one crazy old bastard.

Oh my god am I ever going to burn…

Like Finding A Dollar In Your Pocket

Oh you lucky blog readers you…

My boss was supposed to be traveling over for a visit today. Instead, he called in sick. So instead of feigning the “focused and productive” face all day long, I can do what I usually do.

That, of course, is kick ass in spurts, take names when time allows, and pound out a couple thousand words to add to the collection.

I really don’t slack at work. I’m just one of those guys that takes two minutes to do what it takes most people fifteen to accomplish. Ask any girl I’ve porked (bah dum ching!). And since there is a solid mix between the proactive and the reactive nature of my job, I can usually budget blogging time in chunks throughout my day.

Some days, however, my lack of desire to edit what I’m clacking out on this keyboard here is combined with heavily interrupted three minute blogging sessions to create twenty five hundred words that just don’t make sense when all is said and done.

For that, my friends, I apologize.

And there are other days, heavily evidenced in last week’s mentally discombobulating series of posts, where I take myself entirely too seriously. And you know I “mean it” when I break out the italics.

I do want to mention that I have continued to re-read Friday and Saturday’s efforts, and just shake my fucking head at the way I really didn’t say what I was trying to say. So how about I distill it down to ten words or less? I’ll even italicize it, so you know I “mean it.”

”Internet Celebrity” is creepy. Weirdly, part of me craves it.

One post was supposed to set up the other. Instead, I got stuck explaining something else altogether, and that really didn’t go the way I had thought.

Whatever. My bad.

By the way, the UK’s own Poker Chiq asked me at the tables last night if I had a blog, and if so, which one was I? Aren’t I more “famous” than that? How am I going to complain further about my growing Internet Celebrity if I’m not even well-known in my own poker blogging circles? Come on people!

Speaking of the tables and last night, I bounced real early after getting aggressive with Ace King, and then pushing a steal re-raise with the hammer pre-flop against a guy that’s used to playing against Al Can’t Hang’s maniacal home game fish Lewey. Landow’s my boy, so it didn’t sting getting taken out by him, but I should have known better.

Two random search terms that found my blog today: ”are sharapova and kournikova lesbian lovers” and ”cumbersome bowties.” Were the former true, it’d be like Christmas every day of the year. I guess if they’re both hot and Russian it must be true. I mean, have you ever seen a video from TaTu? They almost have to be lesbians in that country just to stay warm.

And all across the world men are reading that paragraph, closing their eyes, and sighing that sigh of contentment.

Never one for segways, I have to mention that I do little things now and again to torture my dog. For example, he has the WORLD’S MOST ANNOYING DOG TOY, which is this hard plastic ball that features a ten second voice recorder. Any time the ball is jostled, I hear myself saying, “What’s that?!? Who’s there?!? Get the ball! Get the ball!” And then it smacks off the baseboards violently as he gets it as the ball repeats, “What’s that?!? Who’s there?!? Get the ball! Get the ball!” We also play this game in the middle of our in-house winter fetch sessions where I stand over his toy and continue to ask, “What do you want me to do? Do you know what I’m going to do?” until he barks.

My favorite game, just because this one drives him the most bonkers of any, is “Little Paw.” Basically, I pet the dog and talk to him, and then all of a sudden grab one of his paws while saying “Little Paw!” There are six places on my dog’s body he doesn’t want you messing with – four paws and his hind flanks on either side – but it’s the paws that drive him up the wall.

He’s really sensitive about people touching his paws, which means that clipping his nails is generally something I never do because it could potentially take all freaking day to accomplish. In the spring, summer, and fall it’s not a big deal because he can wear them down outside. Now though, he’s got fucking talons on each paw.

So early early this morning (in the 4AM hour), my dog started to do his little shuffle that he does to let me know he wants to be picked up and put on the bed. It’s a bad habit, and one I’m accommodating. I grab him off the floor (after we do our little just-out-of-arm’s-reach dance we do every night), and as I’m swinging him up and over the top of me to the other side of the bed, his talon rips a gash right in my chin. And it’s bleeding like mad.

The only thing that sucks worse than having to wake up for a moment at 4AM is having to wake up and get out of bed to get a Band-Aid at 4AM. What can I say? I’m a bleeder.

I was thinking of how I was going to explain this half inch tear in my chin if anyone asked, and I think I’ve settled on the following:”It’s nothing, really. I mean, he’s only like this when he drinks.

Back to last night’s tournament for a moment, I was thrilled to log in this morning and see that “on_thg” had taken it down. I had visited his blog a couple of times previously, but until last night I had absolutely no idea he was from my town.

Imagine my shock then when I’m scrolling through the tournament tables and see someone else from Grand Haven. I asked him if I should know him, and he responded that we had met, and that he knew my old man. Wouldn’t give me any more than that.

So I had to put my awesome ninja powers of detection to good use.

I Googled his screen name, tied him back to his blog, and went through the five months of archives in about three minutes to come up with the following clues:

”Child of the 80s” – means he’s around my age

“I’m bigger than you” – means he’s a big guy

“I can’t trust people because I work with liars and cheats for personal injury cases” – means he’s probably a lawyer

“I’m a golf nut” – means that’s where he likely knows my dad from

I put all those together, and came up with a pretty solid educated guess, which I nailed right on the head. Damn right I’ve got awesome ninja powers of detection. By the way? Via the wonders of bloglines.com, I think I caught you taking down a link to your “second favorite Australian,” undoubtedly in some sort of revisionist history editing frenzy to get the place cleaned up before the neighbors started coming over. J’accuse!

Here’s an open invite to THG to join us for the home game next (and any) time we have one. I never really got to know him very well, but his dad’s a real good guy, and I kinda remember his sister from my graduating class in high school.

Actually, I remember his sister as being slightly gawky and awkward her senior year, but if I’m not mistaken she turned into quite the good looking lady over the course of the next few years.

If I were a scientist, which when I think about this I really should have been, I would be working concurrently on two projects. The first would be some sort of formula that would help determine whether or not a gawky and awkward sixteen or seventeen year old girl would grow up to be more or less attractive than she is at that point, and by how much. The second project would be a time machine so I could go back and arm myself with that information.

Yeah, yeah…stock tips too. But first and foremost, the formula.

By the way THG, I’m not talking about your sister here, because I never really knew her in high school, but I do know more than a couple of girls from way back when that totally went in opposite directions, and it would have been nice to know which one was going to blossom and which was going to hit the (figurative, although it may as well be literal) wall.

If I could have locked up one of them early (again, figuratively), I probably would have went to my ten year reunion after all.

Tilt Proof

I played less than one full orbit on Monday, and less than one full hour on Tuesday. Why? Because I'm tilt proof.

I'm not going to let the online ridiculousness get to me. For instance, on Monday I was at the 25NL tables, and lost two hands in one orbit, sapping me of my entire $25 buy in.

The first? AK, the only caller was a short stack with $5. Flop is King high, I put her all in, she calls with K8. I was an 86% favorite and she caught her 8.

The second? AQ, and four of us see the flop for $3 each. I flop Broadway, TT pushes me all in with his set. I'm only a 65% favorite here, but I'll push. Runner-runner eights for his boat. Fuck PartyPoker.

Tuesday night featured the most mathematically improbable beats I have ever taken. I mean, I've lost to quads before, but two hands showing down within five seconds of each other, on two different sites (Party and Stars)?

On Stars I was playing a $5 two table SNG, had KT, and the turn gave me three Queens and a Ten. I pushed, and the dude slow rolled me with his call. Fuck him.

Five seconds later, I played a flush into the teeth of flopped quads. I knew that guy had a Nine down, I just didn't figure him for two. Crazy. I made the right read - almost - by playing a weak-kicker flush against him, but I didn't get the read dead-on right.

If you see me out on the street today, I'll be the one looking to the sky to make sure I don't get lit up by a lightning bolt. Later.

D-Fense

West Michigan has a chain of Wal-Mart Lite stores called “Meijer” (pronounced My-err), and they recently opened a “salon” inside from the “Great Clips” franchise.

Despite my best efforts on Saturday to give myself a haircut, I found I still needed to pay someone to clean up my head. I figured Great Clips would be the cheapest haircut in town. Hell, they’re in a grocery store.

For $12 I got a clean-up cut from the ugliest hot girl I’ve ever seen.

She had terrible hair, which I thought should have precluded her from touching anyone else’s head on principle. Thankfully, she was just re-buzzing my scalp and squaring off my neckline. Impossible to mess up (unless you’re me and trying to do it yourself) or give that trailer-park touch. She had braces, but just on top, with aqua blue rubber bands around the metal tooth girders. She had absolutely no ass and I think she borrowed her arms from the corpse of Karen Carpenter.

But oh-my-god-can-I-look-down-your-blouse-again? Please? Holy shit, for a skinny girl like that to be packing solid D’s was just impressive. Mind you, she was so fuggly that had she auditioned for a strip club they would have sent her out in a bottomless burka. If I were taking her on a date, it would have to be a Saints football game so the paper bag on her head wouldn’t be out of place. As a matter of fact, if I were to sleep with the girl I think I’d have to try that asphyxiation fetish thing, because plastic shopping bags could only help.

But none of that really mattered because from her shoulders down to her navel she was perfect. Dead on perfect. And she actually smelled good enough that I kicked around the “would I?” question in my head for about thirty seconds.

That it took twenty nine seconds to confirm my initial “no” was a testament to the D cup. I wouldn’t have asked her out, but I’d have tipped her another $10 to lift her shirt up like it was Mardi Gras. Would have been well worth the cash.

So, on the way out of the store I realized I needed to hit an ATM. For some inexplicable and unexplained reason the ATMs at the two local branches of my bank don’t accept my card. Their ATMs do everywhere else, but just not in the city in which I live. Again, no explanation.

I had my card ready to pop in, but then realized that I was going to pay $2.50 in fees to get money I could get from my debit card if I bought anything in the checkout line. So I grabbed a cup for a frozen coke and waited in the self-checkout line behind the two people currently checking out to buy an $.89 drink to avoid a $2.50 fee.

And I waited. And waited.

The guy at the first terminal had rang everything in, hadn’t bagged it, and was trying to pay in cash. Of course the dollar bill reader wasn’t taking his bills on the first try. $16.86 was his total, and he put a $5 bill in from his wallet. It spit it out. He put that bill back in his wallet, took another $5 out, and tried again. Rejected. He put that bill back, took another out, and that time it took. But the next didn’t.

How many fives does this guy have?

He repeated this for the singles he was using to get from $15 to $17, and when it all finally went through, then he gingerly bagged his groceries.

I wanted to Kerrigan him.

The guy in the other lane was buying wine in the box, and besides the ID check, he challenged the bored cashier on the price at which it rang up, and demanded a price check.

Ugh.

When I finally got through, I got $50 back – entirely in fives – and the frozen coke machine was broken, which is something I suppose I would have learned had I went through a much quicker moving traditional checkout line.

Ugh again.

And then I bought stamps this morning from a self-serve machine at the post office and got $3 in change back in Sacagawea dollars.

Terrific.

Reminds me of a little story. On the FX network they used to have this morning show that I sometimes watched in college. Tom Bergeron of “Hollywood Squares” fame was the host. Anyway, they had a segment where they did an “Antiques Roadshow” sort of thing with collectibles. This guy brings in a framed $2 bill and was talking about how this $2 bill was a present from his grandfather or something, and he had kept it all these years and was excited now because (I guess) $2 bills are out of production and he wanted to know what it was worth.

The collectibles guy just deadpanned back, “I’d say that’s worth about two dollars.”

Good stuff.

So Super Bowl Weekend is coming up, and since my Lions have never made the big game, I don’t have many memories at all that center around the big day.

Except one.

A few years ago, before the ex and I were married, we went out to her uncle’s ritzy apartment building where they always threw a lavishly catered private party in the residents-and-guests only bar. Not only did I end up winning something like $200 on my squares, but the ex got hammered, twisted her ankle badly, threw a whole bunch of vicodin on top of the Jack Daniels, and then basically goaded me into this bizarre role playing scenario when we got home. Had we videotaped it, the only shop that would have carried the footage would have been the one Nic Cage visited in 8MM. She was so drunk/high off of the booze and meds that I would bet she wouldn’t and couldn’t possibly remember how weird she asked me to get. I actually feel just a little bit dirty just thinking about it. I think I was about half a step away from putting on a codpiece, a bowler hat, and calling a few of my droogs over to help me out.

You know I only bring that up because I’m fairly certain she stops by here periodically. She’s knocked up again (which is more fun to say about your ex-wife than “she’s pregnant with her third child from her husband of a few years”), so if she reads the above, I’m sure she’ll be annoyed or wistful. I’m not sure which. It’s not like sleeping with me has ever left anyone feeling “wistful” in the end, so I’m going to figure on the former. “Annoyed,” yes. “Bored,” sure. “Unfulfilled,” absolutely. “Wistful?” Probably not.

By the way, ex-wife of mine, please do stay out of the comments widget. “Plausible deniability” is what I’m able to use to put the blinders on and pretend like you’re not actually stopping by. I’m really not that dumb though.

I only play dumb on TV.

Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?

Man, $12/hr sustained over more than a dozen hours this weekend has really left me on a high. I can only really pinpoint four big mistakes at the 25NL tables that cost me “big.”

One – I called Daddy’s $11 all-in with Ace Ten of clubs after telling him, “I’ll double you up.” He doubled up in style, taking two nines and making them four.

Two – In my only session at 25NL six-max, I called an all-in with Ace/Weak of spades when two spades and an Ace flopped. I knew I was beat at the moment, but was rolling the dice to see if I could suck out. By the way, this $25 loss knocked me down to $55 “in the bank,” which was my low point before I made my run back up to $240.

Three – I had an enormous stack, somewhere in the $225 neighborhood, and saw a raise of $2 with another three-figure stack and AJo in the hole. Flop brought two nines and a King. I made a pot sized bet, he called. Turn brought another King. I was pretty sure he didn’t have a King at that point, so I made another pot bet. Again, he just called. River was a blank, and I pushed a bet out there that was just shy of being pot sized, hopefully portraying a bet that I wanted to make just expensive enough to pay me off on my boat, just cheap enough to call. He did call – with Aces. I don’t know how he could chase that far with the boat on the board, and I don’t know how he could have read me as bluffing. Maybe had I slow-played it a bit, but I thought that maybe my bets could be read as Nines full instead of Kings full – either way I was sure he didn’t have the boat. Right read by me, puzzling call by him, and I was out $45 or so on that play alone. I still maintain that I played that hand more correctly than he did.

Four – I chased two all-ins on an innocuously low flop from two players with $25 each – I had Queens, one had Tens, one had Kings. Some solid pre-flop raising action should have told me I was beat, but whattareyagonnado? Kings held up, and that cost me $25.

$106 on three mistakes and one play that should have worked. By the way, that same play worked on Iggy later, but I slowplayed it a bit more, and got lucky he didn’t get aggressive back at me.

I played tight, solid, aggressive poker this weekend. And I can’t tell you how good it felt to actually see results.

Speaking of feeling good, I want to acknowledge the frustrated funkiness of the two posts I threw up this weekend. Notice I said “acknowledge” and not “apologize for.” If I ever were to figure out what it took to be truly happy in this life of mine, it’d cause a fundamental emotional shift the likes of which we haven’t seen since Peter Cetera took the reins from Robert Lamm. I can only imagine what would happen to this blog if I got married to a wonderful woman (which would be nice this time), sired a kid and had a terrific job…

September 22, 2007: Little Santino did the cutest thing today! He was eating his applesauce while we were watching the Lions game, and he took a finger full of it out of the jar and wiped it under his eyes like black paint, pointed to the TV and said, “foobah!” LOL! He’s giving me so much inspiration! And Melissa and I were just laughing and laughing! Finally, she offered to take Santino out to Nana’s house for the afternoon so I could watch the Lions and write my article for the Press in peace. She is such a saint! I don’t know what I ever did before I found her and found Jesus!

Holy shit, there’s a glimpse into a future I don’t think I’m ready to realize. Every time I complain from now on, someone please remind me that I could be sipping Chardonnay while wearing Dockers and talking about my 401K with my golf buddies instead, would you?

And yes, I am saying playing 13 hours of PartyPoker while completely nude over the course of a weekend is preferable to drinking Chardonnay and talking about mutual funds. “No load” my ass.

So I shaved my head again this weekend, but not down to the stubble like I used to. Actually did a pretty goddamn amateurish job on it too. So bad, in fact, that I have to go pay $13 for a “haircut” just to clean the head up, which was what I was trying to avoid in the first place. I cut it all the way down using the 5/8” guard on the blade, which puts my hair on the North side of “cancer patient,” but on the South side of “manageable.”

There’s a small patch right at the top of my head that I completely missed too. It’s easily three to four times longer than the rest of my hair on my head. That’s always good.

I also finally got my W2s in the mail on Friday, and immediately dove in to figure out my return. I had originally thought that I would be stuck with a shitty return, something in the $200 neighborhood, but was pleasantly surprised when it totaled up to $800! Count on seeing me at Greektown in Detroit some Saturday night in late February. Unless, of course, I can find a cheap flight out to Vegas on the spur of the moment or something.

Aside from that, thanks for putting up with me this weekend. I’m not a morose motherfucker very often, but this past week was awfully difficult. For now, thanks and I’ll see you on the tables...

Last Night...

Queens. Man, I don't like fucking around with the Hilton Sisters*. Especially at a blogger-filled table.

But it was G-Rob, and I think I'm a little less wary of him than I would be landing that hand against Iggy, for instance.

*(By the way, on "Bernie Mac" this week, they had kids playing poker and calling pocket Queens "Mary-Kate and Ashley.")

G-Rob is on my right, and bumps the $.50 blind to $1.25 before it got back to me. I raise another dollar, he raises another two, I put another two on top of that, and before you know it, we've got $10 in the pot pre-flop.

K87, all diamonds.

G-Rob immediately pushes the rest of his stack in, $18.45.

Hmm... I go into the tank temporarily, then type "i really don't think you have a king" in chat. Double As says "now we're talkin," and Iggy pushes me over the edge with "GAMBBOL."

I push.

Turn is a 2. So is the river. I wince temporarily, looking for the hammer - but the pot is pushed to me. AhJd from G-Rob, and he doesn't catch that last diamond he needed.

"a hole"

"nh"

G-Rob is pissed.

I, however, had one of those life-affirming sessions all weekend that really made everything else feel all right for more than a little while. The basic stats? 13 hours of effort, +$167.91.

Yeah, I'll take it.

Saturday, 330PM

I had just been whacked on a 6-max NL table for my $25 buy-in, and had folded steadily for three orbits on a full ring table when I felt like I needed to do something about it.

(on the phone)

Bob: Hey, what's up?

BG: I'm still getting cold decked. Going on three weeks now. I'm only calling you so I can say something out loud I want those bastards at PartyPoker to hear. I've got the software running, I know they're listening.

Bob: Ok, what's that?

BG: I just want to state out loud, and for the record, that I'm never depositing money in this fucking site again. I'm going to burn through my last $55...

At this point I'm dealt KQo and limp in for $.50

BG: ...and never play here again.

Flop comes KK4

BG: Uh, wait a second Bob. I had King Queen and just flopped a set of Kings. Whoa! Some dude just pushed all-in! I'm calling that. No way he has King Four. I got called by another guy!

Turn and river come, $71 is pushed to me (I was against KJ and AA)

BG: Um, I just tripled up. Maybe they are listening.

I took my stack all the way to $225 before cashing out at $160. Maybe I was being just a little too harsh with my good friends at PartyPoker. And, by the way?

THERE'S MY MOTHERFUCKING MOVIE CHECK.