Living to Tell

Awash in them

2014-04-30T20:11:00.001-07:00

Words.

They seem to be tumbling out. Writing two things at the same time. One a new short story, the tenth and I believe the last in this collection. And a blog post about my best friend from high school and most of my twenties who I traveled all over the country with and who I just learned died a couple of weeks ago. Pieces of those travels have turned up in my stories. I hope I did them justice.

Bones

2014-04-27T22:33:00.001-07:00

Miracles run out. There's an allotment. How many times can you roll a seven. An eleven. Roll it anyway. Maybe there's one left.

The Way I Heard It

2014-03-16T23:17:00.001-07:00

This isn't about me. But it might have been, the way I heard it.
She said, You fell in love with me, didn’t you?
He didn't want to own up to any of it. No matter what his answer. If he had an answer.
That was stupid, she said. Just plain stupid. I'd always suspected your decision making skills.
It's more of an art, he wanted to tell her. A black art . Except he didn’t tell her anything. Not yet.

The Home Team w/comments by Sideways

2014-03-05T13:06:00.002-08:00

I don’t cheer for the home team. I haven’t for a long time. When I was a boy I rooted for the teams I was expected to – the Packers – Green and Gold gods to be bowed down to. But something turned for me – it all seemed so arbitrary, so without thought. You happen to be born in a certain place, to a particular set of people and because of that happenstance you are a member of the tribe. The tribe that says we are the best, we are the chosen.

The logic of it embarrassed me. Really?, I wanted to ask. Really? What if you had been born one hundred miles away? The more I thought about it the crazier it seemed. I wanted to meet the other team. Then another and another.

Some – or most – of any tribe are needed to root for the home team. Without them, I think stadiums would be empty as importing loyalty is harder than growing your own. Call us brainwashed robots or not, this mindless adherence might seem arbitrary but it is necessary to preserve culture and customs. But then we have to decide what is really worth preserving and why we are afraid of change.

Do we need stadiums? Do we need the Bread and Circuses? But you hit the right spot – what is worth preserving. It seems it is often the wrong things – the superficial things that get preserved until a culture becomes a thin shell of its former self.

Recently I had a discussion with a friend about being attracted to what my friend D calls “the other”. It’s been, if not an issue then a theme, a thread I’ve tugged at trying to understand. I thought that perhaps my friend S could help me. I’m white – she’s, of course, not. Except I’ve come to the conclusion that it really doesn’t have much to do with appearance but more with character – more with the heart, one that hasn’t been completely blinded by the chance of culture.

I don’t have that much of an insight on why some seek out the other. I’ve imagined it’s a desire for life to be a little more complicated, stepping away from cookie cutters and boxes and all those clichés we feel trapped in everyday. Perhaps it’s a desire to control your own destiny. I do understand why we don’t seek out the other. When the world is spinning - a collision of culture, language, morals, even color - you have to hold on to something. Is there anything wrong with that? Except it’s mostly a losing battle.

Yes, Sideways, I think that is right – but I would substitute rich for complicated. I am currently writing a story where one character tells another that believing we are holding onto something is simply how we get through the day.

I have had strong friendships with Spanish men, Native Americans, Asians, but really it’s been women. They have let me in easily and deeply. With men there are other obstacles – power maybe. Maybe I try harder with women. Maybe I am more myself with women.

Don’t women only give half the story?

No, they are at least 75% of the story.

Or maybe I wanted to prove something to myself and to them. Prove that if you open the heart the rest of it comes along. It doesn’t matter if the heart is from Argentina or Iran or Vietnam or India, or even the high Hopi mesas of northern Arizona. If you stay open to the hum, it can come from anywhere. Be grateful when it does.

The ABCs

2014-01-10T12:39:00.001-08:00

Two of my oldest friends are gay. They are a bit older than me, and for some New Year's reason I was thinking of them. B is the one I've tried to stay connected to. And A, too - because what's a B without an A.

When I met B at DePaul it was pretty clear she did not like men very much. I couldn't blame her. I guess I decided to show her it didn't need to be an absolute. I'm not sure why that was so important to me, but it was. I guess my plan was to enter every window she opened.

And I did. Sentences again.

Sentences were the first window. She seemed to approve of what I read. I think we talked about that, but it was a long time ago. Maybe what we talked about was other people - people we worked with - we both liked M, our boss at the library.

I started writing and she approved of the first writer who took me under her wing - this writer, C, (I swear the A and the B and C are really these women's first initials) was also gay. The world only seems like it is rich with coincidences. I think it is something much more mysterious than that.

B started editing my stories - pushing me to say what I mean and not to just sound pretty. It's still something I struggle with. When C arranged for me and a couple of other writers she had under her generous wings to give a reading at a local bookstore it was at B's house where I sat nervously waiting to head over to Women and Children First, the bookstore where I was to read. B gave me a half of a Xanax which I took but I'm not sure if it made any difference. I was still anxious. But we went and I read and it was okay as the things we fear mostly are.

That led to a fellowship at Sewanee and more readings and a lot more stories. B is still one of the first to read a finished story. She still encourages me. So many years. Such a good person.

I'm not sure where this has led me except to be thankful for the people who have pushed me to be honest in what I write and how not to be afraid to say what's in the heart. Say it on the page. Say it in life.

Sometimes this gets me in trouble - sometimes it has me saying things to people that they might be surprised to hear. Sometimes it surprises me. I admit I like to see the surprise.

The other night I wrote to S, a new friend. I told her some things that had happened a long time ago. I had never told anyone these things before. But I wasn't thinking about that. I guess I wasn't thinking. And that's okay even if now I am slightly embarrassed for sharing these things. But that will have to be okay too.

The heart doesn't often lead to trouble - that's more of a mind thing.

Shooting Sparks

2013-12-24T07:52:00.002-08:00

Recently I have been thinking about the brain and how synapses fire and what throws the spark. And a bit ago I sent someone a story I wrote and that someone knew exactly why the last sentence needed to be there. That's unusual. Trust me, it is.

There are billions of brains in the world but only some of them connect, fire at the same frequency. It's probably tied to a theory of mine - see: The Hum of Invisible Wires. It may seem like I spend way too much time thinking about this. I might. But the fact is it is rare to spark - or at least it is for me. Admittedly my receptors may have been altered over the years - maybe they now require more to fire. But I don't think that's even half of it.

It may be sentences. It may be as simple as that.

I have met a bunch of really smart people. Interesting people, people I have loved and in some cases still do. But there is this other quality that may be rarer than smart or even love. It's this simpatico - how sentences - what they say, how they say it find their way to their perfect receptors. Mesh like gears. Their sentence might be just the perfect length, the mot juste perfectly placed. Whatever. But it rings the perfect bell, the bell you thought only you heard and then it rings all the way across the country. Maryland say, or DC. It rings all the way from there and you don't even like the East coast.

It's just good to say hello.

Motion and at rest

2012-08-19T01:23:00.000-07:00

Others count sheep. I count bodies. Eighteen year old body falling from a hotel window. Twenty-three year old body twitching on a bathroom floor. Body through windshield. Body stopped by bullet. As the poet/mortician said, bodies in motion and at rest.

Counting doesn't help. It's a construct that belies the lie. What helps is to say the names: Camille. Michael. Steven. John. It only helps a little. Say a prayer for the living. What remains.

The Hum of Invisible Wires

2011-10-14T09:05:00.000-07:00

A number of years ago I read a book titled Fire in the Mind. George Johnson wrote it. At the time he was a science writer for the New York Times. He lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Maybe he still does. I may have lived there when I read it, but I live a long way from there now.

I had been interested in science in the same way I had been interested in a well constructed sentence. I'm certain there has to be at least a minor connection. An ordered thread connecting the two.

Johnson's book - maybe the whole idea of the book - was based on the seemingly incongruous conceptions of creation and the universe shared by the scientists at the Santa Fe Institute and the Tewa Indians who live in the the pueblos of northern New Mexico.

The Santa Fe Institute is a quirky thank tank nestled in the Sangre de Cristo's north of Santa Fe. Murray Gell-Mann, who discovered the quark was there, as were two fellows who thought they discovered the underlying laws that govern the rise and fall of the stock market. They also came up with a system to beat Roulette, or maybe it was Blackjack - I forget which. This is only to say that the scientists at the Institute were not your typical academics. For a time - perhaps he still does - the writer Cormac McCarthy kept an office there. He liked the science. The scientists, I guess, liked his sentences.

Much of the science Johnson described in the book, especially the quantum-mechanics, passed right over my non-scientific head. But I was able to to grab onto just enough for it to feel exciting, to fill me with wonder.

The Tewa natives I knew a bit more about. I'd been to the pueblos - Santa Clara, Santa Domingo, Tesuque, Taos, and San Ildefenso. I spent a good amount of time at San Ildefenso. I dated a woman who lived there - she was Hopi but had been married to a man from the pueblo, and her sons were young and living with her, so she was allowed to stay. For a pale guy from Chicago I ended up knowing a lot of Indians (they preferred being called Indians, trust me), and their Indian ways.

What attracted me to scientists and Indians was the sense that they carried the secrets. Secrets that explained things I felt, but could not explain. I imagined the universe to be layered in strata to which I did not have access. I wanted in.

My Hopi friend tolerated my questions. They were a game we played. I'd ask, and she would say, "I can't talk about that." And then she would, but in sentences that had their own strata for me to puzzle through.

From the science and my Indian friends, most deeply from my Hopi friend, I came to see what they held in common was their belief in connectivity. The living to the dead. Present to past. All of time the same time. How a person moves through it both as particle and wave which brings me to the hum. How could it not? My living proof of what the Tewa and the Hopi know from birth - before birth. What some physicists learn in other ways: the hum of invisible wires. Which for me is the invisible connection I have felt and sometimes still do.

I don't know the exact math, but I have met a good number of people. Some of them pleasant, some less so. Some just plain toxic. But with a few there is a hum. It can be with a man or a woman. It can be sexual or not. But there's the hum. The hum that connects. At the level of the quark, the big bang, the Hopi mother, the thread that is thrown out across space and time. And from time to time you get lucky enough to find what you have broken off from. You reform that invisible connection. And it hums. You meet someone and they can be so different - so unexpected, and yet there's the hum. Listen.

Steve Job's Sister Liked Me

2011-10-10T18:48:00.000-07:00

A friend who otherwise meant well, sent me an email to say she had been reading articles about Steve Jobs and his passing. She said an article in the Times mentioned his sister, the writer, Mona Simpson. And how seeing Mona's name made her think of me. What she meant was the me I used to be.

In 1994 I was living on Tulane NE in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I'd landed there after quitting a life I'd had in Chicago and decided one day to take a drive. The thought being not unlike the title of Simpson's best known novel, Anywhere but Here. I rented a casita from a daffy, bead-collector, who was a former-Chicagoan herself. I wrote stories. I did not work. The not working and the writing stories and and the much bigger sky forged for me a different me.

I sent out the stories to literary magazines and sometimes to the glossies. The stories, some quickly, some slowly, were returned with the thanks but no thanks. Sometimes an editor took the time and the care to write a few lines. Some of the lines were encouraging. The wildly eccentric Gordon Lish sent me a couple of bizarre notes from his The Quarterly. I've saved those. One I seem to remember began, "This starts good."

I digress.

That first summer was nearly over when I saw NPR was soliciting stories for their show, The Sound of Writing, which was sponsored by PEN's Syndicated Fiction Project. If a story was purchased it was to be read on the show and then having that pedigree, they would shop it around. I sent them two and one day my bead-collecting landlord brought me my mail, two of the manila envelopes I used to send out my stories. They had made their way back home.

Except one had found another home. A nice home. Mona Simpson, the final judge that year, picked my "Helpless" out of the slush and said, yes. I forget how many stories were chosen that year - twenty-something, I want to say - out of maybe a thousand submitted. Many were writers I'd read and admired. Writers with multiple books and New Yorker cachet. And me. And Tess Gallagher.

Tess Gallagher, the poet, and sometimes short story writer, and I had been corresponding. She had been married to Raymond Carver, a hero of mine, when I still had heroes. From him I learned some things about writing. What to put in, and more importantly, what to leave out. The power of the unsaid.

Carver had died six years earlier and I wanted to find Tess and tell her what he meant to me. I went to a reading she gave in Chicago at Barbara's Bookstore, but I was too timid to approach her. But after I settled in New Mexico I wrote her a letter and mailed it to a bookstore in Port Angeles, Washington where she lived. I probably wasn't the first to do so as the bookstore passed the letter on and soon I received one back. In it she told me that shyness was for cats, and should our paths cross again I needed to make myself known.

And now we had both been lucky enough to have won the PEN award. Luck meant a lot to Carver - he wrote about it often - the good and the bad of it. The crazy ways it shaped a life. Having my story chosen seemed, at the time, the good crazy. Mona Simpson had been a friend of Raymond Carvers- he had even written a poem for. She knew Tess well. And somehow I found myself a part of that circle.

I wrote Tess to say how great it was that she won, that I won. I wrote to her on my birthday - and she wrote back saying she hadn't heard, and to thank me. She said she had been out of the country but now she was back and was writing me from Ray's grave - it was the anniversary of his death. She liked to read to him, she said. He loved to hear good news.

Turn the Page

2011-05-05T09:43:00.000-07:00

It seems I've somehow started writing again. I finished a new story and immediately started another which I am five pages into. And here I am noodling again.

Last night noodling on this new story which as yet does not have a title - which is bothering me a little but not too much as writing anything is such a marked improvement. Then I noticed this.

The pattern is I will write long-handed (too often long-winded) in pencil. I'll type it up - print it - edit it, and try to move forward. Moving forward is the funny part. Rather than turn the page and start scribbling - I will scribble up and down the margins. Tentacles circling around the printed text. But almost never will I turn the page. Afraid, I guess, to face again all that white. The bright white abyss of a blank page.

Full Stop

2011-02-09T12:56:00.000-08:00

I almost always speak or write in truncated lines. Cutting off the end where it needs to be cut. My nephew finds this amusing, says, "You talk so funny". Where funny means different. Different, I hope, in not an entirely bad way.

I admit it is done for effect. Though I'm not certain what effect is desired. For someone who has spent so much time alone - and for whom those separate, wide-open spaces have made a difference, have, at times, been a lonely blessing, words still flow. I'll run off a text, an email, fiddle with a story. The lines stay consistent. The rhythm of the full stop.

I doubt that I always wrote and spoke this way. A lifetime of reading played its part. At some point in the '80s I stumbled upon, or was given, Raymond Carver. He, echoing Hemingway, showed me how a sentence could work. Do its verb and noun work (adjectives and especially adverbs very much off the reservation). Now, some twenty-something years later, I'm reading Carver's biography. Trying to write again myself. Twelve pages into a story that I've been writing for six months. For forever.

0%

2010-07-07T02:02:00.000-07:00

There are exactly eleven ways in which you can love a woman. Or as Richard Yates claimed, there are eleven kinds of loneliness. I'm just saying.

Let me put it another way.

Last night - almost all the night, I laid awake thinking: this is what it feels like to be 0%. It was a new sensation - mixed with what, just hours ago, felt like the whole wide breathing world.

Short breaths. Then long. Breaths that echoed don't stop. Breaths to take your breath away.

How to wrap your mind around that?

The sweetest teacher you ever had hands you the grade: 0%. All the while thinking you were the apple in her eye.

Tecolote on the Brazos

2010-05-19T05:49:00.000-07:00

Once alongside the Bravos River in southeast Texas I spent a night with a woman whose hair glistened black in the arid moonlight. She swore she was a native. I didn't believe her, to my dying days I'll believe I was right. She lacked the necessary passion. She talked too much. There was the question of the owl.

There's the particular scent of a woman. There's also the sound of a woman. Intimate sounds. Barely registered sounds. Sounds that sear. Sibilant Spanish S's that say yes. The just audible breath that catches with the moan of a dove. A sharp intake of breath, its urgent release.

To borrow a phrase: My whole life I cheated days. As if I were the blank tape recording moments for safe keeping.

Once alongside where the Rio Grande and Red Rivers meet in the high desert of northern New Mexico, I heard what sounded like - because to compare is to record - an owl. I swear to you she sounded like an owl.

A Book and a Chair

2010-05-11T20:39:00.000-07:00

For over a year now - maybe as long as two, I'd lost the connection to words and sentences and the necessary life they provide. Losing the sweet rhythms of language, I lost a part of myself. I wanted it back, but I didn't know how to find it.

And then a friend gave me a book. It doesn't matter the title, the author, but it was a book that slowed me down, put me in a chair, and embraced me. Teased out the what I'd been looking for. It made me take pencil to paper, now fingers to keys, to write this and thank her.

Book Snob Rides the El

2009-08-12T14:04:00.000-07:00

My mother has made the claim - all right my whole family has, that I am a snob. Perhaps, but is that such a bad thing? If I am a snob it is more along the lines of a very particular, slightly screwy take on culture and what's right and what's just plain wrong. For example - back when I frequented bars a fair amount I held strong opinions on what made for a great bar and what didn't. Weeds, O'Rourkes, The Old Towne Ale House (the early years), Cassidy's all made the cut. Butch McGuire's definitely did not. I could tell you about movies and places to live and music but I won't bore you.

I'll just mention this: Books and the writers who write them. Surprisingly enough people still read books. Every day on the El I see people reading books. I'll admit that I almost never approve of what they are reading, but at least they are reading, they are holding a book in their hands (ah, and I mean a book made of paper). And every once in awhile, like today, I will see someone reading a book that gives me hope and makes me smile. Just across from me I eyed Birds of America by Lorrie Moore and it was being read.

RIP CSF

2009-06-05T06:59:00.001-07:00

She said that if I belonged there, the place would embrace me. Being from Chicago I thought her ideas were a bit squishy. But this was New Mexico and wild horses were neighing on the mesa - the moon appeared bigger than I'd ever seen it - we'd toked up some. I was open to something new. And she was right. The place did embrace me and the College of Santa Fe was a big part of it, and now it's effectively gone.

When I first settled in New Mexico I rented a guest house from a crazy woman in Albuquerque who rented to me even though I didn't have a job - but she was from Chicago and had worked at DePaul as well, so how could she not trust me? Eventually she tossed me out, but that is another story.

That first year in New Mexico I had enough money where I didn't have to work so I would explore around and every afternoon at 1:00 I went to a coffee house called Uncommon Grounds and sat outside on the patio where I drank coffee and wrote. I wrote eight stories in as many months and met some writers who invited me to join their group and six of those stories eventually got published and one won a PEN Syndicated Fiction award. I felt good. The squishy thinking woman had been right.

The money eventually ran out and I scrambled to find a job. It turned out that the College of Santa Fe (CSF) needed a Circulation Supervisor and I applied. The interview went well, I thought, and when I was walking out of the building one of the women who interviewed me came running up and offered me the job on the spot. I felt that embrace again.

CSF was a great place. It was an arty school in an arty town. Writers, painters and sculptors - the whole arty lot were around. It was in the air - in the pores. I met great writers and became friends with some of them - Greg Glazner, Arthur Sze, Julie Shigekuni, Jon Davis and many others. Some of them read my stories - I house-sat for Greg. And some of the students I met there - some who worked for me, went on to be published writers - Gabe Gomez, Danielle Deulen, Eddie Chuculate.

But it didn't end as well as it started. Not much does. The library director who I was close to died, and the school always on shaky financial footing got shakier. It felt a little like a broken heart when I left for California, and to watch it go under now, tugs at the heart again.

All Jittery

2009-04-26T03:30:00.000-07:00

It's not caffeine - or even 5-hour. No, it's the scent of the coin. A free-roll into a $3100 tournament. What a beautiful country. Harrah's decides to shoot up something they're calling the Chicago Poker Classic with a $3100 buy-in. Harrah's wants to own the Chicago-land Poker market, and now they do. And in their corporate big-hearted way they decide to give up 50-something seats on the 3 and the 9, both p and a m for like two weeks. And who but our hero is sitting in on Monday night when he has to go work on Tuesday - but, hey, it's only 7:30, an hour-and-a-half to the next draw. What's there to say, but I'm in.

The pm 9 rolls around and the kind lady pulls the lucky table. Which is 21 where the hero is sitting his should-be-at-home butt. 21 the table hollers and the kind lady walks over says, deal. (The deal here is the lucky seat at the table that draws the high card wins a free seat into the tournament). Hero sits the 3 seat. Dealer deals 3, 4 ACE. Hero shoots dealer a big thumbs up and the ACE of clubs holds up.

Now what? Play aggressive - cause, hey, it's their money ($). Can you say free-roll? Or, do you play Lock-Down-Poker (LDP) because, hey, if you just make the money ($) you're probably going to make $4000, and depending on turn out, 1st might pay out like $120, 000.

Buckle-up boys and girls.

Me and Viet

2009-04-17T08:06:00.000-07:00

I first became aware of Vietnam when I was in high school and the folks I ran with generally thought the war a bad thing. It defined the group politically and it was a good way to take a stand against parents and authorities of all types. Oh, and the draft. That was a bad thing , too. Scary bad.

But I got lucky. Real lucky. 18 and eligible and draft ends. How about that for variance? Peace-out, as they say.

Jump forward - quite a bit forward. Late 80's or something and I still don't know what I want to do. But I'm a reader, always have been. So I'm reading, and suddenly I think I can write. Blame Carver, blame LdG who turned me on to Dubus. Blame Anshaw who said there was something there and made me believe I should apply to Sewanee, which I did.

Which is where I met O'Brien who had just published the best fiction ever written about the war. Read: The Things They Carried. No really, I mean, read it.

And O'Brien played poker, though not all that well (Kent Nelson did - believe it- little can full of coins and bills - tough dude) - plus he drank less than me which made us even, I guess. Which oddly enough brings me around to D D who is now doing her PhD at Utah the same place where M S did hers and she brings us around to Sewanee and O'Brien and bottles of gin in the trunk - god, can the world be that small?

And why is it that, proportionately, there are more great Vietnamese poker players than any other ethnic group?

Which brings me to D, my own private Viet - who hates poker - but allows me to play so long as I don't bore her with the stories. Too much.

A man of the cloth?

2009-04-13T07:40:00.000-07:00

In my profile here I list Religion as the Industry I am part of. This is, I had thought, an exaggeration. But a funny thing that happened on the way to work today has given me pause. Is it possible to be a man of the cloth and not even know it? Was an Industry listing meant to be humorous really an unconscious leap into the truth? Have I entered the twilight zone?

It happened like this:

I'm waiting on the corner for the bus when a car stops and its horn beeps. I peer in and an Indian man sporting a long beard is motioning to me. He looks vaguely familiar as so many Indian men do. He continues to motion and I am unsure exactly what he wants so I open the car door.

"Come in," he says. "I give you a ride." He says this with an accent.

I am surprised because an Indian man with an accent has never before stopped and offered me a ride to the El. There have, of course, been numerous cab rides with similar sounding and looking men, but those were business transactions and while those men may have looked Indian, they were for the most part Paki. I digress.

"I always see you on the bus," he says. "I often thought that some day I would sit and talk with you."

I'm thinking, WTF? But in a friendly manner I say, "Well, thank you for the ride."

And then he asks, "Are you in the clergy?"

When I explain that he must have mistaken me for some other holy man, he says again, "Yes, I always see you on the bus. I thought I could talk to you, and now I am."

It's a short ride to the El, and a less lazy man would leave a few minutes earlier and walk. But that man is not me. I am the man who is mistaken for the clergy and the clergy are given rides.

When we get to the El I thank the Indian man for his trouble. He says it is no trouble at all. I nod. He nods. Then I call D to share this story. She says, "Weren't you scared?"

Scared? Of a Gandhi-like Samaritan? He and I are cut from the same cloth. There is nothing we fear.

Trust the Russian?

2009-03-16T10:52:00.000-07:00

A brief example of how I continue to run bad at the tables: Saturday playing 1/2. Within the first hour of a ten-hour session I am dealt a set three times, one straight, and quads. Pretty sweet, huh? Good start. Should be up - Something. Except I am down $160! Don't ask.

Much later in this roller coaster session, where after hours of playing tight, tight, tight - I finally claw myself back to even when this hand comes up. In middle position I limp in with 8, 7 (but it was SUITED). Three of us see an un-raised flop that comes 7, 7, Q rainbow. Check, check, I bet $20 - and get one caller. I'm thinking, nice. A, Q, maybe. Turn is a 2. I reach for chips and the young Russian (or Eastern European - hard to tell - they all sound the same, and are starting to menace the tables with their tough-as-nails play) whispers to me, don't do it. But I do. I toss in another $20. He calls.

Back story - this same whispering Russian-Eastern-European-whatever, has been caught running three fairly big bluffs. He has been heard to say, okay, no more bluffing. The river is an A. There are no straight or flush draws. If indeed he had A, Q, he just made two pair. As I reach for chips, I hear his voice in my head, don't do it. But there is exactly one hand that beats mine - and come on, this is Poker - I'm supposed to trust a whispering Russian-whatever is looking out for my best interest and is warning me I'm beat by the only possible hand that can beat mine? That he doesn't want all my chips? Right. And when in an unsure voice I say, same bet his reply is, of course, all-in. Whatever. I push in the last of my stack. He turns over pocket Q's. Nice hand, sir.

On a semi-cheerier note: The next day I had a free-roll into the Poker Stars $200,000 Sunday Guarantee. There were only 29,000 entries. They paid out to 4270. By a miracle , I survive to the money. We get down to 3120 players. I have an average stack. It's become shove-city when I wake up with A, A. The blinds are 2400, 1200 and I make it 10,000 and the BB shoves. I get it in great against his A, J until he runs down a straight. Still, I cashed - survived 26,000 players. Whatever.

ed. note: the author is aware that 7, big would also be a winning or chopping hand against his, but the case 7 was inadvertently mucked face-up pre-flop. the author regrets the omission.

That virtual yet tactile touch

2009-03-07T01:14:00.000-08:00

It must have been a phone company. AT&T? That had the tag line, "Reach out and touch someone". It was a Great line if only because I still have it lodged somewhere deep in that part of the cortex that believes and believes deeply in such nonsense. Reach Out. Touch.

Because I'm so easily touched.

You move away and you move away. Just for the sake of moving away. Sometimes. Just the other day at the WORK I less than love, I counted up at least three - count 'em - 3, jobs that most people would never leave. Yet.

And so you stay up too late and in between virtual poker hands you get a virtual touch on the shoulder, on the heart, asking why Roth and not Updike. Good question. Thanks for asking.

The Rhythm of the Absent Saints

2009-03-05T07:01:00.000-08:00

It's as if a switch got switched. Off. The one that controls my appreciation of sentences that sing, sentences with dead-perfect stops. Interior rhymes. I'm just not reading as much anymore, and when I do it's all hit-or-miss. Hard to find something to really hold on to. The Roth book I'm currently on, "Everyman", has its moments, but it's the first in awhile.

It's a muscle that needs to be worked again. I'm thinking all the Poker has made it all dull, made much of the rest of life dull. When you're into it, it consumes you - elbows everything else aside. Which is okay. For awhile. But I want both. Salter and Brunson. Carver and Ivey. A well rounded life. A (poker) room of my own.

Deflation

2009-02-08T23:30:00.000-08:00

Feeling it. A sense of deflation - in everything. The economy, the government - that huge post-election bubble. Press up close, listen to that air run out. And Vegas, I hear, though I haven't been back since August which is about when I - maybe we, or most of us, started running bad. Real Estate - forget about it. Ain't nothing real about it. But man, the Shoe's room is packed. Thirty on the 1/2 list - ten tables running. Maybe two in ten running good. Everyone playing tight. Except the drunks and the new boys. Drunks win. Go figure. Breathe out. Breathe in.

Almost Ready

2009-01-10T00:14:00.000-08:00

Almost ready to post again - the new year - impeachments - maybe a gym in the future. The president of a formally un-electable race. So much to talk about and that doesn't even include Poker (note to ed: cap intentional). And is Axelrod who I'd always thought he was?

Questions - maybe answers to come.

Soledad on the Blue Line

2006-11-28T14:27:00.000-08:00

Soledad rides the Blue Line from her apartment in Logan Square to the Loop where she works in the lobby of an office building selling coffee and the kinds of things you might want with your coffee - bagels and donuts and muffins. Sweet, doughy things. I haven't been to her stand - I know the building, I walk by it on the way to work but I haven't stopped in. The only time I have talked to her is on the train - on the Blue Line that I've recently switched to while the Brown Line is under construction.

I've been curious about her age. She has grandchildren - three, I think. But that doesn't help me much with her age. I'm guessing she's around sixty but I could be off by ten years. There isn't much gray. It's just hard to tell. One of her grandchildren's name is Marie. Next year Marie will start high school and Soledad is worried because it won't be one of the better public schools where there is hope for college and a better job than selling coffee to the office workers who can afford it.

I think if I save a little more she can go to a Catholic school, Soledad told me. But Marie wants to go the public school with her friends. Maybe she doesn't want to take her grandmother's money. Maybe she has a boyfriend. Maybe he's a banger. I hope not.

Catholic schools are better, yes? she asked me. I didn't know what to say. I could have said that I taught for a year in a Catholic high school in Chicago (I won't mention its name). I went in as a sub teaching English and typing. My major wasn't English and I couldn't type - I could peck around a bit, but I couldn't type. When the teacher who I was filling in for decided not to return from her nervous breakdown, the principal asked me to finish the year. I explained that I didn't really know what I was doing teaching those classes but she pressed on saying how much the students liked me which since I didn't know what I was doing was probably true.

So I stayed. I still remember one student, a boy who was disruptive and never turned in his work. I spent a lot of time out in the hall with him. After a few weeks of this a teacher pulled me aside and said, You know he can't read, don't you? Well, no, I didn't know that, but it explained a lot. They keep passing him through because they need the tuition. That's just how it is, she explained.

My teaching career didn't last very long. I guess I wasn't cut out for it. But I survived that year in the Catholic high school. I guess the students did too.

I told Soledad that, yes, Catholic schools are better. Maybe some are.