You Can't Miss What You Can't Measure

Get it Str8 -- Introducing The Str8 Story Podcast

noreply@blogger.com (Shane Schleger) — Mon, 03 Aug 2015 16:29:00 +0000

The first episode of my new podcast is available now on Soundcloud and for download HERE!

(The show should available for subscription on iTiunes within a couple days)

The Str8 Story Podcast will be an interview based show, featuring a rotation of guests with no particular affiliation to each other, other than being fascinating individuals who are willing to share their time with us.

My first guest, Roger Steffens, defines the caliber of personality I hope to attract for future episodes. He has a prolific and consummately fascinating story that takes us from the Vietnam War to his current ascension as an in-demand photographer, with a comprehensive viewpoint on all interim aspects of American counterculture. Steffens is also, notably, the world's preeminent collector of reggae music and physical artifacts, and our paths first intersected over a common love for reggae music and Jamaican culture.

A lot of our conversation revolves around Bob Marley and other reggae performers as well as Rasta philosophy, but there a lot of other nuggets of Steffens' awesomeness that peak in throughout.

Tune in, turn on, drop out and enjoy!

We Don't Love These Hoes (Misogyny in Poker)

noreply@blogger.com (Shane Schleger) — Wed, 29 Jul 2015 04:37:00 +0000

It's usually a complete bore to engage in any discussion about the socioeconomic climate that surrounds poker, but I'm going to make an exception and write about the latest twist on the topic of women's place in poker.

Thankfully I can skip past the legitimate, but well covered, complaint that a lot of female poker players put forth, arising from an unwelcoming atmosphere at the poker tables and other variations on being made to feel uncomfortable or marginalized while playing poker.

Instead, I get to focus my attention on another perspective that is probably more insidious towards the success of women in the game and more easily dismantled too--the disdain that many male players irrationally maintain towards attractive women who market themselves as public personalities in poker.

It's an old and illogical argument that has been around for as long as I've been in the game and, I'm sure, for as long as women have been receiving attention, acclaim or money in traditionally male dominated arenas.

The argument states roughly: Women are unfairly propped up and afforded opportunities that similarly talented male peers would not have, so let's nip this reverse sexism in the buttocks and get back to discussing how scary talented we are as poker players and how much credit we deserve for that.

It's a very tired retelling of the same old, "she got there because of her looks" trope, so allow me to break that one down before proceeding: No successful woman ever achieved her status simply as a measure of her physical beauty or sex appeal.

Even if we look at industries where women are valued primarily for their physical beauty--for every hot actress or fashion model, there's another equally hot one down the street who's also smarter, more ambitious, more shrewd, harder working--and it's those attributes that undoubtedly will buoy her to success beyond mere sexiness. You might even argue those other attributes define sexiness, but let me focus here:

This week, an attractive poker player named Samantha Abernathy was photographed with Phil Hellmuth, and, what would have otherwise been a normal day in the Twitter Timeline of Phil Hellmuth's followers turned into an international incident when a hateful troll named Jeff Tims took it upon himself to call out Abernathy, saying, in effect, that any glory she was enjoying was the result of her superficial beauty.

PIC: @SamAbernathyy me and @JessicaDawley at John Sabats Hampton house. Next stop: @1OakSouthHampton #Relaxed pic.twitter.com/nYJFcTMWsu
— phil_hellmuth (@phil_hellmuth) July 25, 2015

Tims attempted to subvert his own misogynistic viewpoint by pointing out that he too had a hot wife and they planned to raise their daughter with values that emphasized her succeeding on the basis of skill, talent and brains, not just good looks, tits & ass. As if any of those concepts are mutually exclusive, but again let me focus:

Abernathy was rightfully triggered and defended herself efficiently, even challenging Tims to a game of Open Faced Chinese Poker, like a true poker player does. Then things got interesting when young male poker players, of the "otherwise seemingly intelligent" variety, tried to convert Tims' dismissive view into a sustainable rational argument. To quote Barry Hutter, who took it upon himself to elaborate on his complaints about women in the public poker media sphere:

"Media and the poker public in general are throwing up any good looking girl seen in a poker room on a pedestal and think it's going to be good for the game."

Before I break your brain by forcing you to parse too much of Hutter's argument at once, let me just stop and explain: Yes, glorifying female poker players, regardless of their objective skill level, would be as "good for the game" as anything I can think of. Sex appeal is sorely missing in poker, and there is only one organic way to enhance that--by showcasing the women who have an interest in playing poker seriously.

Hutter continues: "Something that actually would be good for poker is one of these attractive women consistently winning and actually caring about the craft of poker."

First of all, I can't name more than a few tournament pros of any gender who are "consistently winning" in a way that dismisses the accomplishments of any of our female counterparts.

Secondly, all the women I know who play cards have dedicated more passion into the "craft of poker" than I personally ever did, and the truth is also that poker is not much of a "craft" as much as it is a game where you first try to make money by any means necessary. I'm sure Hutter knows that, so I don't know why getting attention and sponsorship dollars (something that doesn't happen for players very often these days anyway) by flaunting a little booty should offend anyone.

Lastly, almost every successful poker player has relied on his or her privilege in order to succeed. Whether that privilege comes in the form of a great pair of tits that somehow (again--without savvy and ambition and intelligence on top of the tits--how exactly?) transforms into magical sponsorship dollars or in the form of having a friend or family member to loan you money when you go busto--most poker players lean on a massive fortress of privilege to build their careers.

Even the friends I have who started from nothing, who grinded hard from bottom to top and turned their small initial bankrolls into actual wealth over the years, relied in some subtle or obvious way on their natural born privilege.

For my part, I was able to capitalize on several non-poker skills in order to succeed in the poker world, and I was probably only lucky enough to get a sponsorship from 2011-2014 because I had writing and communication ability. I never truly "cared" about poker in the way Hutter seems to imply is worthy of ancillary success in poker. I am definitely not as good at poker as Hutter and also probably not as good as Samantha Abernathy.

***

More to the point--who gives a fuck? Bryan Ferry is a brilliant musician, and he put naked women on the cover of Roxy Music albums anyway, because he knew sex sells. It didn't take away from the excellence of his music or diminish the essence of his craft, and if the imagery bothered you, even better.

Poker is kinda the one game where you get to be whatever you say you are. It's what everyone has done from Jack Strauss to Daniel Negreanu, and it's obscene to discourage women from participating in that part of the fun. The flipside to "you're only getting attention in poker because you're hot" almost suggests that women can only get respect in poker for their results, and then only if they are not attractive.

Let me also point out that the most interesting personalities in the game these days are, in fact, women. Just to prop up two off the top of my head, I can't think of more engaging people in poker than Jamie Kerstetter (whom I consider a friend) or Danielle Andersen (whom I've never met). They're witty, interesting women, and they seem to love the game and have far more ambition for it than I ever will. And, yes, they're both sexy.

So while young male poker players sit around bitterly comparing their acute knowledge of game theory yet pondering their inability to relate to women (i,e. get laid), I hope that my sisters in this game don't get discouraged and continue to pursue their love for poker--tits first.

"It's All Right" and Other Things Music Taught Me

noreply@blogger.com (Shane Schleger) — Mon, 15 Jun 2015 20:01:00 +0000

Today the Observer published a piece I wrote about the practical and immaterial knowledge that I've gleaned through music:

http://observer.com/2015/06/what-music-taught-me-about-loving-my-wife-and-my-life/

Got to Serve Somebody

noreply@blogger.com (Shane Schleger) — Tue, 09 Jun 2015 11:11:00 +0000

Allow me to diffuse any polarization that my last blog piece created:

The thrust of the negative reaction I received read along the lines that "the data doesn't lie, Vegas is doing very well, and if the desires of a few get sacrificed while the the needs of many are met, then so be it--the bottom line is fine." More confusingly, I got accused of being a "get off my lawn" type of grump, despite that I was forming an argument for the value of having more fun.

So, just to repeat the core issue before I get to my true feelings about electronic music: If I stop having fun in Vegas and decide not to come back, there is no issue.

There are other places that I know about which are quite nice during June and July, and the free market is on my side here. It's not simply that I want to be relaxed and happy in return for the time and the thousands of dollars I spend at resort destinations, I actually have some amount of affection for the service industry.

I think Vegas is a spectacular city for its service core: This city built something from nothing. No one was here before, but an enormous league of people was compelled to populate the town, and for what? To serve others.

Besides Hollywood, it's hard to think of a more genuinely American industry. Sure, the French might have invented cooking with butter, but it was the American restaurant boom that began in the late 90s where hospitality was perfected and eventually exported. And while I'm no economist, it seems possible that as long as we keep figuring out new ways to sell each other coffee and beer, gas, grass and ass and entertainment, maybe it won't matter that the factories have closed.

My ability to evaluate service arises from a large sample size of experience on both sides of the fence, as my most recent pre-poker job was working at high-end restaurant in NYC, Blue Ribbon Brooklyn, which used to stay open until 4AM. It was the type of place where a "two-top" could walk in at 3:59AM and get served a full meal with properly paced service.

My very first job in high school was behind a coffee bar on the Upper West Side. I learned there that you were supposed to take pride in your work even if your work was cleaning up other people's dirty dishes, and I also learned that you could wind up spending a bunch of time preparing an $80 coffee order for the Die Hard With A Vengeance crew, working nearby on a shoot in Central Park, and not receive a tip.

At my next job, delivering pizza on bicycle for a major pizza franchise, I learned things like: Chris Elliot is a good tipper. A $30 kickdown on a $22 bill was memorable for a 17 year old, and it remains so. Secondly, you could fuck up someone's pizza when your bike slips on the ice during a delivery to the projects on 96th and Columbus, but even hungry people are understanding and will tip a second time after you re-deliver a fresh pie.

I also learned from the attitude and spirit of my fellow delivery guys. George from Georgia, who could drink a glass of vodka like it was water and always tossed off the first cigarette from a fresh pack as a gesture of good luck. When my coworker Nasry got his bike stolen on a delivery, I asked, "What did you do?"

He said, "I did what anybody else would have done, I walked."

***

I've also had the privilege to patronize many of the greatest restaurants, casinos and entertainment venues across the world, so all in all, I think I know what constitutes standard in the hospitality industry; I appreciate good service and have a high tolerance for subpar service, because I know anyone can have a bad day and accidentally transfer the anger to their job. I don't punish weak servers with a short tip, because my grandmother taught me to operate under the philosophy that crappy waiters had a family to feed and deserved the same 20% as their more competent counterparts.

The gift and the curse is that I can usually spot 10 things a restaurant staff has done correctly or incorrectly before the bread plate is served, and if Las Vegas wanted to hire me as a hospitality consultant, I could probably point out a 100 or more things that were at least slightly off during my first few days hopping around town.

Since that information would probably be worth money to someone willing to package and sell the service, I'll leave it to him and instead use my most recent walkabout as the example to draw from:

Heading from Bellagio to Aria to meet a friend, I managed to get lost. Maybe it was because the Prada store, my usual Aria starting point, was closed, but I was suddenly disoriented, standing amidst the full range of designer retail stores, all closed.

It took at least a few minutes to figure out where the casino was, and when I did, I had to leave the mall area, walk outside and then through another quasi-labyrinth before finding the high roller bar, where my friend was waiting.

Despite there being only two other customers at the bar, it took another few minutes for the bartender to get around to acknowledging the possibility that I might want a beverage. To set the scene, I ought to also mention that my friend, one of the more recognizable and accomplished gamblers in this town, was already at the bar drinking.

I swallowed my frustration and overtipped anyway, since I prefer to enjoy the occasional drink with an old friend without letting a lazy bartender ruin that mood. After leaving the bar, I managed to get lost on the way to the strip again.

At least I stumbled upon this art on the way:

And then, Aria's saving grace appeared in the form of two slices of pizza from the much discussed 50/50 pizza place. It was good, and I walked out of the casino happy, even managing to thread my way over to the Cosmopolitan without getting lost again.

As I neared the north exit of the Cosmo, I spotted a blackjack setup and a provocatively dressed dealer. As soon as I took off my headphones, I realized the music in the gaming area was obtrusively loud. Nevertheless, I slid $100 out of my pocket and asked her to make change. She asked me to keep the cigarette smoke out of her face, and I apologized and repositioned the ashtray.

It was a $15 table, and I put 3 red chips on two spots. "You have to put at least $25 to play two spots," she said, uttering a rule that is semi-common, and with a slight hint of antagonism. She began to spread and shuffle, but when she couldn't affect any semblance of grace the next time she asked me to keep the smoke out of her way, I had had enough.

"You know what? I don't feel like playing, gimme my money back."

I took the black chip and bounced.

***

See, it wasn't too long ago that the same scenario plays out much differently, when a similar type of gambler might wound up seduced on his way out the door. Could be that gambler had too much to drink or smoke or just didn't give a fuck that night, and soon his $100 buyin became $1,000 and from there it wasn't much of a difference between $10k and $100k getting spewed.

Because remember, "whoever invented gambling was smart, but whoever invented chips was a genius," and that was pretty much the core guiding principle that created Vegas--the willingness to exploit illusion for profit.

We accepted that and even rejoiced in the challenge of not getting beat by a city that was designed to disorient us. Remember when the biggest curiosities and challenges from within a casino was the supposed oxygen-pumping and the lack of clocks on the wall? How on earth will we ever know what time it is, you crazy casino?!?!

Nowadays, you gotta get lucky just to find the casino floor after the trail of closed-for-the-night Armani shops ends.

The dispiriting thing is Aria was made that way by design. At one point, I remember the plans for "City Center" were supposed to include things that resembled a normal human city, with features like parks and dog walks. Instead, they opted to build the umpteenth luxury mega-mall, and the result of short-sighted urban planning are felt from the sidewalk on Las Vegas Blvd. to the top floors of Vdara.

So, maybe the bottom line is fine, because maybe it has to be. If you can't lure degenerate gamblers with their favorite drug (because the parephenlia is just so awful), you best hope the demand for Gucci stays strong and the nightclub industry maintains its clamp on large scale entertainment options.

Despite the fact that cultural trends are ever-shifting, it seems the "Vegas is doing just fine" faction is saying that predicting trends and adapting to them (once a trademark of Vegas' corporate innovation) isn't super important to the bottom line.

What if the bottom line is being eaten away more subtly and slowly, though, and maybe you can see it in the form of illogical urban design scaled by billions?

You can definitely see it in the form of a blackjack dealer who is likely ultra titled from having to stand around in a loud, dark room, dressed sexy, while catering to the type of player who applauds after winning a double-down.

Maybe her bottom line isn't doing so well, and maybe I'm not the only who is affected by her lousy disposition, not the only potential spazz who take his negative EV elsewhere.

I am Vegas' ideal customer: I enjoy lots of things so it ought to be easy to get me. Whether it's movies and music, Prada or pizza, hookers and blow, whatever you got. I also like hiking and climbing trees and Red Rocks, so it's kind of remarkable to create a place with all that stuff that manifests as an atmosphere that I am unable to enjoy.

People in this country tend to work very hard for their money, and if their memories of the Vegas trip they saved hard for ultimately leaves a less pleasant impression than their last vacation spot, guess where next year's vacation budget goes?

At some point the corporate bigwigs will realize, one way or another, that the customer IS the bottom line. They will adapt to the actual needs of human beings, or find out the hard way that we have our own way of adapting to corporations.

Las Vegas Eats Itself and the Dull Apocalypse

noreply@blogger.com (Shane Schleger) — Mon, 08 Jun 2015 11:52:00 +0000

"I've been gambling hereabouts for 10 good solid years. If I told you all that went down, it would burn off both your ears."

- Robert Hunter, "Deal" by the Grateful Dead.

By now I can sing those lines with accuracy, this being the eleventh summer I travel to Vegas to play WSOP tournaments. And really, if I were to tell you even half of what went down since 2005, it would not only burn off both your ears, but also probably break your heart and challenge your perception of reality.

Still, my experiences in the poker world have been largely positive.

Looking back on the community and culture that poker people established in the wake of the 2003 boom, I feel mostly pride and benefit from the association with a troop of critically thinking, open-minded individuals. Whether it's the players, the media, the dealers, whatever, it's a decent group of people.

That's before we mention the true trailblazers like Isai Scheinberg, or the 441 Productions team (who created an appealing production design from which to broadcast the game), or Norman Chad and Lon McEachern, who have consistently maintained a good tone to keep audiences interested.

Even those on the other side of the equation, the Russ Hamiltons of our game--those whose truest desire was to needlessly deceive and scam gamblers--taught us something about humanity and protecting your own interests first.

***

So, for me, poker is fine, and whatever rich tradition of gamesmanship and hustle that helped create the mythology of the game will survive.

I have significantly less hope for Las Vegas as a destination gambling city, however, as I've seen this town devolve from a place that had once mastered the crucial elements of service into one that actively, aggressively betrays the same principles.

Even as Ace Rothstein's nostalgic Casino prophecy about Vegas' corporate culture came to life, Vegas maintained its stature as a service industry epicenter, an environment that catered to peoples' needs and desires, however indulgent or slutty, always fostering the possibility of entertainment and escapism.

It might seem like I myself am nostalgic for a time in this city's history that doesn't exist, but that's not it. I never expected to find Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing here or Tom Wolfe's Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake. I wasn't hoping to get in "The Biggest Game in Town" with Doyle and Chip, and by 2005 "Vegas and the fucking Mirage" was already an almost obsolete reference in terms of the casino industry.

No. I was happy to experience my own personal Vegas within the escapist framework. The Vegas that flowered after the poker boom and went back into vegetation after the housing crisis of 2008. The Vegas where I saw my friends build and destroy many fortunes and spend many late, long nights behaving half-badly but just fine. The place where we learned how to manage some of our highest highs and rawest lows while also staying on the grind and showing up the next day.

No. Rather I'm reflecting from the perspective of a customer--a somewhat picky and overly observant customer, but one who used to be this town's platonic ideal; that customer who doesn't mind paying extra for a streamlined voyage into debauchery, one who will happily piss away too much money if he feels relaxed and comfortable.

Used to be that a box man would treat every schlub like a prince, because, in reality, he might be. Now, the exact opposite is true. Potential princes are treated like slobs, because, well, in reality they might be.

***

"The customer is always right" mantra has slid towards "the customer might be right" and eventually into a subtle sense of, "Fuck the customer. Fuck you and fuck me too."

Used to be the bouncer would let you into the club with a pair of sneakers if they were, for instance, Prada sneakers. Nowadays, the sharpest $900 Prada hoodie in the store will only serve to exclude you from places like the horrifically named "Rose. Rabbit. Lie.," where I was disallowed entry in 2014 (into someone's paid birthday table) because..I was wearing...a "hoodie!"

"But...it's Prada!" I protested.

"Doesn't matter, Vegas is moving more towards the 'fine dining' standards of the world. No sneakers or hoodies"

"Cool," I said, feeling the sting of unexpected insult, "meanwhile the rest of the world is going the other way."

***

This calendar year alone I've spent time in New York, LA, Jamaica, Mexico, Miami, four different cities in Texas--the gamut of destinations. I can say with some non-biased certainty that something might be out of wack when the staff at a Comfort Inn in Dallas greets you more warmly than they do at the Bellagio.

There's good food, good service and solid escapism in a whole lot of places around the world nowadays, and I can get into Nobu in Malibu with flip flops, and the ocean is right there, so what exactly is the appeal left for Vegas?

There might be enough people to keep this going. Perhaps it's a revolving group who remains interested in the experience of standing wall to wall in dark clubs where the only way to get anything done is by bribing the staff on your way in, where all your interactions are challenged by the most aggravating music since disco, cranked to inhumane volumes.

I have some fascination and admiration for the strange market that the Vegas nightclubs established in conjunction with DJs. Some of these DJs are undoubtedly very talented, but let's be clear that they are catering increasingly to a lowest common denominator, if not actively defining and preserving it.

To paraphrase Nick Tosches from his brilliant WTF Podcast episode--do people even have fun anymore, or is it just some projected simulation of fun? Maybe the apocalypse has already taken place, just instead of burning buildings and zombies, it's Facebook and Tryst. The dullest apocalypse imaginable, and it's upon us.

You can feel it in the apprehensive, distrustful glances and rough edges of interaction that take place every day in all pockets of this city.

It's come to the point where the croupiers are shocked when a player starts putting action on the Don't Pass line for them. Even the whores have stopped faking it, eying their potential customers with obvious weariness or disdain. They probably need to get laid by now, too.

***

There's also gambling in lots of places around the world, so how long before some visionary pioneer like Bennie Siegel or Steve Wynn finds another ratty stretch of desert and turns it into a kingdom?

It's more likely that the next kingdoms will be built by those willing to design stress-free, user-friendly methods of entertainment, and it seems unlikely that Vegas will redefine itself again any time soon along those standards. I have a lot of respect for Steve Wynn specifically, but do we really want an Encore? No, we do not want more.

So, although the WSOP and the billion dollar monoliths will most likely remain intact one way or another, I could see myself skipping this scene one of these years.

After all, there's equity elsewhere, and when I really think about it, was I ever coming here for the equity in the first place? Or even the supposed glory and the rush of shot taking that defines tournament play at the WSOP? Nah, what I came here for was probably a version of that same concept I keep going back to--fun.

Incidentally, none of this is a reflection on whatever goes on outside the clutches of The Strip. There are plenty of great people who live here, a gorgeous mountainous desert backdrop, and more than a few excellent restaurants. There are even still a few casino properties I like and a few cocktail waitresses I'm happy to flirt with, but for how long will that be enough to keep me coming back?

Cause, relating it what Robert Hunter was saying in that song, "you and me bound to spend some time wondering what to choose," and I suggest we choose wisely.

"And don't ya let that deal go down, no no..."

Fly On...Dope Stories, Jamaica, George Clinton

noreply@blogger.com (Shane Schleger) — Sat, 18 Apr 2015 20:22:00 +0000

In deference to the event described in this embedded tweet, I feel obligated (and pleased) to write something here:

Dude came up to me at a strip club in Miami and said he read my blog. In other words, by far the best experience I've had in a strip club.
— Shane Schleger (@ShaneSchleger) April 13, 2015

First, I am happy to report that the Dope Stories podcast is not dead. Pauly and I recorded a reunion episode just about one year after our first episode aired, February 6th, 2014, which is Bob Marley's birthday as well as the 20th anniversary of the night I first got high on cannabis--at William Kunstler's townhouse on Gay Street in NYC.

You can find the reunion episode (Dope Stories 028) at the normal spots--Soundcloud, iTunes and on the homepage.

I am grateful for the audience we found, who encouraged us to get back on microphone, and I am touched by the ongoing trickle of appreciation that comes our way. Although Dope Stories was not meant to survive in its originally conceived form, it seems safe to say it will live on forever in some way, and I can still stand behind our goal to establish a "rational conversation about drug use" and teach ourselves to think differently about drugs and society.

***

Secondly, as I partly discussed with Pauly on "Reunion," I have moved past the vague desire to kill myself that plagued me daily for several months, a duration and severity of depression that I had never experienced in the entire history of my manic-depressive saga.

What happened? I'd rather discuss what rescued me rather than what threatened to drown me, especially since depression is a deeply entrenched state of mind, intangible, and so much larger than any sum of its parts. Also, not necessarily reflective of the external circumstances that incubate it.

Social media is almost completely useless when it comes to addressing depression, and I won't pretend to offer much more utility here. Even friends, however compassionate and intelligent, are ineffective at helping with your depression. That's partly to their credit, because you become temporarily less blue in the company your friends.

In the end, I found myself relying on whatever level of "default perseverance" I had stored up in order to push through. Then things started to click.

On his recent book promo tour, George Clinton leaned on a talking point when he was asked, "What is funk?" He explained something to the effect that: "Funk is that thing...that just when you want to crawl into a hole and die, instead you start to shake your hip and move your feet."

Brothas Be, Yo, Like George, Ain't That Funkin' Kinda Hard on You?

Truly, the first thing to click in the process of freeing myself from depression stemmed from reading Clinton's memoir, Brothas Be, Yo, Like George, Ain't Thank Funkin' Kinda Hard on You?

I wrote something about the book, and my love for P-Funk, in the NY Observer, but I hardly scratched the surface of how motivating Clinton's story, and the music of the Parliamentfunkadelicthang, has been to me.

In a basic yet ineffable way, I couldn't read George's account of a brilliant 50+ year career in the music industry, complete with the gamut of glories and stumbling blocks that you might imagine, and find an excuse to sit around in my doldrums any longer.

It's the story of America (George can be found everywhere from North Carolina, New Jersey, New York, Detroit, Toronto, Hollywood, Tallahassee to Bermuda), and it the story of art--a brilliance and dedication that George kept in motion for nothing more than the sake of the music itself--for the love of "taking it to the stage."

I also realized just how amazing a career it was and how much of the P-Funk catalog I had been sleeping on. I didn't even know about "Munchies For Your Love..."

***

The next click took place when I was privileged to go to Jamaica for the wedding of some friends. My wife and I spent four days there, but it was more like "light years in time ahead of our time." Something about the lively spirit of Jamaican people, the majesty of the land and a full-force reminder of the beautiful, melodic wisdom of reggae music...something about it all reminded me of who I was and what mattered to me.

Something about the music.

Logistically, it was an important moment too because my wife and I got to spend some quality vacation time together, having been separated from each other for months at a time due to work obligations. That has been the central "external" struggle in our life: From my career as on online poker having been uprooted and moved to Mexico in 2011, to the various out-of-state production jobs that my wife works, it has been challenging to find the ability to come together and achieve the "old, married couple" lifestyle we desire.

***

At least, after 10+ years of knowing each other, we still have a lot of fun together. When Sheila finally got back from her most recent production job, we had a wonderful trip to our favorite place in the world, Big Sur.

Before we reunited, I had the chance to see "George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic" (the classic moniker back in action for the 2015 Shake The Gate World Tour) play a show in Bend, Oregon. It's hard to describe how tight the band sounded and how sharp George looked as they took the stage and played "Mothership Connection (Starchild)."

They hardly relied on crowd-pleasers and even risked alienating the audience early on with a set of very raw material from Funkadelic's new Shake The Gate album--rugged lyrics laced over hard hip-hop and EDM-inspired beats. The type of beats, of course, inspired by P-Funk in the first place, re-interpolated and re-funketized for 2015.

For sure, the audience in Bend was not ready for TAPOAFOM ("the awesome power of a fully operational Mothership"), and I heard some kids on the way out say, "whoa, it was rough there at the beginning, almost a bad trip!"

The music gets me every time and in every way, though. The level of musicianship and stagecraft amazes me each and every time. Somehow, I cannot see Sir Nose D'voidoffunk come on stage and find the funk and not love it. Look, Sir Nose is dancing again, I think he found the funk!

Oh, but I will never dance: Sir Nose D'Voidoffunk (Carlos McMurray) faces Dr. Funkenstein (George Clinton) in Bend, Ore. 3/19/15.

I think he found the funk: Sir Nose stands on his hands, Steve Boyd on the mic, Bennie Cowan on trumpet, Garrett Shider (back to the audience) on guitar.

***

TAPOAFOM was in even greater abundance when I met Sheila a few nights later for the P-Funk show at the Independent in San Francisco.

I first saw George Clinton perform at Roseland in 1997 (billed as "George Clinton and the P-Funk All Stars"), and Funkadelic music has been a big part of the soundtrack of our life, but this was the first time Sheila ever saw them perform.

It was a beautiful sight to behold the woman I love experience a slice of the same magic that I had first felt almost 20 years earlier (and thousands of Funkateers and Rubber Fans had experienced for more than 20 years prior to that).

When George bellowed, "Free your mind," Sheila yelled back to the stage, "And your ass will follow!"

One of the best nights of my life...

In the time when I drifted from Bend, OR to San Francisco, CA, P-Funk had traveled, by vehicle, down to Santa Ana, CA to play a show (Sly Stone showed up on stage), then back to SF, no less than 20 hours of drive time. Since then, the Mothership has flown to Australia, Japan and the band is now playing a string of shows in England.

That night in SF, in a simple and true way--as I danced around The Independent and witnessed my wife immersed in the sounds of P-Funk, the entire room putting weed in the air as George's granddaughter, Kandy Apple Redd, raps, "Something stank and I want some"--I felt so grateful for these performers, who sacrifice their lives for the stage, meeting a grueling tour schedule in order to play these songs every night for us, for the benefit of maybe even just one member of the audience who's feeling it that night.

Something about the music, it got into our pants.

Something stank and I want some.

Night of the Thumpasorus Peoples: Sheila on the right of the picture, the hat and glasses belong to the guy on the far left of the picture. Ga-da-goo-ga.

I think she found the funk: Sheila foreground, Parliament Funkadelic onstage. 3/22/15, San Francisco. Two of the great loves of my life in one picture.

This is The End: Dope Stories Denouement

noreply@blogger.com (Shane Schleger) — Thu, 31 Jul 2014 16:24:00 +0000

With significant sadness I must report that Pauly and I have decided to bring the Dope Stories Podcast to an indefinite end. Today's episode, our 27th (28th if you count Broke Stories), will be the last episode we publish on our regular Thursday release day.

It was a truly difficult decision to arrive at, and at no point (including now) have I felt fully confident with any of the solutions to the logistical and creative problems that were mounting, inhibiting our ability to deliver a product that could meet our early ambitions.

I guess like many experiment with drugs, the project was: instructive, often fun and illuminating, other times challenging, but always meaningful for me and hopefully for those I interacted with along the way. Sustaining the peak high was not possible, and the trip had to come to an end.

Also like drugs, producing the podcast was expensive!

I'm reluctant to ovequalify the experience or try too hard to mitigate the disappointment I am feeling (and the sense that I have let down our audience), but I think it's fair to reflect that our concept to deliver a weekly "rational discussion about drug use" was both overly ambitious and not quite ambitious enough. Expansive, yet constricting.

The decision to pay for pro-quality audio production without a proper business plan became financially unsustainable. Then, while considering the prospect of doing an aggressive PBS-style crowdfunding campaign (complete with tote bags and t-shirts) to support the show, Pauly and I were reluctant to proceed without being totally sure in our ability to deliver content of a quality to match the commitment we would be requesting from our audience.

On a more personal level, it became at times intellectually and emotionally onerous to show up regularly with the presence of mind to talk about drug use in a way that combined subjective experience and objective analysis.

For much of my life, even as an open, known drug user, I enjoyed a mostly casual association with drugs. It was a part of my identity, sure, but not the central hub or focal point of it. When embarking on Dope Stories, I didn't anticipate all of the obstacles and side effects that came with consistently exploring personal aspects of my consciousness through such a telescopic lens. Or to paraphrase the Notorious B.I.G., "mostly I'm sick of talking."

I still consider matters of drug use and human behavior, and the legislation thereof, to be profoundly misunderstood and in need of exploration. Indeed, I hope to keep exploring these issue in a variety of ways going froward, but I feel unprepared currently to do it in the format we designed.

The Dope Stories name (and Twitter feed) will live on (as will the content itself on iTunes), and I wouldn't be surprised if Pauly and I found an opportunity in the future to get on the mic together and record a reunion show, but for now, the Dope Stories you have come to know and expect every Thursday will no longer exist.

(You can read Pauly's account in his farewell blog here).

***

I should also reflect on what I hope is not a total bust. My concept for the show involved a much longer run, and a deeper exploration of a variety of subjects, but I'm disinclined to write off the experience as a failure. The concept was solid, and if we connected with an audience of any size, for however brief of a moment, it constitutes at least a small success.

I can't even begin to describe the gratitude I hold for the people who listened to the show, those who donated money, and especially to the guests who came on and shared their insight and wisdom into the human struggles and triumphs related to drug use. I learned a lot from the entire experience.

Come to think of it, I have also formed a handful of new friendships, the type that I think will last a lifetime, as a direct result of putting the show together and the past six months of work Pauly and I did, and I can't even begin to put a value on that.

Dope Stories, Dope Guests: High Maintenance

noreply@blogger.com (Shane Schleger) — Tue, 20 May 2014 18:35:00 +0000

While developing Dope Stories, Pauly and I set forth a couple of simple goals:

1. Release an episode every week. This is a cornerstone of podcasting explained by Marc Maron to Tom Scharpling--put the product out according to a consistent schedule and post the episodes on time come hell or high-water.

2. Be good to your earhole: Scharpling also used to joke extensively that a typical podcast circa 2010 sounded like it was recorded on a seesaw.

Maron advises new podcasters to "buy good mics" to accomplish the second goal, but early on, we realized to create a professional-sounding product we'd also need professional guidance. So, we hired DJ Trent, a mega-talented audio engineer and DJ with worlds of experience producing radio and podcasts.

Trent's expertise has proven valuable in even more ways than I could have hoped: he designed the schematics of the studio (in Pauly's office) from scratch and has been guiding us since then on all aspects of quality control--from audio sound to segment producing to encouraging me to not smoke weed before I take the mic.

(Trent's fee also explains why we we are now asking for financial support to help sustain the podcast. If you are uneasy with the idea of backing two degenerate writers in their fringe creative pursuit, think of our donation drive as "DJ Trent's Diaper Fund." The money we are currently trying to recoup has contributed directly to underwriting the costs of his major production, a newborn baby girl).

***

Trent has also helped us in the effort to execute our third, somewhat less simple goal:

3. Invite interesting guests onto the show to share their perspective.

We have been fortunate to attract a diverse set of guests in our first few months: A poker champion (episode 7) who made his struggles with drug use public along the way to winning the WSOP Main Event; an Ivy League professor (episode 8) working towards discovering scientific truths about drug use; a military veteran (episode 11) dedicated to advocating for PTSD sufferers who might benefit from access medical marijuana.

(You can find all these episodes on iTunes and subscribe to the podcast to have them automatically appear every Thursday).

All of our guests seem to share in common a couple things: 1) an interest in engaging in a rational conversation about drug use and 2) an ability to teach me something new or make me think about an old issue from an unanticipated angle.

Featured on episode 16 are Ben Sinclair and Katja Blichfeld, the married couple who created the web series High Maintenance, and we are lucky to add them to the roster of intelligent people who generously shared their time with Dope Stories.

High Maintenance is about an unnamed weed messenger (played by Sinclair) who enjoys the rare perspective of being invited into the homes of a wide variety of New Yorkers' homes to sell them pot. The narrative tone of the show tends to emphasize the observable quirks of the customers that Ben's character serves more than it examines the substance they are smoking or the mechanics of illicit drug sales in Brooklyn.

Ben Sinclair and Katja Blichfeld, creative team behind the web-series High Maintenace.

The stated philosophical goal of the show's creators is to "normalize" various lifestyles that are considered "taboo," if not to entirely eliminate the concept of "taboo" itself. The behavior of characters on High Maintenance represent the range of human foibles--sometimes endearing, other times loathsome--but the creative result is always rooted in portraiture, not caricature. Most importantly: very fucking funny.

It's somehow appropriate that although High Maintenance, like Dope Stories, is a show on the internet, I was introduced to the content by a friend who, like Katja and Ben, lives in Brooklyn. I told our guests that I considered them a type of New York "relic" but didn't elaborate on what I meant: They possess a certain charm that characterized the personalities of New Yorkers I knew throughout my 28-year run in the city--open-minded but unapologetically critical; occasionally ball-busting but always feasting of the unique and offbeat energy that my hometown is known for creating.

***

I now feed off that offbeat energy 3,000 miles away in California, and I am also grateful for the ground-floor type of art that this city, Los Angeles, allows people to create.

A longer-term goal for Dope Stories is to move the studio from Pauly's office to a dedicated studio equipped to handle guests. In the meantime, we were able to host people like Katja and Ben thanks to space provided for us by a unique restaurant in East LA called Thank You For Coming. A quick read of their homepage explains the novel atmosphere they are creating involving food, art, and community.

We were set up in the courtyard behind the restaurant, a makeshift studio designed by Trent on the fly, with green drinks for our guests ("let's see what your made of" Ben texted me while issuing his super-specific snack request) and other green things. It was a beautiful morning in Los Angeles, with only occasional sun and noise issues, and I think the rugged setting managed to work organically with the subject matter and the personalities present.

Sincerest thanks to Laura and Trent for making it happen at Thank You For Coming, and to Katja and Ben for coming on the show!

Catching up on Dope Stories

noreply@blogger.com (Shane Schleger) — Mon, 12 May 2014 11:37:00 +0000

There have been a handful of Dope Stories episodes I wanted to annotate before a chunk of time was diverted by a semi-unplanned road trip halfway across the country into Colorado. On the way, I stopped in Las Vegas to celebrate my brother's birthday while he was there for work, then Albuquerque, NM, where my oldest childhood friend lives and where I learned how to gamble in 1998 at Sandia Casino.

I went as far as Denver then circled back to Los Angeles, in total driving about 2500 miles and spending almost two weeks on the road. We actually recorded episode 10 of Dope Stories, "Ridin' Dirty," while I was in Durango, CO and Pauly was set up at the usual studio. We used the occasion to reflect on past experiences traveling around America, including a couple situations where we would have been busted if not for some eleventh hour ingenuity.

(You can subscribe to Dope Stories on iTunes to receive automatic downloads every Thursday. We have also begun a "soft" fundraising effort to help sustain the costs of the podcast; if you'd like to contribute, here is where you can donate money and help support the show).

I was situated in a condo in Durango owned by an old boss of mine named Spal. Back when I worked for Spal as a bike messenger in the mid-90s in NYC, he would loan couriers everything from winter clothes when the weather was bad to classic works of literature on paperback. The spare room of his small East Village apartment was always occupied by a messenger who needed a cheap place to stay, and whenever someone bummed a cigarette from him on the streets of New York or at a music venue, he would give them two Camel Lights instead of one.

In 2014, Spal isn't loaning me copies of Thomas Mann books but instead providing spontaneous opportunities to crash along "The Spalonius Hobo Highway," in a way still dispatching me on runs like those that would take me home from midtown to uptown Manhattan. Now those runs go from state to state and there is no signature required at the destination, instead a bed waiting for me at one of the properties Spal owns and amortizes. I think he was probably the first person to explain to me the concept of "amortization" and also probably the reason I smoke "Camel Blues" today.

I called my old employer and friend to occupy some time on the long drive from LV to ABQ, and he casually reminded me that he had a place where I could stay in Durango. With no particular direction to travel after New Mexico and a desire to explore Colorado--especially at a crucial moment in the history of marijuana regulation--I soon accepted his offer.

***

The first thing I did after we wrapped up recording episode 10 at Spal's condo was head to Telluride, the closest town to Durango where "recreational marijuana" is currently sold. The policies that went into effect in Colorado at the beginning of 2014 essentially created two systems of regulated marijuana distribution which exist side by side: One set of rules for in-state "medical marijuana" patients and another for "recreational" purchases of weed, the latter allowing people from all over the world to buy cannabis at licensed shops in Colorado, de-facto statewide legalization.

As I understand it, some shops are allowed to sell both medical and recreational marijuana under the same roof, and there are many other inconsistencies between the two systems, including the fact that you can purchase medical marijuana but not recreational marijuana in Durango, sending my "pot tourist" dollars up the highway.

It turned into a welcome excursion through the winding mountain roads, as Telluride was one of the most enjoyable American towns I've ever visited. On the last weekend of the ski season, I stayed at a well appointed hotel at the bottom of the mountain, Camel's Garden Inn, with an outdoor hot tub from which you could view the closest "recreational marijuana dispensary," Telluride Green Room.

While it might be apt to comment on the quality of weed I bought or the price, I remember more distinctly an intangible feeling more along the lines of "liberty" or "progress" as I hurried to the shop 20 minutes before closing time, handed over my money, and bought the maximum allowed amount of pot, seven grams of a variety of strains.

I was halfway giddy throughout the transaction and declared "congratulations to us all!" to the shopkeepers as I walked out the door. Reflecting back on twenty years of smoking weed, I can appreciate the difference between being taken to Central Booking for smoking a joint in Central Park vs. strolling into a storefront in an adorable ski town and legally purchase marijuana.

Made it to pot shop in Telluride just before closing time for 1st ever "legal, recreational" purchase of marijuana! pic.twitter.com/7Nh7rGoIsz
— Shane Schleger (@ShaneSchleger) April 2, 2014

But the stay in Telluride, and the trip through Colorado, is less memorable for the weed I bought than for the experience of seeing a beautiful part of America and being on the road again. It was even more meaningful thanks to the locals I met, who showed me the town and made sure I ate well and lived right the entire time. I also had an acupuncture session that left me feeling more intoxicated than any amount of cannabis I could have consumed.

***

With the perspective and momentum from the Colorado exploration, Pauly and I had an ideal opportunity to interview a guest we had wanted on the show since before the first episode of Dope Stories was released--Sean Azzariti, the first person to purchase a bag of "recreational marijuana" legally when the Colorado regulations went into effect on January 1st, 2014.

Sean Azzariti, seen during the "first ever recreational marijuana purchase" The pink cellphone near Sean's left hand is his mother's!

Later that week he appeared on the new Arsenio Hall show to explain how the opportunity came about, and it wasn't because he woke up early to be first in line. Rather, Azzariti was given the honor as a result of his work discovering and explaining the benefits of medical marijuana for people suffering from PTSD. Currently, PTSD does not qualify as eligible condition to be treated under Colorado's medicinal marijuana guidelines, a situation Azzariti is dedicated to changing.

An Iraq war veteran who served in the Marines, he came on the show on episode 11 to explain how he discovered that certain strains of marijuana provided an alternative to treating PTSD that didn't rely on a mixture of high-dosage pharmaceutical medications prescribed by doctors, all of which had fewer benefits and worse side effects than weed.

One aspect that Azzariti emphasized was that he didn't instantly cure his PTSD symptoms by smoking weed but rather found what worked by experimenting with different strains. It reminded me how closed-off we still are regarding subtle truths about drugs in America, and we currently rely on free-thinking individuals like Azzariti, who are passionate and willing to battle an entrenched system to find reasonable solutions.

***

This Thursday, episode 16, we are broadcasting an interview with the creators of the web series High Maintenance, a scripted show that Pauly and I are big fans of and which doesn't conform to the typical tone of "stoner humor."

The show is about an unnamed courier in Brooklyn who delivers weed to a variety of "stressed out New Yorkers," and premise serves as a means of getting inside the lives of a variety of fictional, but very true-to-life, New York characters and situations.

We discuss a range of topics that related only peripherally to drugs and sometimes pertaining to the struggle of creating an economically sustainable piece of DIY entertainment, which relates to the aforementioned effort that we are starting to raise funds for our podcast, all of which I'll write about more next time!

Conversation with an Opiate User in a Steam Room

noreply@blogger.com (Shane Schleger) — Sun, 23 Mar 2014 20:57:00 +0000

I had an inspiring, impromptu discussion about drug use with a guy yesterday in the steam room at my local "European Style spa."

The steam room? You might ask. Well, yes, I believe in living as relaxing a life as possible and then finding ways to escape from that relaxing lifestyle. To achieve and maintain that, you have to get lucky and work very hard, but that's a topic for another time.

Meanwhile, for less than the cost of an Equinox gym membership, I can flee 7 days a week to the steam room, sauna, jacuzzi, and then, say, spend an hour or three napping on the recliners in the "quiet room" at 4PM on a Thursday. The "quiet room" was also the name of the boxy cell at Reiss 4, the mental ward at St. Vincent's, where they locked up unruly patients who needed to calm down.

Last night, the steam was piping hot, but the lights were set too bright. There was one other person in there, and I asked him if I could dim them. He had to pull his earbuds out of his ear to say, "sure."

"Ha, I've been here many times, but I've never seen anyone with an iPod!"

"Yeah, well, I can't be alone with my thoughts for too long, " he said.

"Ah yeah," I went on, "this is actually the one place I come to shut off the soundtrack and sit with my thoughts."

We talked about the differences between the sauna and the steam room. He didn't like the long, slow sweat of the dry heat vs. the instant return-to-the womb effect that the steam provides. "Yep you gotta work for your sweat over there."

I went on about my spa philosophy. "I am, I think, getting better at doing the whole circuit. Now I try to do one or two cycles in here, then 15 minutes in the sauna, then come back. Just depends how badly I need to detox. Although I also come here as often as possible, period."

He instantly responded to the word "detox" and said, "Oh well right now, that's part of the plan. I am trying to get completely clean."

So it began.

***

He is a well traveled, successful TV producer and photographer, and he has a prescription pill habit that he is trying to eliminate from his life.

Notice: I am veering away from using words like "addiction" and "recovery" or mentioning exactly which drug he is "hooked" on. Our conversation started using those terms, and at first we fumbled through some distinctions about the relative harms of weed vs. opiates vs. coke, but it quickly went to a much more productive place.

I said, "what I'm learning is, it's all the same, we're just using various substances to treat some kind of pain or problem."

"Yep, it's all based on some stuff that happened when we were, like, five years old" he said.

I was eager to change the tone of the conversation in a more uplifting direction and also couldn't resist the chance to frame this conversation in the mind of Dope Stories.

"Dude," I said, "you gotta check out this new podcast I started called Dope Stories. We just interviewed a professor from Columbia, Dr. Carl Hart, who, like, instantly helped reshape the way I think about all this stuff." He seemed interested. The heat pumping out of the pipes added a physical challenge to the discussion, but we kept it going.

"What's your thing?" He asked.

"Crack. Well, freebase, er, ya know, whatever you want it to call it."

"Oh yeah, I've never tried that one. Coke, yes, but never crack."

"Well yeah," I said. "It's sort of the same thing really. I just like to cook it up and smoke it instead of sniffing it." He understood.

As the steam hissed and the smell of eucalyptus circulated, my new acquaintance and I continued to talk; he was sitting with a towel wrapped around his waist and the aforementioned MP3 player in his hand, I was sitting bare on top of my towel and a bottle of water, as per my usual MO. Meanwhile two guys walked in wearing bathing suits. The conversation we were having about drug use didn't skip a beat, but these two guys didn't stick around much longer to be a fly on our wall.

"I think we scared them away," he said, laughing.

I was laughing too. "Yeah, not exactly surprising that two guys who wear a bathing suit to shvitz were not able to take that one."

***

Then he explained the nitty gritty of his journey so far: This was day one of his detox--he was going "cold turkey" off a daily pill habit, and he had already unsuccessfully tried to kick the habit at a place called Cri-Help, which he described in familiar-sounding terms (see the above link about my institutionalization) as places where drug users are confined in a location like criminals, smokers penned off into a corner, no ability to use the phone or internet while getting off the dope. A recipe for failure.

Now, he was trying a new program that involves his being accompanied for several days by a "sober living partner" and seeing a therapist two times a week while he goes through the toughest part of physical detox. I will try to get the name of the program from this man (just as I got his permission to share this story), because it sounds to me like a potentially great "recovery model."

He explained to me that although he was doing well in his life, he saw the amount of pills he was using as a hindrance to achieving the next level of success. "When I realized, going on a business trip, that the first thought in my packing routine was figuring out how many pills I'd need for the duration, I knew I ought to make a change."

"You got this," I told him, "I think you're clearly taking the positive steps to get rid of the habit. You should be proud of where you're at so far with it."

I tried to explain to him how I interpreted Dr. Hart's philosophy. I told him I thought Dr. Hart would consider him an example of the vast majority of drug users, whose lives are interesting, if not also inspiring.

This man is not a "highly functional functional drug user" as the soon-to-be-antiquated language goes. That is a back-handed assessment which now seems absurd and diminutive to me. He is a straight-up productive, happy, upbeat guy who pays his bills and maybe even occasionally enjoys traveling and sports.

TO SUBSCRIBE TO DOPE STORIES PODCAST ON ITUNES, CLICK HERE!

He is a tennis player too, and to relate the discussion with Dr. Hart back to our shared sport of choice, I told him how Hart stated that Andre Agassi, in his book, reported a negative interpretation of his own experience with crystal meth that didn't correspond to the reality. The proof that meth's harms are exaggerated, Hart asserted, was partly evidenced in Agassi's ability to maintain a career in professional sports despite using the drug. Agassi handled his business and played tennis matches all around the world.

"Well," he countered, "at the time, he was not doing well on the circuit, his ranking suffered..."

"Maybe true," I said, thinking about it now more critically, "but I think Dr. Hart would say that was the consequence of whatever emotional or psychological phase he was going through, rather than a direct product of the drug use."

I think it felt good for both of us to just be able to talk through this stuff like intelligent, rational adults, rather than prisoners of a binary thought system.

Here was a guy on "Day 1 of Detox" from prescription opiates, the type that everyone automatically accepts to be "highly addictive." Was he sitting off in the corner of some room, cowering, shivering, hating life? No. He was taking appropriate measures to replace his reliance on pills with healthier things like spending a Saturday evening in the steam room and then getting a massage. What did you do with your time this past Saturday evening?

Podcasting So Far

noreply@blogger.com (Shane Schleger) — Mon, 17 Mar 2014 03:04:00 +0000

Several years ago, my close friend Jesse, a longtime Howard Stern fan and a world class poker player, alerted me to the fact that the Stern Show was "the best possible form of entertainment to listen to while grinding online poker."

That's why he's one of the best, it's true: poker, especially online, is a solitary occupation; some form of entertainment is essential, and you don't get any reading done while playing poker. And while you might love TV and movies, it's commonly known to be just about impossible to focus on the plot and nuances of a scripted, visual piece of entertainment while also making multiple complex decisions for real money.

Music, of course, soothes the soul in adequate measure, but it's hard to lose yourself in the emotional pleasure of sound for 8+ hours on end while also trying to make a living using game theory. Over the years, I came to rely primarily on recorded conversation to fill the long, lonely hours of online poker sessions.

Like much of my friend's poker advice, it took me years to fully implement his entertainment strategy, but eventually I became acquainted with a great crop of broadcast personalities, and, in the case of Stern and other other influential broadcasters like Tom Scharpling, entire broadcast families. The type of family that is generally more reliable than your actual family.

Renewing my Sirius subscription was the first thing I did on the first morning after I relocated to Canada after Black Friday. I had been a Stern listener since high school but became estranged from my radio family when they left terrestrial airwaves. As soon as I had to depart my physical home in the US, it was almost like an instinct, a homing beacon, that called me back to Howard Stern. That, and a clip from one of Howard's masterful celebrity interviews, with Lady Gaga in 2011:

Prior to that, I had made inquiries into the creative whereabouts of Marc Maron (who I remembered from the late 90s as a comic who went on Conan's show and told hilarious jokes about his subway ride to the studio) and discovered that he had a podcast called WTF.

During interviews with fellow comedians, Maron virtually reinvented his career--as well as parts of his personality and his psyche--with each twice-weekly episode. Most importantly for me, he was contributing to the spirit of longform, fun radio that was filling the void of my work days. It was inspiring to watch his career develop throughout the process of re-examining his life as discussed with his peers, but it was also refreshing to simply hear intelligent people have honest conversations.

To name a few other podcasters: Julie Klausner is still, for my money, the most impressive freeform monologuist in the game and does excellent, focused interviews. Jake Fogelenst has been doing this type of DIY broadcasting since he was in high school, and the Fogelnest Files is consistent and uniquely entertaining. If I want to listen to other podcasts where comedians talk to other comedians about the business of comedy, I will listen to Dom Irrera's or Greg Fitzsimmons' show.

And I fux with the Champs. Neal Brennan and Moshe Kasher have managed to put together a product that is both way funnier and way smarter than every other podcast involving two guys in a room riffing with a guest. My post-relocation roommate David and I had more bonding moments while listening to the Champs than probably any other piece of entertainment we sought out during months of cohabitation.

***

It's encouraging to remember how rough around the edges some, if not all, of the above mentioned broadcasters were to start. Even vintage Stern, from before he mastered his cadence and tenor, can be cringe-inducing. In recent years on the Best Show, Scharpling would happily tell his own stories about the unanimity of discouraging remarks he had to persevere against before finding his groove as a broadcaster. Brennan reflects that the Champs should re-interview early guests now that they're actually good at conducting interviews.

As far as my own nascent experiments with the medium have been going: I can't think of any undertaking that I've approached with as much consideration and planning as the Dope Stories podcast, yet I every time I sit down in front of the microphone in our studio or listen to the raw cut of one of our episodes, I'm reminded of a dozen new things that I need to work on or had never thought of.

In other words, I still think I suck as a broadcaster, but I am aware that there's a clear and steep learning curve which I hope to climb efficiently. Just as I learned poker, I am trying to learn from those who currently do it better than I do. I'm also thankful to have a more literate, mentally organized partner in Pauly.

It's still a challenge for me to a) express my own thoughts coherently, much less b) listen to and process the thoughts that Pauly is presenting in our conversations and c) react to his comments while also maintaining the thread of whatever thought I had while d) trying to prevent my mind from jumping to another thought.

Now that we are trying to broaden our voice and incorporate guests to the mix, the mini-architecture of that process is even more elaborate. It's now important to e) absorb the guest's story while also f) advancing our own concept of the show's themes and sometimes g) having to spontaneously consider new ways of thinking about an event or ideology. With both of our first two interviews, I noticed places I wish I had asked better questions, listened more closely to answers or thought more intelligently about certain things in the first place.

***

2012 WSOP Champion Greg Merson

Luckily, our guests have delivered in the spaces where I still see room for improvement in my skills as an interviewer: Our first longform interview took place over Skype with 2012 World Series of Poker Champion, Greg Merson, who chronicles a string of substance abuse issues and details how his life with and without substances has played a sometimes uneasy role in his occupation as a full time professional gambler.

For more information about all of our episodes so far, check out the Dope Stories Episode Guide.

And our episode 8 guest is very special--a true "get"--because I regard Dr. Carl Hart as an intellectual godfather to some of the ideas that buoyed the creation of Dope Stories. It was an interesting talk for me, and I'll write about it more as the episode date approaches (Thursday, March 20th).

For now I'll just tease it by saying that the most enjoyable part was how gracefully he schooled me on some of my own sloppy thinking.


Columbia Professor and author of High Price Dr. Carl Hart in the Dope Stories studio

Subscribe to Dope Stories on iTunes.

Slate Piece: Fifteen Years Smoking Crack

noreply@blogger.com (Shane Schleger) — Fri, 28 Feb 2014 22:18:00 +0000

I wrote an article that Slate published earlier today, and in just a few hours there were more comments on the piece than anything I have ever written on the internet, combined. (A distant but memorable second was this account of bad service at a fancy LA restaurant).

If there's one thing I wish I made clearer in the article: I'm not looking for a way to indulge my crack habit, much less justify it. I wanted to reflect back on 15 years of experimentation honestly in an attempt to readjust perceptions about drugs, including my own. The piece was challenging to write and to publish, and I tend to think I would have had an easier time continuing to "justify" my habit if I kept the matter private.

We look within our families at the palpable toll that drugs have taken, and the destruction that the drug war has wrought, and we instinctively blame the drugs themselves as the cause of the problem. Or, even less rationally and more divisively, we blame the addict. Some of that is founded in experience: drug users do sometimes act selfishly, ignorantly, and deviously; the drugs themselves are toxic, harmful and have a deteriorating effect. In other words, drugs are "bad."

But a lot of blame is founded in a level of closed-minded, irrational discussion that has shaped drug policy and colored our perception of drug use for decades. "I thought Nancy Reagan settled all of this in the 80s. Just say 'No.' Simple," wrote one commenter, hinting at the fact that 30 years later, there is still limited ability to explore the possibilities that drugs are also "good" in some ways.

There is little room for a narrative from the drug addict that doesn't involve his being rehabilitated, repentant or "recovering." The level of dialogue at our disposal is mired in black-and-white language and little room to interpret subtle shades of grey. Thankfully, plenty of people commented to the effect that was pretty much the only point I was trying to make--that it's time for a new level of dialogue--and it's a point I believe in firmly enough to throw myself in front of a freight train of stigma and heartache. As one commenter said, "The hostile reaction of the commentary to this piece only bolsters the argument of its writer."

I anticipated that the story would be filtered through some deeply ingrained perceptions about drug addiction, the war on drugs, personal responsibility, and the idea that I was lying to myself and others, delusional and "in denial." A lot of people seemed engaged by one small sentence I wrote, "I need my friends and loved ones to help keep me in check" as if I was placing some extraordinary burden on them and not getting by in life with traditional boundaries. Substitute "need" with "prefer" and maybe the wording is more accurate, but yeah--that's sort of the deal I have with my friends and loved ones, we help keep each other "in check."

***

Maybe it's easier to look at this as my cry for help. Except I'm not crying--I'm telling these stories and broadcasting the issues on Dope Stories because I find it helpful. I find I am providing myself some measure of solace by being straightforward about my problems. There is observable local evidence of harm reduction and the ability to more easily reformat ideas about substance use and consciousness when I am honest about it. I hope it translates for others.

I can't really begin to parse the hundreds of comments on the article--which ones I thought advanced the discussion vs. limiting it and which made me feel good vs. those that hurt my feelings. The comments reflected various attitudes about the drug war, drug use, and the nature of addiction and run the gamut from profound to ignorant.

This is just ground zero for discussion, and I don't (yet) regret taking a shot at helping to shape the discussion.

Dope Stories Episode 4 - Talkin' About Base: Crack 101

noreply@blogger.com (Shane Schleger) — Thu, 20 Feb 2014 07:00:00 +0000

We've just released the fourth episode of Dope Stories Podcast, and all our episodes are now on iTunes! Subscribe to the show and new episodes will download automatically every Thursday. Also please rate and review the show! (I believe I've heard other podcasters emphasize this!)

Episodes 4 and 5 address trickier, heavier, more personal issues than anything we've done before--specifically, in this episode, my 15 year on-again, off-again love/hate flirtation with crack cocaine, and next week, Pauly's ongoing relationship with prescription opiates.

I will write a more detailed companion piece to this topic soon, but for now I won't deconstruct the subject matter too thoroughly and let the content speak for itself.

Suffice it to say it was not a particularly joyous process to come out with this information, but I felt it was necessary to serve part of the show's purpose and to deliver on my steadfast belief that the best way to comprehend "addiction" and "drug abuse" is to first have an honest and transparent conversation about drug use, including my own.

Dope Stories (I Got a Few)

noreply@blogger.com (Shane Schleger) — Thu, 06 Feb 2014 18:59:00 +0000

"Herb is a plant, not a drug, I want to destigmatize herb relative to other drugs," a friend explained to me while discussing his beloved weed habit.

"Why don't we, instead, work towards destigmatizing drugs altogether?" I asked.

The die for the Dope Stories Podcast had already been cast, and I was merely testing the waters with a concept I had been thinking about aggressively since pitching the idea of a radio show designed to foster "a rational discussion about drug use" to my future co-host, Pauly McGuire.

The Dope Stories Podcast began brewing this past summer while I was enjoying a monthlong reprieve from society in the form of a honeymoon road trip on the West Coast, highlighted in no small part by a return to psychedelic experimentation.

At the same time, Dr. Pauly was hitting the road on his own trip, enjoying his perennial escape from the rat race on Phish tour, reporting tidbits on Twitter such as the price of a strip of LSD on "the lot" and describing the eccentric characters who were hanging around at 5AM in a random San Francisco apartment after a show.

I always respected Pauly's journalistic voice, his Hunter S-esque way of embedding into a subculture and unabashedly reporting on the fun stuff. "We need to get together and compare notes" was my first thought. My second thought, "we need to put that discussion on tape during one of your '5 minute podcasts.'" That thinking quickly evolved into, "We need to start our own podcast and thoroughly examine all the issues related to drug use and drug policy. We have the experience to draw from and the balls to put it out there. Let's call it Dope Stories."

I can't think of an idea appearing so simply and completely to me while still rooted in the foggiest of notions and starkest contradictions.

For the past 20 years since reading Andrew Weill's 1972 seminal work on drug theory, The Natural Mind, I fully believed that drugs and experimentation were organic, integral aspects of human consciousness. But during 20 years since of my own experimentation, I have found little in the way of a blueprint or roadmap to rely on when reconciling how society regards the behavior of drug users engaged in what I consider fundamentally normal behavior.

The current discussion on drugs is mired in closed-minded, black-and-white thinking and the result is stratification and stigmatization: We demonize those addicted to certain drugs, like heroin and nicotine, while celebrating other aspects of our own drug use, like alcohol and caffeine.

Meanwhile, users are ostracized by their loved ones and families are ripped apart by illogical drug laws and antiquated legislation that everyone -- from the police and judges prosecuting the cases to the corner kids and hillbillies selling drugs -- agrees is an ongoing disaster.

If you haven't seen Eugene Jarecki's incredible documentary The House I Live In, I recommend taking the time to do it immediately if not soon. Jarecki's work is a significant element in the the inspiration for Dope Stories.

I wanted to start a conversation to help me understand all these contradictions, and to discuss:

- Why one of my oldest friends was being sent up on a 5-year federal prison sentence for dealing in the same substance, marijuana, that I get to freely enjoy under state regulations here in California.

- Why I consider psychedelic experimentation very valuable and healthy on the one hand but also very risky on the other. I wanted to describe my return to psychedelic experimentation in the context of my history, which is marked by a full-blown, drug-induced psychotic breakdown that I experienced as a result of the exact same kind of experimentation.

- My own experiences with hard drugs; bring that darkside of my personality to light, not just to "normalize" the behavior and break through my own stigmas but also to try and shed any light I can on the behavior.

And I knew there was only one person who could help get those stories out of me, and whose own stories I wanted to hear in return. That's Paul McGuire.

(Read Pauly's version of our origins here).

I love radio. It's been an important part of my life since listening to Vin Scelsa and Seven Second Delay in high school, Howard Stern and WFMU for over 20 years.

I also love the new era of DIY broadcasting that we call "podcasting." I can't think of a better medium to slowly but surely unravel all the confusion surrounding the topic of drug use and to make a connection with an audience around a fundamental, but wildly misunderstood, facet of human existence.

Pauly and I have our work cut out: we have 40 years of combined drug experience and roughly zero professional radio work under our belts--so it might take us an hour or three to get our thoughts straight, but we hope you stick around for what promises to be a long, strange trip.

Stay tuned for a bonus episode 2, in which we discuss the death of Phillip Seymour Hoffman, how 90s "heroin chic" in NYC may have helped foment his habit, and the needle and the damage done in our own lives.

After that, look for a new episode every Thursday.

Au Revoir PokerStars Team Online

noreply@blogger.com (Shane Schleger) — Tue, 31 Dec 2013 17:37:00 +0000

One of my favorite misheard lyrics is from Smiff-n-Wessun's "Bucktown." I always thought he said "Au revoir, yeah, now up I'm up out of here" but it's actually "ROR, yeah, now I'm up out of here."

Point being, I am not signing up again with PokerStars Team Online for 2014. It was a great experience, and the full summary appears on the Pokerstars Blog:

Goodbye Team Online, it's been a pleasure!

Denied Entry

noreply@blogger.com (Shane Schleger) — Tue, 17 Sep 2013 20:39:00 +0000

I was denied entry into Canada last night at YVR, despite having entered the country on two separate occasions since Black Friday (and at least one other time prior to BF). My most recent adventure to Canada, documented in the previous blog, took place last month. Yesterday, I was told I wouldn't be allowed into Canada, then essentially compelled to buy a new flight back to LAX.

A friend of mine who got turned around on a different occasion was forced to buy a flight to Hawaii since it was the only flight back to the US that night. The other option (if no flights back to the US are available) is to spend the night in a local holding tank. It is a humiliating and frustrating experience, costly and nonsensical.

The primary sticking point for Canadian customs officials is a 2001 misdemeanor conviction for possession of marijuana, for which I served three years probation. I was sentenced in 2002 and finished up my term in '05. Even if you think that offense is worthy of being denied admission into a foreign country as a tourist, the way this played out should offend anyone's sense of logic, because the same exact issue came up on my last visit in early August with the exact opposite result.

At that time (in August, crossing over by car via the "Peace Arch"), I was told I was being allowed in despite my criminal record, because I had, in Canada's eyes, paid my debt to society and been rehabilitated. They said 10 years had passed since the conviction, that was the threshold. "We're gonna let you and your wife in today, despite the old charge," the female customs agent said.

This wasn't the case according to the guys I was dealing with yesterday--no, now, I was being told by the border agent, a young man of Pakistani descent, that I would not be redeemed for my crimes in the eyes of Canada until 10 years had elapsed from the time my probation ended.

When I flew into the same airport, and stood in that exact room for a secondary screening in 2011, the issue of my 2001 arrest didn't even come up! The inconsistency blows my mind.

The man gave me two options: speak to a judge and appeal this decision, or leave and try to come back in 2015! I asked to speak to a judge to appeal, which became clear wasn't really an option--more like a theoretical option--so I settled for a supervisor. Neither the supervisor nor the first agent could explain why I was let into the country twice before. They basically admitted that border agents have some amount of arbitrary discretion, which I interpret as: if they don't like the cut of your jib, they can find a reason to keep you out.

They were really telling me over and over, "We can't account for why you were let in twice in the last two years, but, yeah, come back in 2015."

It was like they were committed to their decision but didn't really understand their own motivation or rationale. By the time this discussion was taking place, the die had already been cast, and talking to the supervisor only served as a means to express the frustration I was feeling over the farcical nature of their decision.

The agents acknowledged that I was calm and respectful towards them, so they were happy to answer my questions, just not let me into the country. They recognized that I was simply trying to be a good, money-spending tourist. They knew I had dinner plans with friends in the city that night, and they knew I had paid for my two-week vacation rental up front. And they still told me to go fuck myself until 2015.

***

Meanwhile, the border agent was clearly interested in poker, peppering me with questions about being a professional poker player--asking me stupid shit like, "Can you make money playing online? How do you do that without being able to see people's faces?" Tells me he sees a lot of guys coming into Canada to play now that it was banned in the USA.

He asked me about my arrest. By "asked me," I mean he introduced a series of questions and statements designed for self-incrimination. So, I explained the general circumstances of the arrest to the agent--that I was unlucky enough to be hanging out with a friend on the Upper West Side of Manhattan on the day the police were wrapping up a month-long investigation on him over marijuana.

I pointed out the length of the investigation, the skill of the investigators, and highlighted its propinquity to the WTC massacre (I was arrested on 7/11/01). The customs agent had the nerve to say, "They didn't have anything better to investigate?"

Meanwhile this agent had to spend 2.5 hours looking over my case, searching my bags, then escorting me to the ticket counter (he was nice enough to accompany me outside for a much-needed cigarette first), then to the US Customs station, and finally to the gate, where he had to hang around while I waited to board my new one-way flight home. Didn't he have better things to investigate?

***

There is no moral to the story. I wish there was solace in indignation, but I find no comfort saying "Fuck Canada, I'm never going back."

Mark Twain's concept of "loyalty to the country always, loyalty to the government when it deserves it" sort of applies here. I was going to Canada because I love Salt Spring Island and wanted to spend two more weeks there finishing out WCOOP. So who wins if I let one agency of the Canadian government kill the good vibe I felt towards the landscape and people of Canada?

I also know that some of my Canadian counterparts, especially professional gamblers, face similar hassles when they cross down into the USA, and it's equally frustrating and ludicrous.

I would have thought that spending three weeks in Canada recently would have cemented my relationship with Canada as a welcomed tourist. Rather, this whole dynamic--also considering that we dropped a five-figure sum into the tourist economy last month, and I had plans to drop another four-figures in the coming two weeks--is so irrational, it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

I would call it a Pyrrhic Victory--because no one wins--but I can't even understand why or how the battle is being fought in the first place.

Honeymoon Landing

noreply@blogger.com (Shane Schleger) — Wed, 28 Aug 2013 18:23:00 +0000

Some years ago during a Commerce tournament Lee Markholt said, "there's more to life than poker" and I responded half-jokingly, "yes, and as soon as I figure out what that is I will get right on it."

Along those lines, this has been the best summer of my life, and it had nothing to do with poker. I did play a pretty full schedule at the 2013 WSOP after scrapping my foolish plans to stretch myself between online poker in Mexico, bracelet events in Vegas, and sanity in Santa Monica.

In Vegas, I made half a run at the $3k 6-max event but didn't put up any other results. I did, however, get married to my longtime love, Sheila McCormack.

So this happened tonight! I married my longtime girlfriend, the love of my life, @SheilaMcCormack! Pic by @OwenCrowe pic.twitter.com/0HjK20npdH
— Shane Schleger (@ShaneSchleger) June 4, 2013

We met in December of 2004 at Blue Ribbon Brooklyn, where I was wrapping up my tenure as a waiter while transitioning into a full time poker player.

Then on June 3rd, 2013, around sunset, we had a quickie wedding ceremony in front of the Bellagio fountain with a three person guest-list consisting of my oldest childhood friend Matt and two of my close poker friends, Owen (who wasn't playing a tournament that day) and Jesse (who busted his 5PM tournament in time to join us).

With Matt flying in from New Mexico at the last minute, we only had time for a "three-minute bachelor party" consisting of [no] hookers and [only a little] blow.

We gathered with the wedding efficient and the photographer in front of the hotel (I searched "scenic Las Vegas wedding" around 3PM that day and found these great people to help us get married on a few hours notice) and 20 minutes later, we had the paperwork and instructions to make everything legal and official.

After the ceremony, the five of us went to dinner at Jaleo, where Owen picked up the tab on a delicious meal with a couple of outlandishly-priced bottles of Spanish wine.

Two nights before the ceremony, on Sunday around 11PM, we were in downtown Las Vegas getting our marriage license. And although we were semi-formally engaged (its own long story), we were nonplussed by the prospect of planning a wedding (or even choosing what type of wedding to plan), and had only decided two nights before that--on Friday, when I picked Sheila up from McCarran Airport--to pull the trigger.

***

The trajectory of our relationship has been somewhat intense and complicated--layers of conflict and madness coating the underlying foundation of love, respect and understanding that formed our bond from the night we met (and I might add, there is only the subtlest difference between a "one-night stand" and "love at first sight").

People who know us know that there were at least a few times over last 8+ years when our future together seemed dubious. My friends also know that throughout the hard times Sheila and I experienced, my determination to work through our problems and make it last never wavered, only grew stronger year after year.

As the line from "Southern Cross" goes, "So we cheated and we lied and we tested. And we never failed to fail, it was the easiest thing to do." That song played in heavy rotation towards the end of our month-long honeymoon road trip that began in late July and concluded yesterday.

***

When Black Friday went down, Sheila and I were definitively broken up. From November '10 through April '11--the time span during which I got a deal with PokerStars and was then presented with the necessity to move out of the US to continue playing on PokerStars--we didn't talk to each other.

When Sheila and I started communicating again in May, we arrived at a good emotional space fairly quickly, but it wouldn't have been appropriate or practical for her to tell me to stay in Los Angeles, and the option of her giving up an LA-based career was doubly impractical.

So I left California with an aching in my heart, went to Vancouver to play WCOOP, and although I had a good month in poker, I was in a state of constant agitation, trying to manage all the aspects of my new life, particularly the relationship that was re-emerging over a distance of thousands of miles.

When I left Vancouver and figured out that Mexico existed a mere 3-hour drive away from my erstwhile home with Sheila, it eased my angst with the hope that a new setup would allow us to function in a more fluid relationship. It didn't.

The struggles and swings of our shared life continued. But we also continued to slowly and clumsily work through our individual emotional baggage and bullshit, to hash out the possibility of a harmonious future. That dynamic unfolded for the next year-plus until we eventually reached a place of confidence and ease over the prospect of creating a lasting commitment.

When Sheila and I met in 2004, we were both basically still kids, and we had to grow up significantly before we could get to the altar. Put another, maybe more accurate, way--Sheila made me fight for her love; at every turn she challenged me to become a better man.

Or maybe it was the wine talking, maybe it was Vegas and the fucking Mirage.

***

When it came time to plan a honeymoon, Black Friday proved its role as both blessing and curse. I've said it before that BF did cause one distinctly positive change--got me out of my comfort zone, forced me to see the world from a broader perspective and face the challenges of living a slightly unfamiliar life in a foreign country,

For the eventual honeymoon destination, BF inadvertently allowed us to find one of the most beautiful places I have ever visited, an island not far from Vancouver called Salt Spring Island. The sort of place I never imagined existed, rather more like a place you hear about in the Bob Marley song "Dreamland."

But more on Salt Spring Island soon.

First, I had to pitch the scheme to my new bride: Let's find someplace in Canada to chill: Let's take that long overdue road trip up the California coast, let's stop at the hotels in Big Sur, Mendocino, and Seattle that have special meaning to us. Let's ride, let's ride, let's ride, let's ride, get high.

And then, let's set up in Canada, where I can put in the hours on PokerStars that I had been forsaking, a place we can live together for a little while and hang out while I play some poker, just like the good old days. After all, what new bride doesn't want to spend her honeymoon cooking and cleaning (also reading and gazing at an incredible view, of course) while her husband spends 8+ hour days in front of the computer, working?

Sheila acquiesced to my vision, which I was confident could be a recipe for a special trip. Confident but not completely certain. While I finished out the WSOP, she researched the Gulf Islands and various other desirable destinations in Canada, and, through luck and destiny, found an insanely beautiful vacation rental property in Salt Spring Island. It turned out to be a better honeymoon than I could have ever dreamed.

There are deer everywhere on Salt Spring Island.

We had a lot of fun driving up the coast, staying at the breathtaking Ventana Inn and Spa in Big Sur, then a quaint, well-appointed spot in Mendocino, CA called the Sea Rock Inn, introduced to us during a friend's wedding in 2011. The final stop before crossing the northern border was the Edgewater in Seattle, which, despite some indicators of "downhill alert" is still a pretty sweet hotel.

***

We arrived in Salt Spring Island, exhausted, around midnight on a Friday night, narrowly catching the last ferry off the mainland. The ferry ride itself was pretty cool--there was decent food, an outdoor smoking section, and a couple of fun-loving Canadians heading to another, smaller Gulf Island--Pender Island--who gave us some of the lay of the land.

It was dark when we arrived, and I wasn't prepared to be blown away as thoroughly as I was the next morning when I woke up and experienced the view from our temporary home. I had wanted to find a place that resembled Baltar's home on Caprica (I remember IMDB'ing the location as soon as I realized those scenes from Battlestar Galactica were actually filmed on this planet), and Sheila more or less found it:

Baltar's house in Caprica

Our spot on Salt Spring Island.

The initial sense of awe only expanded when we hit the Saturday market and were greeted with a luscious array of local food and crafts. There was fresh pasta, two local cheese companies with offerings to compare favorably with any Parisian fromagerie. Local produce, chicken...lavender products from Sacred Mountain Lavender. A very mellow woman, who had lived on the island for 20 years, selling handwoven blankets, scarves and hats that appealed to Sheila's sense of fashion as completely as anything at Fred Segal could.

It got better from there: Black Sheep Books down the way, where I found a copy of Henry Miller's Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch that I had planned on ordering online. A man on the next corner making fresh hot donuts. Down the street, Salt Spring Coffee, Denman Island Chocolate everywhere.

Horses, deer, cattle, goats--all over the island. Everywhere we drove, walked, hiked, swam, kayaked--views and sights that can't be properly described in words. People along the roadside picking blackberries, farm stands dotting every major and minor road, selling freshly laid eggs and whatever else the resident farm is producing. Take the eggs, drop $5 in the bucket, be on your way.

***

During the three weeks we spent there, I think I played 10 sessions of online poker, finishing a slight loser but enjoying the grind in a more relaxed, integrated way than I had since March, 2011. Most sessions finished around 5-6PM, when Sheila and I would take a ride down to St. Mary's Lake for a swim. Then we found the rope swing, tied to a tree along the road. Then some local kids at the rope swing showed me "Jumping Tree," a hundred yards away, with densely tiered branches and water underneath deep enough for safe jumps, anywhere from 15-60 feet up the tree.

It's an island of 10,000 people, not vaguely the boondocks. As I understand, it's basically a hub for all the other local islands--children from nearby islands like Galiano and Mayne take a water taxi to Salt Spring for school. There are at least three major grocery stores and any other kind of store you might need. There is essentially zero cause to leave the island for anything unless the clamor of city life is calling you.

Yet, you have to want to get to Salt Spring Island--the ferry ride is long and kind of expensive--which (I think) is why you don't find any corporate chains on the island. No Starbucks, no Holiday Inn Expresses, and you will not be seeing any golden arches around here.

People come to Salt Spring for a variety of reasons--to retire, to relax, some to live "off the grid" and subsist without electricity and other conveniences of the developed world. One seemingly typical arrangement involves exchanging farm or household work for lodging during the summertime. Hitchhiking is common and safe. There was one guy we gave a ride to--a recovering addict on his way to an AA meeting--who told us, plausibly, that we "will always carry a piece of Salt Spring in our hearts."

***

When it came time to plan the trip home, we knew we had to stop again at Big Sur, but instead of taking a leisurely 6-day jaunt back down the coast as we did on the way up (we had also stopped at Cambria, Pt. Reyes and Eugene, OR), we wanted to get back to Ventana quickly, then get back to the city. The trip from Salt Spring back to Big Sur consisted of two long stretches down the 5 (a route equally beautiful in stretches as the Redwood Highway) with a stop for dinner in Seattle, a motel in Roseburg, OR and then a night in San Francisco.

We shacked up in SF at the pied-a-terr of an old employer of mine, the former owner of a messenger company where I worked as a youth in NYC, also one of my favorite people in this world. We slept in the back room of the basement of a two-story apartment he owns. The top floor he rents out to college students, the basement he makes available for friends passing through.

The front room of the basement was occupied by another friend of his, who was in the middle of his own epic voyage from Austin, TX to who-knows-where, geared up with mountain bikes and kayaks (plural) and a guitar. This was the only night on the trip we didn't pay for.

On that note, and in the spirit of gratitude that characterized much of our odyssey, I have to state how incomprehensibly lucky I am that Sheila had a good year at work in 2012, because with my abysmal poker results in 2013, there is no way I could have afforded this trip.

(Or, as the joke goes,

"What do you call a poker player without a girlfriend?"
"Homeless.")

***

Entering Big Sur from the north.

Ventana Inn is not inexpensive, but it's one of the best places you could ever splurge on, if you value the serenity and sanctity of nature, quietude and total relaxation (and don't desire a poolside bar). For me, there is absolutely nothing I'd rather be doing in this lifetime than walking around in a robe, down to the "clothing optional" pool and Japanese baths, going for a summer swim.

Room service ends early, but the pools are open all night.

The local restaurants are excellent; the hotel rooms are seamlessly built into the woods, brilliantly conceived by local architect-turned-furniture-designer Kipp Stewart who figured out a way to optimize solitude and connectedness in a single hotel room.

The pathways are lined with vibrant purple lavender and green rosemary stalk, calming and vivid, meanwhile deer and wild turkey randomly roam the property. The massage room overlooks the vast expanse of rugged mountainside to the impenetrable expanse of the Pacific Ocean. And, well, it's just...Big Sur. God's Country, I've heard.

We planned on staying one night, then stayed two.

Most importantly, there is no dollar amount you could assign to the experience of witnessing your partner the happiest she's ever been.

I love you forever Sheila.

Viva Mexico: Team Online Short Film

noreply@blogger.com (Shane Schleger) — Wed, 22 May 2013 21:14:00 +0000

My PokerStars Team Online short film has been released, and I've been warmed by the positive reaction. That's a credit to the director Ryan Firpo (who also directed the forthcoming documentary about the poker room, Bet Raise Fold, which looks excellent). I was really impressed by how he captured a large chunk of the arc of my life and created a film that incorporates some of the past, the present and the future, as all good art does.

I wrote a little about the making of the film recently on the PokersStars Blog, and now I want to compare some of the themes from the video to my current relationship with poker.

The truth is, despite the fact that I am proud of the end result of the project, the video is hard for me to watch. Not just because hearing my own voice will always make me cringe, nor that the camera adds 10 lbs. in addition to the fact that I was 10 lbs. heavier when the filming took place last year. The main reason the video is tough to process is because right now I am closer to the feeling of bottomed-out despair from 2010 than I am to the triumphant feeling of having a proper identity within the game, sorta where the video ends.

Plenty of people watched the video and assumed that because it ends on a high note that I am in a good place, spiritually and emotionally, with poker, but what the video really depicts is my ongoing cyclical struggle with poker, and I have to report I am not in the "up" part of the cycle right now.

Most poker-related media focuses on the sexier aspects of the game, the extravagant sums of money in play, the exotic locations poker players travel to and the joyful spirit of being able to "play a game for a living."

That's actually a fine representation of reality for a lot of players I know: The best, most elite players definitely live a life that's thoroughly comfortable and relatively glamorous. They understood and practiced the single most important aspect of the game--bankroll management--and created a comfortable, steady living, year after year, largely immune to risk of ruin and the short term swings that plague less disciplined players like me.

But for many other players, poker is a struggle in too many ways to mention. It is for me still after more than eight years in the game, anyway. So when it comes time to represent my poker experience, I guess my writing instincts take over, and I find catharsis in telling the story as clearly and honestly as possible. It's somehow easier for me to face failure and disappointment than try to embrace the smoke-and-mirrors that the poker life affords. Not that there's anything wrong with the smoke-and-mirrors, I think poker as escapism is one of its finer qualities. I just usually lean towards my familiar approach, what I've been doing since my teen years--trying to create a narrative that expresses as much of a complete picture as possible, putting the past, present and future in the same picture.

***

It's also not exactly accurate to compare my current state of affairs with the anxiety I was feeling in 2010, because I'm experiencing a new manifestation of the pain of this poker life, and it revolves around a concept that even the most elite pros encounter: the struggle to balance poker with regular everyday life. How to be all-consumed by a game of small edges while still being present for people and things that exist in the non-poker world.

It also eventually relates back to the fact that the DOJ fucked us hard with Black Friday and has made the already difficult balancing act of being a poker pro much harder for those who felt compelled to leave the country in order to continue playing online.

For a while last year, I was in a good zone that allowed me to focus a lot of energy on poker and also spend time back in California. At first it felt really disheartening to drive through Southern California on the way to Mexico and see all the houses filled with people whose jobs didn't involved driving three hours south to a foreign country in order to generate income. Then I got over that and accepted the joyful mess and embraced the weirdness.

At times, I felt stretched a little thin by the need to drive to Mexico to play and my desire to drive back to Los Angeles to see my girlfriend and enjoy what I considered my "real life," but after a while that too went away. I had established what I thought was a good balance. I was at peace with the events of Black Friday and had gotten over the overwhelmed feeling of being displaced. Maybe I even felt lucky that I could keep one foot in each of my worlds while others had to give up their home life completely. I also acknowledged that it had been good to get out of my comfort zone.

And then, sometime towards the end of last year, my whole perception changed: I suddenly felt that I wasn't living a good balanced life at all, and that perhaps instead of getting the best of both worlds, I was getting nothing in either world. I decided to refine the balance, spend an extra day each week in California, be more present and available for my girlfriend in the hopes of creating a life that wasn't defined by long isolated stretches of playing online poker in a Mexican ghost town.

Again, a poker player needs to be fully dedicated to the game to perform at his best. Balance is the enemy of dedication, and my recent attempts at balance seem to have failed.

I still have the discipline and drive to try and get it right, and in order to do that I have had to embrace more contradictions. When you're on a downswing or not loving the game, many people advise you to take a break, take a step back and player lower stakes, fewer tables, study more. That conflicts with the instinct to just keep grinding and try to simply end the downswing and re-find the game. Like I said in the video, sometimes you have to give something up in order to get it back, and I'm learning that again.

So I'm working through it. Consciously taking steps to reform and reinvent myself. Seeing a shrink about my anxiety. I still feel blessed to be able to spend any amount time in California with the love of my life (I consider both my girlfriend and California itself to be the loves of my life), and to be able to play online poker just three hours away in Mexico, but it has become increasingly difficult to feel completely engaged wherever I am.

See, I still love grinding a Sunday on PokerStars, but it's just not the same without my girlfriend sleeping in the next room, getting up after I'd been working for a few hours to make me bacon and eggs. It's not the same without being able to walk outside on a sync break for a smoke and see random people walking, jogging, panhandling, living life. That balancing act was hard enough in itself--spending 8-12 hours every day, clicking buttons and maintaining a relationship--but now, with a bowl of hastily prepared cereal in the place of bacon and eggs, separated from my friends and loved ones by hundreds of miles and an international border--it also feels bleak.

In other words, not longer after I overcame the anxiety of compartmentalizing my life, a new anxiety replaced it, arising from the fact that I was longer living an integrated life. I am once again envious as I drive by the homes of Southern California residents with their Southern California jobs.

***

A lot of people commented on how nice my apartment looked in the film and how cool the pool looks, but that's sort of another example of smoke and mirrors: You could think of it just as easily as high-end solitary confinement. It's a modern, beautifully assembled condo building, 18 stories high and packed with amenities, but on any given night when you look up from my deck at the large mass of apartments, you will almost never see more than three other lights on. It's largely vacant. This conforms to the general vibe of Rosarito: A sprawled out coastal landscape with a lot of rough, unfinished edges, a stretched out ghost-town, a cartoon-ish underworld compared to its neighbor in the north.

On the same grounds, right next to my building, is a condo building that remains incomplete, a vertical concrete slab of darkness that will likely never be built. They were planning to build four identical building in total and couldn't even complete the second one. That is why the pool is so cool-looking: If you are planning to accommodate four-buildings' worth of people, an Olympic-sized pool (in addition to the outdoor infinity pool) is a good idea. Then when the economy collapses and the media starts to depict Mexico as a land of random drug-related beheadings, and everyone leaves--now you don't have enough people to fill a pool, nor even the ability to keep the hot-tub going seven days a week (it's only heated on the weekends).

Really, it has nothing to with amenities or square footage or the state of tourism in Baja Norte, and everything to do with the problems of living in an isolated environment in order to work an isolating profession.

So, I want to be back in Santa Monica again, watching sailboats out my window while I play the Sunday Warmup, waiting for my woman to wake up and make bacon and eggs. Or lox and bagels. In the meantime I have to find a way to reconcile the struggle and find a new balance in order to live either (let alone both) parts of my life correctly. Maybe with the perspective of the video, I can also carry the awareness that this is just one short, painful chapter in a long story that's been filled with a lot of funnier and more glorious chapters.

Stay tuned for the sequel I suppose!

Bring the Noise

noreply@blogger.com (Shane Schleger) — Sun, 07 Apr 2013 17:25:00 +0000

It's appropriate for Barack Obama to apologize for calling attorney general Kamala Harris the "by far the best-looking attorney general in the country" for exactly one reason: It was a statement guaranteed to be misconstrued, and as a public figure, he should be savvy enough to censor himself and avoid the ruckus.

(Arguably I should be too, but I haven't been inspired to write about much recently--well, nothing--so I figured I might as well take a detour and rant about the various things that tilted me about this Gawker piece by Tom Scocca I just read).

I appreciate the fact that Obama apologized for the "distraction" created by the comment and not the comment itself, because there was nothing inherently offensive, degrading, or minimizing about what he said. It was, in essence, a charming remark, and, considering the context is an interaction between two politicians, a humanizing exchange.

This is how Scocca (a man) explains why it's not cool to tell women they're attractive: "Because it's rude, you idiots. Because what you're saying is: Let's stop thinking about her and start looking at her—everybody here in this room, have a look, check her out. Check it out."

I believe Obama's comment (again, had it been delivered in an appropriate context and not from the President in a public forum) can just as easily be interpreted in a strictly positive light, with a subtext that reads more along the lines of: "Since my professional respect for you goes without saying, please take this old-fashioned compliment in the most flattering possible way." It's the sort of kindness that is easily communicated and understood between friends or associates with a history, who are secure in their gender identities.

The smart women I've encountered in this lifetime have don't have a problem making these kinds of distinctions.

Love how this argues that women are individuals too and then puts them all in a box - gawker.com/5993807/manspl…
— Sanat Gersappa (@sanatgersappa) April 7, 2013

***

The person I know best in this world, the person I would call my soulmate, is a woman. It's not an overstatement to say that my greatest pride in this life has been witnessing her extraordinary success in business. I don't say "extraordinary success" because she's a woman, but relative to the thousands of people I've known and observed in this world (and myself), our trajectories and ability to harness talent and ambition efficiently. She is a woman who proved to me that "there are no second acts in American lives" is complete and total bullshit.

She built much of her career at a company that is known for being a "boys club." Would it really shock you to learn that she has had to field a range of compliments and come-ons in her rise to the top? Do we really expect that in her years working in a male-dominated environment, that no one noticed (or--gasp--mentioned) that in addition to having the brains and the talent to do the job better than anyone else around, she also has a nice rack?

Should she feel objectified by flattery? Or empowered by it? Or maybe she just work with the fact that her physical presence as a woman is necessarily an aspect of how men perceive her, and maybe that's not so bad.

She doesn't have to rely on her attractiveness to get the job--the work speaks for itself--but she doesn't have to let thousands of years of biological hard-wiring bum her out, either. The reaction that men have towards women is far more pure and genuine that the convoluted sexual politics we pile on top of it.

***

The more intellectually annoying aspect of the media blowup after Obama's comment is how it once again demonstrates the increasing importance we place in reacting, in advancing theories based on emotion and half-thought out arguments instead of reasonable, measured contemplation. The need to say something is stronger than the need to say something that's actually true. (I'm guilty of it, too, of course).

This erodes our ability to connect with each other as humans as opposed to socio-political constructs, of living breathing creatures and not merely creations of social media. I'd say the only thing that allows us to engage in a meaningful way is our ability to filter out immediate feelings and emotions through a rational eye. It is the basis for empathy.

But the die has been cast, and our ability to communicate in a calm and intelligent way is not-so-gradually becoming whitewashed and muddled.

(Of course, there is plenty value in our current ability to react quickly and incisively: the above imbedded tweet probably summarizes the confused, creepy nature of Scoccia's piece better than I will, no matter how many words I spew).

***

"Mansplaining," as far as I know, is a recently popular term meant to denote the condescending way that men explain certain things to women, so I guess by re-appropriating this fad term, the editors of Gawker are hoping to create some sort of high-minded unified understanding of women's issues. Or generate page views, whatever.

The thing is, I don't need to be explained anything by Gawker editors about modern-day feminism or the antiquated architecture of sexual politics or the inequities women continue to face.

I don't need a Buzzeed reaction piece to (an intentionally provocative comment by) Adam Carolla to be informed there are funny female comedians. That's because I've been listening to funny female comedians since I was a child, and I never made the distinction before the media invented the distinction. (I also happen to think my girlfriend is the funniest person on the planet of either gender).

Of course, I'm not automatically hip to all the issues that women face. I hear my female peers in the poker world tell me that they still run into situations at the table where male players say stupid or offensive shit or otherwise make women uncomfortable. So, I understand that the poisons of old, oppressive attitudes still linger in various ways, and I realize it's important to be vigilant, cognitive, sensitive, and open-minded.

The difference is, I try to get my information by listening to actual women talk about their actual problems and emotions and not from the groupthink that persistently seeps out of the new media culture.

"Casinos Without Borders" -- Verge Piece by Trent Wolbe

noreply@blogger.com (Shane Schleger) — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 17:57:00 +0000

Last week an editor at Slate contacted me about doing a followup piece to my story on Black Friday from 2011, but I realized that the piece he wanted had already been written by my friend Trent Wolbe for the online tech publication, The Verge.

I also realized I neglected to post a link here. Enjoy:

Casinos without borders: 'I moved to Mexico to keep my job playing online poker' by Trent Wolbe

Gowanus Dolphin Jumps Shark

noreply@blogger.com (Shane Schleger) — Sat, 26 Jan 2013 20:14:00 +0000

Dolphins have jumped the shark.
— Neal Brennan (@nealbrennan) January 26, 2013

By the end of the yesterday, I figured out that it's OK to piss off a group of internet cognoscenti as long as you make your girlfriend laugh.

I am among the luckiest of all Twitter users for having a girlfriend who doesn't check Twitter (and also has nearly zero awareness of internet meme culture). So when we sat down to dinner last night, I assumed her reaction after I explained that day's adventures with my Twitter parody account the @GowanusDolphin would be a mix of a) not really understanding what I was talking about and then b) making fun of me for my geeky behavior.

Instead, she got a surprisingly hearty laugh out of the whole thing and thought the idea of a dolphin lamenting about being unable to find the South Street Seaport was funny.

Granted, we were a couple of glasses of wine into dinner, but anyone who has been in a relationship for several years might agree that it's not an insignificant accomplishment to elicit a genuine guttural laugh from your partner.

***

@shaneschleger you were genuinely trying to enjoy the internet sans cynicism and that's a sin to them haha. keep your chin up.
— Cuck Grassley (@80want) January 25, 2013

can we save our vitriol for actual bad people instead of people who genuinely enjoy something one irony level below us like @shaneschleger?
— Cuck Grassley (@80want) January 25, 2013

I was appreciative for this person not just for his kind words but for helping me understand where it was I went wrong.

Based on the reactions and conversations I had on Twitter yesterday, I learned that my transgression was not being crass about the plight of the unfortunate dolphin but being lame and unfunny according to the standards of people who spend all day on the internet deciphering the value of internet memes. Turns out that parody accounts are offensive on principle to certain people, in and of themselves, regardless of the content. I ran into a pack of viral meme watchdogs, and they were happy to rip me to shreds.

I guess I have a very simple sense of humor, and to me the idea of a dolphin getting stranded in the Gowanus Canal, setting up a Twitter account and then asking to be put on the guest list at the Barclay Center is just fucking funny to me. In other words, my sense of humor has not evolved much since my father showed me a VHS tape of "Land Shark."

In any case, when some of these professional internet crawlers discovered that I wrote a blog about the parody account, I found out that that was yet an even greater offense to their sensibilities, and they were not shy to express it and pile on me a bit:

for what its worth this shaniaconline.blogspot.com/2013/01/if-you… ONLY MAKES THE PARODY ACCOUNT WORSE
— max read (@max_read) January 25, 2013

This is the cool guy who made the dolphin parody twitter. Very funny. Love parody accounts: @shaneschleger
— Katie Notopoulos (@katienotopoulos) January 25, 2013

The guy who created the dolphin parody account also runs @p_funk_bot, which tweets random lyrics to Parliment Funkadelic songs. lmao
— Katie Notopoulos (@katienotopoulos) January 25, 2013

I follow some of these people, and actually consistently enjoy Katie Notopoulos' content, but I didn't really understand what I did to bother her so profoundly that she'd take time out of her day to basically harass me, so I asked:

@shaneschleger i'm sorry, i'm just grouchy over this whole bangwithfriends.com debacle
— Katie Notopoulos (@katienotopoulos) January 25, 2013

Apology accepted I guess? I have no idea what she's referring to regarding "bang with friends," but I realize that when you spend all day on the internet, standard interactions can become difficult to navigate. The value in determining whether or not you're attacking someone for being an actual asshole or just because you are having a bad day is minimal, but the value in reacting quickly and decisively and broadcasting it is high.

Of course I find it especially bothersome that Notopoulos would attack @p_funk_bot which has done her no harm and has brought some level of joy to many of the thousands of people it has interacted with.

At times, I've been an asshole on the internet myself, but for the most part I apply "anti-Internet Tough Guy" rules to my dealings online: If I wouldn't say it to your face, I probably won't say it to you on the internet.

It's very easy to make your own point of view seem correct in 140 characters and a lot harder to take a step back and analyze a situation intelligently. And since it's also not much harder to take someone to task directly on Twitter, rather than harass them in the abstract like Max Read and Notopooulos did, I can't say I have much respect for their approach.

People on the internet pretend to care about bullying, but as one of my favorite comedians Neal Brennan has pointed out, no one actual gives a shit about bullying on principle, they just don't want to be part of the group that's bullied. The corollary to that is when it comes time to dish out some bullying, it's easy to get on board.

***

Not clear on how this Twitter parody account warranted suspension. Did the real Gowanus Dolphin complain? dailydot.com/society/gowanu…
— David Gallagher (@davidfg) January 25, 2013

This might be the only actually halfway interesting issue in the aftermath of the @GowanusDolphin Debacle. When I told my girlfriend that the account was suspended, she (as a totally distant, relatively objective observer of the events) thought it was outrageous that they would ban the parody account and said it's "almost an issue of free speech."

At the time the account was banned, I didn't care. It started out as an unfunny gag and wasn't likely to get much funnier, so it's probably good that they pulled the plug early.

But why exactly did they pull the plug? Of the people who came out to criticize me, no one actually admitted to being offended by the parody of a struggling dolphin, but many of them stood behind the principle that I was a in the wrong for creating something that was not cool on the internet. The only clearly outlined offense was creating something that was deemed not funny and not hip according to advanced standards of irony perpetuated by a certain clique of neo-journalists on Twitter..

There really was is not a valid reason to have banned that particular parody account on Twitter. Plenty of parody accounts thrive, and plenty of legitimately offensive real accounts as well, and parody in general is a well integrated aspect of pop culture. So, my hunch is that I actually did offend someone (or a large enough group of people) on the basis of making fun of a dolphin's suffering within the first 10 minutes of the story breaking.

I can only assume this is a peripheral effect of the viral media's obsession with the cuteness of animals, as evidenced by the abundance of feline- and canine-related pictures and memes that get circulated constantly by people who are influential on Twitter and in the new media. It seems Buzzfeed writers and their ilk have an easier time relating to animals on the internet than to people.

I'm the Jerk Behind @GowanusDolphin

noreply@blogger.com (Shane Schleger) — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 20:24:00 +0000

If you were watching the news or following Twitter this morning, you might know that a dolphin was stuck in the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn.

Killing time on a rainy day, I decided to do something I've never done before: start a Twitter parody account (@GowanusDolphin), along the lines of the Bronx Zoo Cobra thing. While I don't consider the suffering of a friendly animal to be a laughing matter in general, I also didn't think the subject was so taboo that it couldn't be parodied.

I was partly goofing around to see if I could be the first person in the race to create the inevitable Twitter parody that would exist. I think anyone who knows me knows I wouldn't create something in order to offend people, but despite trying to keep it light and funny, I crossed the lines of good taste according to several people.

That was FAST RT @gowanusdolphin: How do I get verified?
— HuffPost New York (@HuffPostNY) January 25, 2013

If you create a parody account within fifteen minutes of a news event you are the worst person on the planet and I hate you.
— Jared Keller (@jaredbkeller) January 25, 2013

Looks like I am now included in a sweeping indictment that covers everyone who ever created a timely parody account on Twitter, and I'd just like to know why.

The account was suspended within a half hour or so, so I can't easily retrieve the content I wrote, but for whatever it's worth, I wasn't making obscene or tasteless jokes about tuna fish, The Cove or anything like that. I just decided to use the occasion to combine my love/hate feelings towards New York and my naturally goofy approach towards social media.

My first tweet said something like, "I will survive this, thanks for the support." Another tweet I wrote asked if The Barclay Center could put me (the dolphin) on tonight's guest list. Another tweet just randomly referenced the Talking Heads, "this is not my beautiful house..."

Hipster dolphins are the worst. RT @buzzfeedandrew DOLPHIN STRANDED IN BROOKLYN CANAL! SAVE IT! twitter.com/michaelhayes/s…
— Jon Gabriel (@ExJon) January 25, 2013

And while many other people on Twitter joked generically about dolphins in Brooklyn, hipsters, etc., apparently it was my full-fledged parody that crossed the line:

I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say that this @gowanusdolphin account is far worse than the Holocaust.
— Joel Johnson (@joeljohnson) January 25, 2013

So I suppose making a parody account about a suffering animal is more offensive to some than creating a casual reference point to an event in which millions of people, including some of my direct ancestors, were tortured and murdered! I wonder how many of Joel Johnson's family had to flee Germany or hide out in bunkers in the Ukraine during the great Dolphin Holocaust of WWII, but I can tell him some of my own family history if he's curious.

Or was he just making a joke, and one that I can say is basically funny and well-phrased and acceptable if I don't overthink it? Maybe I should just lighten the fuck up.

***

Of course plenty of people played along with the joke, and I got dozens of follows, favorites and RTs within a twenty minute period. A few even lamented the quick coming and going of the account:

How is @gowanusdolphin already a suspended account? Damn, haters!
— GabeR (@widestance) January 25, 2013

And the best observation was:

sad news -- it appears that Twitter suspended @gowanusdolphin's account. Probably because it was fake.
— colbyhall (@colbyhall) January 25, 2013

***

But the negative feedback stung so much harder than any amount of positive encouragement, so I think I got a taste of why entertainers are sensitive to negative commentary and so immune to the joy of positive feedback. Also, how frustrating it is when people "can't take a joke."

So I'm writing this blog for two reasons:

1) Although I believe anonymity is an important part of the Internet, I also believe in taking responsibility for things that offend people. I do not want to hide behind the mask of anonymity in order to make any kind of point, but especially not to disgust or piss off people.

As I said earlier, I would have never started the account if I had thought it would have registered with so many people as tasteless. Maybe this points to my own flawed moral compass, but that's a different issue.

2) I was genuinely upset at some of the reactions that came my way, because I think it's weird our viral culture makes it taboo to goof on an animal but completely OK to say awful things to other people. One girl I follow on my real account and who follows me back called me something along the lines of "human scum" for having created the account.

While many of people registering disapproval in my @-mentions deemed it inappropriate for me to mock a dolphin, they had no problem calling the human behind the account all sorts of horrible things.

Anyway, my bad I guess!

Ocrowe and the PCA

noreply@blogger.com (Shane Schleger) — Mon, 14 Jan 2013 20:48:00 +0000

One of my closest friends, Owen "Ocrowe" Crowe, took fifth in the PokerStars Caribbean Adventure main event on Sunday, cashing for $435,000 and getting his year off to a very nice start.

I met Ocrowe in April of 2005 in Foxwoods, when we were both relatively new to poker. Crowe had just come off a chop in an NEPC preliminary event, splitting the prizepool three-handed with Curt Kohlberg and Anthony Snyder (son of Jimmy "the Greek" Snyder) for what seemed like a lot of money at the time, probably $50-60K. (Wait, that still is a lot of money!)

Crowe and I were seated together late in the day during the next prelim event, when we chatted and quickly became friendly. Also at the table were Gavin Smith (a month before his seven-figure breakout score at the Mirage), Chris Bell and Brett "Get Crunk" Richey.

Ocrowe making a run at some WSOP event. 25K denomination chips in play!

Richey and Crowe both had a big stack on the bubble, and when they got involved in a hand together, I took the opportunity to sneak out for a smoke. As I made my way back into the room a minute later, Crowe, to my surprise, was making his exit, saying, "nice to meet you, good luck" as he passed. He and Richey had played a huge flip (one of them had AQ and the other had JJ), Crowe lost and was heading to the rail. It seemed like a shockingly big pot to play on the bubble, but today it would probably be standard.

***

Our friendship was solidified throughout that year, and in 2013 I consider Owen among a very small handful of people in this world with whom I have a genuinely strong connection and mutual understanding.

He's one of the few people I can travel with happily, which might not sound like anything special, but it's rare to find someone I can trust implicitly, tolerate as a hotel roommate, tolerate when he's drunk, and with whom I can generally enjoy the daily grind of being on the road. Over the past eight years, we've experienced both gloriously high points together and some distinctly low times, plus plenty of misadventures that I won't be writing about in this blog.

In 2011, our career paths diverged distinctly. Prior to Black Friday, as I was rededicating myself to online poker, Crowe was venturing into the arena of live cash games in local California cardrooms, and when Black Friday gave me a clear reason to relocate out of the US and play online, it gave him an equally clear objective to continue grinding live.

Still, we've both been "on tour" to some extent for the better part of the last decade, and while Owen has achieved much better results over the years (notice his ability to snap off 6-figure scores in large field donkaments, year after year), it's fair to say we have both been chasing the possibility of a life-altering 7-figure score for a similar amount of time.

So it was with a great amount of pride and awe that I watched as my friend seemed to glide through a field of nearly 1,000 players to final table of one of the biggest tournaments of the year, and to my mind, the best one to hit a score in, since it takes place so early in the year.

There are few tournaments these days that pay seven figures to the top two spots, and witnessing Owen have a shot at the big dollars was exciting and nerve-wracking, if also for the fact that I had a 2% financial interest in his success.

When 2% of first place amounts to a significant amount of money for me (going into the final table, I was guaranteed to win around $3K with an upside of $36K if Crowe scooped), the scale is exponentially more profound in real life terms for the person playing for the other 98%.

***

In other words, while it requires a lot of luck, talent, timing and psychological presence to make the final table of a 900+ player tournament and not much more of the same to win the entire thing, the difference between those two results can be the difference between paying off a few bills and a career-making score. This is the case even when the player is not playing for 98% (and it's rare that anyone is playing for that much of his own action).

Without getting into the particulars of Ocrowe's financial arrangements, a typical tournament grinder can easily find himself coming into the final table with a makeup figure of $125K (this would not be an extraordinary figure either, it would actually be on the low side of things for a player who grinds the circuit full time and hasn't had a six-figure score recently).

The prize for 8th place in this tenth anniversary PCA was $165K. A grinder with a makeup deal might have 50% of his action after makeup, so after his backer recoups the $125K red-figure and they split the $40k remaining profit, the horse is walking home with $20,000 in cash. Nothing to sneeze at, but also not an amount of money that would meaningfully impact the life of a professional poker player.

Sliding further up the pay scale, a fourth place finish, for a gross cash of $560K, would leave the same player with $217,000. That's enough money to replenish a bankroll and maybe create the maneuverability to structure a more desirable backing arrangement than the one I described (despite how common these deals are, I would say it's advisable for a player to avoid makeup deals). It's a fair amount of security and a huge psychological boost, but it's only partially "life changing."

If that same player outlasts just three more players instead of busting fourth, well, now we're talking: $1.8M is a lot of money for the win (so is nearly $1.2M for second). Even after paying off the makeup, splitting the profits with a backer, paying off trades, paying off taxes, accounting for a relatively spendthrift lifestyle--with a modicum of money management, a poker player could almost be said to be "set for life" with that type of score.

There's no moral to the story, but I will take any opportunity I find to illustrate the severe vicissitudes, the constant narrow misses, embedded into the life of a tournament poker pro. How close to a life-changing score you can get while still winding up so far away.

Well, the real moral to the story is: Big ups to Owen, who finished 5th for a gross cash of $435,000! That's a huge start to the year, even after you break it down according to your own imagination based on the above Field Guide to MTT Division.


Owen Crowe, pictured at the PCA 2013 final table. (Third from left, wearing a hockey jersey because he is Canadian).

***

My PCA experience was considerably more lackluster than Owen's, but as the running joke with a friend of his and mine goes, if it hadn't been for the "butterfly effect" of my busting the tournament on day one and leaving the Bahamas earlier than scheduled, who knows, maybe Owen would not have made his run.

I sincerely love the PCA, and I hope to play it every year for as long as it exists, but to play a live poker tournament optimally requires a certain amount of motivation and passion, and after two months of traveling, I was perhaps lacking that complete sense of enthusiasm for the mission.

I am always a bit perplexed when I read people bemoan their table draw and cite 5-6 great players at their table. What about the other 2-3 players? That's where the value comes from and always has! Sure, in 2007 the proportion might have been closer to 2-3 great players, but that's the natural evolution of things. The game ain't changed, it just got harder.

In 2013, it's completely common to draw a table with at least five good-to-great players, and my starting table had WSOP Champion Huck Seed on my direct left and on his left, Dwyte Pilgrim, who personifies the level of passionate motivation for live tournaments that I mentioned.

This is Dwyte Piligrim's table presence.

Still, there were at least two or three weaker players at the table and that means it was a fine table draw. I didn't get much going, and other than two river calls that I sort of regret, I was not too unhappy with how I played. I got my last 23 BBs (7K at 150/300) in with AK vs KQ and busted near the end of level 5.

***

I wasn't in the mood to hang around and grind the live side events, so I decided to change my flight home from Monday to Friday. It was Wednesday then, still in the early stages of the tournament. If Crowe had been deep in the event (and despite the fact that Crowe actually almost called his shot, telling me, "I'm sticking around and winning this thing"), I would have hung out. But my post-bustout instinct to flee towards home took over, and I curtailed the trip.

As in 2012, I had a great time seeing my friends and acquaintances and with the other member of PokerStars Team Online. I did the one requisite run down the steep waterslide, but the only real exercise I got all week was during a quasi rematch in tennis vs. a couple other PSTO guys, Tyler Frost and Richard Veenman. My partner Roy Bahsin acquitted himself nicely during the match (at least from the baseline), but ultimately the southpaw Frosty proved too strong a competitor (and too much of a nit to allow himself to lose $50), and Roy and I were defeated 6-1, 6-4.

My Kinda, Sorta 2012 Year in Review

noreply@blogger.com (Shane Schleger) — Mon, 31 Dec 2012 20:37:00 +0000

It's mostly a celebration of an arbitrary passage of time, but I still enjoy the New Year. There is an inescapable collective feeling that one chapter is closing and in its place the illusory promise of opening a better, more interesting chapter.

As for recapping my own 2012, there is no succinct takeaway. It seems the narrative of my life often veers off-course, and I usually only have the slightest ability to control it. I think I've also let go of the futile pretension that I can. I believe we create our own realities, but it seems the individual components of that reality can take many forms along the way.

When I got signed to become a member of Team Online in 2011, I thought the narrative would be mostly about enjoying my life in Santa Monica and becoming a true professional poker player, after 7 years in the game correcting all the mistakes of my career and perhaps fulfilling my potential.

Then Black Friday happened, I had to leave Santa Monica if I wanted to still be an online poker player, and, well, what's the proverb? "Man plans, god laughs."

The narrative then became about re-establishing myself, not in the poker world but in the world itself. Not just geographically but emotionally too. I eventually found the initial trauma of having my life uprooted to be liberating, and the post-Black Friday upheaval ultimately helped make me feel like a more autonomous, cognizant member of the world.

***

I did grind hard on PokerStars for the first 10 months of the year, and I was planning on going even harder for the last couple months, eying a reasonable shot at hitting 400K VPPs for a solid income boost to the year.

Then, some stuff changed, and the narrative became about: Making an impromptu visit to a close friend in Maryland who has cancer; followed by an even more spontaneous vacation with my girlfriend to Tulum, Mexico. Then it was time to spend a couple days with friends and family back in New York over Thanksgiving.

I did make it back to my home in Baja Norte for a post-Thanksgiving Sunday grind, but shortly after that it was time to go on a long-planned trip to Israel. After all the spontaneous traveling I had done, I would have been inclined to cancel the trip, but it had been 30 years since I visited the country where my mother grew up. More importantly, I wanted to see my friend David, with whom I originally relocated to Canada, who is now living in Tel Aviv.

So I guess my current narrative is: Grind hard when the grinding is good but don't be reluctant to drop out when the pain and joy of real life takes you away from it. I guess it's another version of the elusive concept of "balance" to which poker players often pay lip-service.

The only problem with achieving that balance is reflected in something that Jerry Seinfeld mentioned in his recent NYT Magazine profile:

I read an article a few years ago that said when you practice a sport a lot, you literally become a broadband: the nerve pathway in your brain contains a lot more information. As soon as you stop practicing, the pathway begins shrinking back down.

It applies to poker too. Maybe not to all types of players, but for me at least, there's something about playing at my highest level that requires playing in an all-consuming way. The confidence I need to play my best poker comes from knowing that I made good decisions the day before (or knowing that I made bad decisions that I need to correct). It's a major challenge for me to recreate that confidence when I am only squeezing in occasional Sunday grinds. Slowly easing back into a good grinding schedule is my current priority for the upcoming year.

***

My proposed narrative for 2013 is not setting goals. Maybe to my detriment, I've never been much of a "goals oriented" person. For a vocation that is as tumultuous as poker, it seems almost foolish to establish rigid goals. Let's say your goal was to make 110K in 2012, but you only made 85K. Did you fail? What if you had a losing year? In most scenarios, the only thing you can really do is keep on grinding.

Of course, I have more serious hopes and ambitions, plans and dreams, for the upcoming year, but when I think of discussing those, I just think about this thing Bob Dylan said on 60 Minutes in 2004 when asked what "destiny" means to him:

It's a feeling you have that you know something about yourself - nobody else does - the picture you have in your mind of what you're about will come true. It's kind of a thing you kind of have to keep to your own self, because it's a fragile feeling. And if you put it out there, somebody will kill it. So, it’s best to keep that all inside.

***

Oh wow, I almost forgot to mention: I will be continuing on with PokerStars Team Online for 2013, my third year as part of the team. Happy, grateful, and honored to have the opportunity. Actually, I can say that last sentence applies to how I feel about most aspects of my life.

Happy New Year everybody, and good luck in 2013!

The Weekend in Online Poker

noreply@blogger.com (Shane Schleger) — Mon, 05 Nov 2012 07:30:00 +0000

I had a very good, but nearly amazing, weekend in online poker: I won the elusive Saturday Splash, a $2.22 turbo rebuy that draws a 10,000+ player field every week and this week paid $18K to 1st.

I have really been wanting to crack one of these off ever since I started playing them regularly last September. There are two $1 versions of the same tournament every day that also have huge prizepools (my friend and I nicknamed them "The Mythical" and "Mythical Jr."), and it's a fast and loose structure, with lots of chips in play, and the opponents are not the high- and mid-stakes tournament experts I am often facing off against. It's basically just a lot of fun to go deep and pick up a stack in these things, and to actually outright win is disproportionately satisfying.

Below is a screenshot I took of my first ever 9-figure stack in a poker tournament, which I acquired after doubling with AA vs 88. Also note that Mr Swatch, who wound up taking second, is one of the original MTT players on Stars, and he said he thinks he won the first $109 turbo the site ever spread.

Then, as the day was winding down, I found myself deep in the Quarterly Supernova Freeroll, a tournament I try never to miss, since it only takes place four times a year and has a $1M prizepool and a field limited to Supernova+ VIPs and a few satellite winners. In the very early stages of the tournament, I spiked a miracle king on the flop after getting it in preflop with KK vs. AA, and I continued accumulating as the field whittled down.

By the time we were down to two tables, I have to confess I was feeling the pressure. The $100K first prize (I had traded 35% with friends so actually stood to win a maximum of $65K) would have been significant money for me, and when it all came to an end, we were not playing very deep at all. I was 2/13 in chips and only had 20 big blinds.

With two tables left, I lost a pot with AK to QT that would have put me at 7M chips but instead left me with 3M or so. I then spiked the "heroic ace of justice" on the flop after getting it in with AK vs. KK, which brought my stack back up to a healthy at 5M chips.

The table draws were non-ideal, with all the relatively healthy 15-20 BB stacks at my table and several 10-12BB stacks on the other. With 13 players left in this spot, I am generally looking good to make the final table and have a great shot a the glory. Then the button opened (same guy who won QT over AK), and in that situation AQo was just too good of a hand to fold from the big blind (with 20BBs). I shoved, he called with TT, and it wound being a spot where I had to win a coinflip for a whole lot of equity. I finished 12th for (65% of) $9K.

It's as good an example of any of the vicissitudes of tournament poker, and I got a quick couple more (AKA "bad beat stories"):

Tonight, as Sunday was winding down, I was still in the Sunday 500 with three tables left and lost with AA to 99 for a 60BB pot. This is the second time that's happened in the same tournament since August. Last time if I remember right it was two tables left and my QQ lost to 77.

If it sounds like I'm complaining after having a profitable weekend, think of it more like...lamenting what coulda been.

***

The weird undercurrent to the past couple days is that I've been dealing with some fairly intense emotional stress. It's not the sort of stuff that I'm going to write about here, more the sort of stuff that causes me to lose hours sleep and much of my appetite.

Despite feeling like I could barely think or breath properly half the time, I was completely zoned in on poker. It's a phenomenon of some sort, or a developing theory maybe, but I have observed poker players who are experiencing extreme swings in their personal lives often get super-focused and manage to put up incredible results.

I remember a good friend who endured the devastating loss of a family member and went on to crush tournaments for the next week. I also remembered that Phil Ivey made the final table of a WPT event shortly after his father died.

I have nowhere else to go with that tangent for now, but, yeah, that was my weekend in online poker.