Scabbing for Cookies

I have always believed that if you are one of the truly lucky ones, there will come a time in your life where you discover that which you were meant to do, that which you do so much better than all others. There occasionally comes that sublimely rare moment when a Tiger Woods picks up a golf club, a Michael Jordan picks up a basketball, or a Brian Lamb picks up a Cable-Satellite Public Affairs Network. So you can imagine my happy excitement when I felt that I too had discovered that which I was meant to do.

As the lag between posts on this blog clearly proves, if there is any task that I feel that I can truly throw my back into, and do as well as almost anyone on this planet, it is the act of not writing. So when I first heard of a so called “writers strike” I honestly thought that my time had come. It suddenly occurred to me that there are few things for which I have so much innate flair for as I do for “not-writing.” And now I was being told that my secret talents could be put to the greater good. My not-writing would become a devastating tactical Strike upon our corporate overlords. I figured I would not-write my ass off, nonstop, day and night, until corporate America could no longer stand the weight of my boot upon its throat.

And there I was this week, quite satisfied with how aggressively I’ve been tea-bagging "The Man" these past few months, when Christi unfortunately broke the bad news to me. What she tells me is that I don’t actually belong to the WGA.

Hmmm. Apparently, as she explains it, there is actually a guild of some sort that writers join. For whatever reason, I imagine perhaps a screw-up with the postal service or a problem with my cell phone, I never actually got an invitation to this clique. Christi also goes on to point out that, in my case, a doubling of my DVD residuals will not actually come out to all that much. So much for “being of use.”

On the bright side, what that means is that I am free to write again and just in time since I’ve decided to try using this space for something I usually abhor, two way communications.

I read somewhere that one of the strategies for growing a blog’s readership is to actively court and respond to reader’s comments. Now, I realize that this might make sense for a less narcissistic writer. However, what originally attracted me to this whole idea of keeping a blog in the first place wasn’t the new media ability to have actual interaction with a readership. Rather it was just the idea of being able to blah, blah, blah about myself in a public forum, for free, and without necessarily having to be interesting.

Why then did I enable the anonymous comments feature on this blog? Well, in all honesty I actually enjoy reading and erasing spam comments. It’s been interesting to watch them evolve in sophistication. Just yesterday I got a spam comment that actually found the phrase “Take me to the river” from an earlier post of mine and cut out a Wikipedia entry on Al Green that had the same phrase, and then posted the entry into my comments section, with their web address at the bottom and a link to "sportsbook" thrown in randomly. I was so impressed I actually left it up for the time being if you want to see the latest in spam-tech.

Now don’t get me wrong, I am exaggerating somewhat. I do enjoy getting nonspam comments as well. I’m just not a big fan of interacting with other people when I can avoid it. Getting comments is kind of like getting phone messages and emails, in that people sometimes expect you to return the interaction. While this is by no means unreasonable, it is annoying nonetheless.

And also, more often than not, what happens when people make a comment is that for some reason it suddenly becomes about them. It’s all: “I think that you’re brilliant Mike” and “I can sense the powerful virility of your loins” the stuff that they think and that they feel. By no means did I start this blog so that other people could talk about themselves.

(Now obviously I know that you have interesting things to say and if it was just you, I would have plenty of time to respond to and consider anything you might have to say. But you and I know very well that not everyone has as many well thought out things to say as you do. Once again, as it has so often been the case in your life, other people are ruining it for you.)

Nonetheless, putting my aversion to social interaction aside for a moment, I am actually requesting help in the form of your comments and suggestions if you have any. I am hopeful that one of the more creative amongst the half dozens of people who read this blog might be able to help me come up with ideas for Christmas cookies.

For quite a few years Christi’s family in Dallas has invited Christi and I to share Christmas with them. Traditionally, Traci, Christi’s Uber-Mom sister in law, bakes up Christmas cookies that we all get to decorate. Naturally there are only so many times you can decorate a tiny fir tree or a rotund old guy in a red suit and still have it be interesting. So over the years we have tried to expand the design possibilities at least a tiny bit.

The first year was really primitive. Maybe an occasionally angry snowman or some peapods (Christi loves English peas).

The second year was still sloppy but at least I tried to work more within a theme, counterfeiting holiday money.

Two years ago at the height of bird flu mania I figured the best thing I could get for Christi’s nephews and niece would be some fine Tamiflu antiviral cookies.

And then last year I decided to honor various members of the Bush administration who are no longer with us. (Due to my almost photo realistic craftsmanship, who the cookies represent should be obvious. Nonetheless, I’ll label them at the end of this post just in case you have trouble figuring out who is who.)

And then this year I figured I’d try something different. I decided I would open up the floor to see if anyone out there had any thoughts. So, if you’ve always had a remarkable concept for a holiday cookie that you desperately want someone else to steal and pass off as their own, now’s your chance.

Of course, there are a number of things that I’m looking for in a design. Naturally we’re looking for topical originality. But I also need simplicity in execution. If you have a brilliant idea but it would involve me having to recreate Picasso’s Guernica, in icing, on a dozen cookies, that is probably going to be more annoying than it’s worth.

While it doesn’t have to be directly holiday related, at the very least it has to be age appropriate. If appreciation of your idea is going to involve me having to try and explain to a nine year old what exactly balloon fetishes are, or Picasso’s Guernica for that matter, I’m going to have to pass.

And finally, you will get bonus points if you can work within the confines of standard cookie cutter shapes, triangular trees, stars, reindeer and whatnot. This is not a prerequisite, but if it saves me the trouble of carving custom shapes in the dough and therefore plays to my laziness it will be appreciated.

So far, I think the Tamiflu cookies were the best received. It was a simple design that didn’t take much explaining and seemed like fun to eat. (I understand that the color of the capsule is wrong but I had supply problems. I think Camille hogged up all the yellow to make stars or something like that. Through the pain of experience I’ve learned that sometimes fighting an 8 year old over frosting is more trouble than it’s worth.)

The Bush cabinet cookies were not shunned, but they weren't gobbled up with the same enthusiasm as the Tamiflu cookies. As it turned out no one seemed quite as excited to eat an almond iced John Bolton cookie as I had hoped, except for Bella of course, their angelic if somewhat slobbery 900 pound Mastiff, who jumped up on the table and ate the entire administration when no one was looking.

And now, this year, I'm putting it in your hands. So if anyone has any topical and easily reproduced design ideas, I would love to hear them. Of course, if your design is chosen you will not be mailed any finished cookies, and in fact you won’t really get much of anything out of it except the satisfaction that I feel when my life is made easier. However, if the dog doesn’t get to them first I’ll post a picture up here and the kids will of course thank you. And by thanking you I actually mean me, since they don’t really know you very well.

(In case you needed help with the Bush cabinet cookies, moving counter clockwise from the upper right hand corner you quite obviously have cookies to commemorate ex-US Representative to the U.N. John Bolton, ex-White House Chief of Staff Andy Card, ex-Secretary of Defense Donald “Rummy” Rumsfield, ex-director of FEMA Michael “Brownie” Brown, and of course ex –Secretary of State Colin "The Colon" Powell.)

Pride and Product Placement

All right, I do feel bad about not putting more up in this space. But the bottom line is that the stuff I’m doing down in Florida is just too powerfully exciting to post about here. I suppose I could make frequent updates on my day to day life in SoFlo, but if I did I would have to make this a pay site. There’s no way around it, my life has become just that exciting.

So to keep this a free site, Christi has suggested that I pull material from the vault and write about some of the things I do when I’m able to sneak away from Florida, things like showing her some of the gayer parts of NYC.

Now, contrary to anything Christi might tell you, I’m not actually gay. Nonetheless, I’m not above occasionally indulging in intrinsically gay activities, such as going to parades, or even uber-gay activities such as the New York Pride Parade.

I remember what it was like when I first moved to NY. From my loft in Chelsea I could hear the commotion marching down 5^th Ave. Being somewhat parade-curious, I checked it out and wow, let me tell you, that was some Gay. Growing up in southern Michigan you don’t see so many floats dedicated to post-op transsexual Asian volleyball teams.

Since moving out of Chelsea a number of years ago I haven’t had an excuse to catch the parade. So when I just happened to be back in NY with Christi a few months ago, and she expressed an interest in experiencing the gayness herself, I was happy to oblige. And wow, let me tell you, the times they are a changin’.

Don’t get me wrong, there was still plenty of gay. You still had your Gay Lawyers for Buddha and whatnot. But what you also had this year, which I don’t remember 10 years ago, were the corporate floats. Verizon, Delta, Macy’s, among others, all had gay floats. I guess I always had my suspicions that Starbucks was at the very least "bi," but who knew that there was something intrinsically gay about Gotham Lasik or JP Morgan Chase.

I’m not quite sure when this corporate influx came about, but I have to admire the balls of the first Macy’s suit who had to make this presentation:

“All right, hear me out on this on. There is this group of really large and excessively hairy men who refer to themselves as 'bears.' Now what makes these guys interesting is that they love to have sex with other large and excessively hirsute men. I imagine it’s predominately sodomy, but probably not exclusively so. You’d also have your oral pleasures, your manual stimulations, nonpenetration assplay and whatnot. Anyway, the thing is that once a year they get almost naked, maybe they’ll have on some leather chaps, denim short-shorts (I don’t know, it’s summer and it’s hot out) and what they do is they drive a float covered in frilly crepe paper down fifth avenue in celebration of their sweaty man-love. Now, as the head of corporate branding for Macy’s, I don’t imagine I have to tell you where I’m going with this one: We NEED to be behind that float! If that’s not what Macy’s is all about, then I don’t know Macy’s.”

Naturally, on the one hand I’m proud to think that our country has come this far. Less than twenty years ago, most any image of one boy liking another boy (in that way) would have sent corporate America running for the hills, shrieking like a little school girl. So, obviously I applaud the courage of the companies willing to show their support for the gay community.

However, it is a little strange to see. And I can’t help but wonder if this changes the focus of the Pride March. It’s just that when something becomes so commercialized there is always the fear of it losing its original vision. In a year where even the Republicans are embracing their wide stances, I would hate to imagine people forgetting the true meaning of Gay Pride Day: the hot, anonymous gay sex.

I would think there was copious man on man, and lesbian, sex happening somewhere in the city that weekend. But what I saw at that parade, more than anything, were people shilling. On both sides of the parade barrier there were legions of day temps who handed out free samples of the newest gums or moisturizers, or whatever needed to be marketed to New Yorkers that weekend.

There was a very young family next to Christi and me that seemed to be making out like bandits. I’m not sure their exact heritage but they cheered quite enthusiastically when the “Venezuela Gay United” float went by, so I’m going to make them South American. Anyway, they were happily collecting parade swag by the fistful. They had a shopping bag filled with free samples of breath mints, beauty products, and the like. Every so often their two year old would reach into the bag and pull something out. And being two, he couldn’t really tell the difference between the Trident White Cinnamon Tingle and the only slightly differently packaged Astroglide Personal Warming Lubricant. It’s amazing the things you’ll chew on when you can’t read.

Anyway, it was a lot of fun to watch the foreign tourists who were obviously just walking by and didn’t know quite what to make of all this. Two older Japanese women politely “ooh”ed and “aaww”ed with wide eyed delight whenever one of the more ornately adorned drag queens would sashay by. I watched them as one of the sample distributers handed them a wooden paint stirrer from the Pleasure Chest. It had “SPANK SOMEONE HAPPY” printed on it and it could be used as a 20% off coupon for “any single impact implement” from the store.

The exact meaning of all this was a little confusing to the women at first. With puzzled looks, they conferred in Japanese, until one of them finally figured it out. She bent over, ever so slightly, and used the small wooden paddle to tap herself on the behind. “Ohhhhh! Hai,” the other one said, and nodded enthusiastically. To signify that she understood, she herself bent over and let her friend tap her behind, softly the first time but with an audible CRACK the second time. This took then both by surprise, and they almost fell to the ground giggling.

So, come to think of it, I suppose my fears about the integrity of the Pride March might have been a little unfounded. If, as it turns out, a little push from the commercial sector is what it takes to get two Japanese women to share their first lesbian SM experience, so be it.

And once again, from the largess of corporate generosity comes cultural understanding. God bless America.

PS Of course the one product that Christi and I were both surprised to find absent at the parade was this:

PPS I don't ever do this but, powerful poker personality Barry said I had to put a picture of him in my next post “Listen here, my man, I don't care what the subject is! You sneak me in there.” And my friend Terence said that if Barry got in then he had to be with him. So, by request, that's Barry and Terence up there (the non-bear looking guys). Happy pride to both of you.

Days of Shame and Disappointment: Michael Bay’s Existential Relevance to This Year’s World Series of Poker

In a very general sense I’m somewhat happy with myself. I could definitely be doing much better in many different ways, but overall I’m able to sleep at night. Nonetheless, I’m not a man of great “accomplishments.” I have never swam the English Channel or founded a culture changing website.

However, there are two small things I have done. I do not talk about them much, but I have taken personal pride in them over the years. What I'm proud of is that I have never once been knocked out of the World Series of Poker on the first day, nor have I ever seen a Michael Bay film. At least that’s how it used to be.

This year, for the first time in the 7 years that I have been playing the world championship, I did not make it to day two. I won’t bore you with the specifics of the hand I went out on. I will just say that it was one hour before the end of the first day. I had 15 outs twice and if I were a better tournament player I would have hit one of them. I would have won the hand and ended the day with well over two times the average stack. But that didn’t happen. I could use one of those “I was trying to win the tournament and not just survive it” rationalizations, but I think that’s a cop out. I had just been moved to a new table and I didn’t have nearly enough information on my opponent to make the play I did. It wasn’t a horrible tournament play but it was a little sloppy and unnecessarily risky. To win an event of this size there’s not much room for sloppy play. You have to be, as I once heard it described, shit-house lucky (a term, the origin of which I do not know but that I understand nonetheless) or you have to be flawless in your play. I was neither.

As I’ve described before, getting knocked out of the WSOP is a particularly unpleasant moment for a poker player. And this year for me, going out on the first day, was the worst in a while.

And on top of that, I found out that sometimes when you’re not happy with yourself you’re not so concerned about taking care of yourself. “Screw it!” you think. Who cares. Sure, you promised your son you wouldn’t drink this weekend, but since you already had one beer (it would have been rude not to) another one isn’t going to change anything. And yeah, now you’re drunk. You hate yourself so much for lying to your son, the only person who’s ever believed you, that you’re just plain numb by the time you use that stolen Unicef money to pay for the tranny hooker. Naturally, one thing leads to another, and before too long you think “yeah I always did want to kill a hobo” and that’s when bad things start to happen.

So that’s the state of mind I was in waking up this morning. That’s the place I was at that allowed me to say “Ehh, maybe I’ll catch a matinee of Transformers.”

Now, just for the record, I have nothing against the film director Michael Bay. There’s no logical justification for taking pride in never having seen one of his movies. It’s just that, in the most insignificant of ways, it made me feel like I was beating the system. The Michael Bay film represents something fairly powerful. It isn’t even the movies themselves so much as the brute force marketing of them. When a new Michael Bay film is about to come out, I want to see it. Saturated by the trailers, and posters, and the articles that show up in the Sunday Times, I start to feel the illicit pull of the siren’s call.

I just naturally assumed I would have to see Pearl Harbor, one of the most expensive movies ever made, or something or another to that effect. It was supposed to be Titanic but with even more things blowing up. The Island: Ewen McGregor, high concept sci-fi, how wrong could that be. But with each movie I resisted those first weekend screenings. I was able to put off seeing it just long enough for the reviews to come out. The reviews offered an immunization of sorts. And after that opening weekend the TV commercials died down a little, and room was made for the next weekend’s premier, and for some reason seeing Pearl Harbor no longer seemed so utterly imperative. For whatever reason, this made me feel as though I had accomplished something.

Transformers though, I knew Transformers was going to be tough to beat. The Transformers cartoon was not an integral part of my childhood, but it is something I remember. I’m in no way ashamed to say that, as a young boy, I enjoyed seeing giant robots beating each other up. Obviously, the giant robot stuff coming out of Japan, Macross/Robotech and the like, was far more advanced than the half hour toy commercials we got here in America. But I remember watching the Transformers cartoons nonetheless. And, sure, it was cool to see cartoons of robots slamming into each other, but there was always that nagging fantasy of what it would be like in real life. At nine you realized that that would be the ultimate in cool, actual 30 foot robots, actually punching each other in the face, and blowing things up with laser cannons. And of course that is just what Michael Bay spent over a hundred million dollars to taunt me with.

Naturally, it was a silly point of pride, never having seen a Michael Bay film. But nonetheless it did make me feel good that I wasn’t going to let the studio’s marketeers tell me what movies to watch. As I said though, I was not in a very good place this morning. Hence the matinee.

Walking over to the Palms’ theater, I feel dirty. Through the trailers, through the opening credits, I sit alone in the theater saddled with a sense of personal failure. But then the movie starts, and I watch an unidentified army helicopter being escorted by jet fighters to a Middle Eastern military base. Once there, the copter starts to whirl and shift and transform itself into an evil robot, and it starts to rain down unholy robot vengeance upon the puny humans and their primitive military technology. It is a short sequence, but it is about as cool I would have imagined unholy robot vengeance would be. I start to think that I’ve unfairly misjudged this Michael Bay guy.

But then we cut away from the giant robot blowing things up. We cut away to people talking; and that’s where things start to fall apart. Within a couple minutes of this I begin to wonder why we can’t just have the robots blowing things up without all the jibber-jabber cluttering it up. For almost two hours people keep talking to each other. Some kid buys a car and bags a girlfriend far hotter than he should, and the African American kid cracks an alien super code with about 15 keystrokes on his home computer, and because he’s overweight he eats a whole plate of doughnuts, and other stuff happens, and hopefully John Turturro gets a really big paycheck.

Eventually however, as though Mr. Bay had read my mind, the entire last half hour happily tosses all the jibber-jabber aside. The evil robots attack the good robots and mere anarchy ensues.

There is a sequence where the evil jet-robot flies through a squadron of human jets and tears them apart, jumping from one to the next, transforming between robot and jet as it does. But besides that, there unfortunately isn’t very much carnage of a really creatively holy gee-whiz sort. And sometimes it’s a little tough to tell one giant robot from the next. The hard to follow blur of “real life” robot action occasionally makes me long for the more stylized Japanese cartoon action.

I think one of the good robots got killed but I’m not entirely sure. It just got ripped in two and being a robot I would think that might be more or less fixable. Of course, if I was following the action correctly I think that the robot who died was the “urban” robot that liked to breakdance and talk in that rapping grandma sort of way that white people sometimes write black dialog. So I may not actually be too upset if that robot doesn’t show up for the inevitable sequel.

And then a bunch more things get blown up, and a plane flies through an office building, and eventually the kid from the first Project Greenlight movie shoves a box into one robot’s chest, and I guess that’s as good a reason as any to end the movie.

In all honesty, I have obviously seen worse movies (Silent Rage still exists). Taken as a popcorn blockbuster for the kids, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with Transformers. If this was some little Korean film that I had discovered at the video store, I would have thought, wow, it’s a little flawed but it definitely has it’s fun moments.

So part of me is perfectly happy to ignore the stupid and say “Ehh, it could have been worse.” And when I first went to bed after getting knocked out of this year’s WSOP, that’s pretty much how I felt about the last hand I played. Ehh, it could have been worse.

But when I woke up the next morning and really did the analysis, I was struck with a far more burdensome realization. Obviously, the painful part is not that it could have been worse, it’s that it could have been better, it should have been better.

And I suppose that’s the fundamental existential question that seeing Transformers throws in my face. If you make a hundred and fifty million dollar action film, are you trying to make something as good as James Cameron’s Aliens or are you just trying to make something that is not as bad Roland Emmerich’s Godzilla.

If I had never seen James Cameron’s Aliens, then sure, I might not know how good an action movie can be. But I have, and to pretend that Transformers is the best you could hope for is deceitful. Transformers is not evil by any means. But to not acknowledge and criticize its lowest common denominator aspirations is a sad surrender of sorts.

As it happens, I have some idea of what my poker capabilities are. I know I could have played that last hand better. Was the play I made Roland-Emmerich’s-Godzilla-horrible? No. But, was it the best possible play I could have made? Not really.

There’s nothing wrong with coming close. Being almost good is obviously better than being bad. But being almost good is by no means the same as being actually good. Sometimes it is important for me to be reminded of this. For that I thank you Mr. Michael Bay. Please keep trying.

The People Prevail! Brodie Boycott is a Success.

Just in case you hadn’t heard, since my boycott was a success I am now ending it and have gone to Vegas. As you may or may not know, I boycotted this year’s World Series of Poker in protest of Richard Brodie being barred from Harrah’s. Unfortunately, I was a little busy and never quite got around to telling Harrah’s about this. Nonetheless, when Harrah’s ran their first $1,500 no-limit event and the turnout was a paltry 2,998 as opposed to the 2,999 that it would have been had I been there, it was obvious that they felt the sting. I am proud to say that thanks to my actions, Richard is once again allowed at Harrah’s.

Now I know what some of you have said. “Didn’t they lift that ban weeks ago?” Yes, they did. But I personally felt that I had a duty to carry on the boycott just in case Richard happened to get banned again. Certain hardened cynics have said that I had ulterior motives in waiting to come to the series, that the only reason I kept pushing back my Vegas plans was because Christi and I were so enjoying our summer in the city. Obviously that’s meanspirited speculation that devalues the sacrifices I will make for a disenfranchised working-class everyman like Richard Brodie. I suppose that for every one man that chooses the path of altruism there will always be 50 others who seek to question his motives. Such is the world we live in.

Furthermore, I normally find it to be in bad taste to talk about my charitable works, but since you brought it up, I guess I should probably let it be known that it wasn’t just Harrah’s that I boycotted in support of Richard. For the past month or so I also boycotted making blog entries, eating brussel sprouts, putting money away for retirement, and flossing. That’s just how I roll.

Still Here

Christi often wonders what will happen when I pull a Stu Unger and overdose alone in a porno motel. If no one finds my body, she wants to know long it will be before people start to wonder whether I’m still alive. Well, if the past 5 and a half months are any indication, I might put the over/under at around 5 and a half months. The calls and emails have started to trickle in.

For the people interested in such things, I would like to go on the record as saying that I do still exist. If you happen to be wondering why you haven’t seen me around the northeast much or at any of the usual tournaments it’s because I’ve been with family in Florida. And unrelated to that, if you’re wondering why I haven’t updated this site much, there is a reason for that as well. It’s because I’m a lazy sack.

But in my defense it is also partially due to the fact that I haven’t done much worthy of your reading time. My normal year end activities, the east coast poker tournaments, the Central American Krumping circuit, the pro bono bounty hunter work I do for tax reasons, so on and so forth, have all been indefinitely put off. I will make an effort to do exciting things that I can write about at some point in the future but I have no idea exactly when that might be.

Right now I’m just in something of a holding pattern, taking some time off from the danger and excitement of my normal duties in order to hang out with my father. For the past couple years I was always hoping that he was just faking this whole Parkinson’s thing. He does love attention. And as Rush Limbaugh clearly showed, anyone can fake that whole shaky-ass crap. Unfortunately though, it’s finally gotten to the point where even if he is faking it he’s doing such a damned thorough job it’s probably best to just humor him.

So Christi and I have been hanging down south for a while to keep him company. On the bright side, even though he may be a little older, and whole lot wobblier, his attitude, as always, is good. And, above everything else, he’s still here, which all things considered, is probably not the worst way to start the year out.