Jorge and I

He’s got that raspy casino cough that is almost impossible to avoid if you’re unaccustomed to arid smoke filled Vegas. So he doesn’t sound exactly like Hurley. He looks like Jorge Garcia, but not exactly like the guy you see on TV. I don’t know whether that has to do with the makeup and lighting of TV, or if it has to do with the fact that I’m an idiot and can’t tell the difference between two entirely different people. When I first saw this gentleman walking around the poker room of the Bellagio I thought, wow he’s a dead ringer for Hurly, a character from TV favorite of mine, Lost. I imagine he must get that a lot.

I love Lost. It’s one of those great ensemble pieces where the entire cast is made up of fascinating people. It would be unpleasant to try and single out only one favorite character (that is if you pulled Ben, the empirically best character in the show, out of the equation). Still, if you had to pick the one character that you would feel most comfortable hanging out with, hands down it would be the burly and beloved everyman of the cast, Hurley, as created by the actor Jorge Garcia. So when this person who could be Jorge Garcia joins the table I am at, I can’t help but think it would be kind of neat to play poker with him.

However, since it is New Year’s Eve, I figure that he is not Jorge Garcia but rather someone who simply looks like Jorge Garcia. My logic comes from holding celebrities to a higher standard than I hold myself. While I might have nothing better to do than hang out and play cards on New Year’s Eve, a celebrity of Mr. Garcia’s stature would not enjoy anything so normal.

This makes perfect sense right up to the point that they fill the other two empty seats at my table. Three to my right is Lukas Haas, and directly beside me is a kid with scruffy stubble, a baseball cap, and a cigarette dangling from his mouth that I eventually recognize as Leonardo DiCaprio. I decide to reevaluate this New Year’s Eve logic.

I go to Matt the young floor person for the game I’m in and I ask him what initials the Jorge-Garciaesque player clocked into the game with. Matt says “JB,” which is not the “JG” of Jorge Garcia. Still, in a noisy casino, unless you see it written down, “JB” and “JG” are for all intents and purposes, the same things. Since this doesn’t help, I flat out ask Matt whether JB is Hurley.

Matt thinks this is funny because he wondered the same thing, but he thought it might be obnoxious to ask. In the end though he said it isn’t Jorge Garcia. He doesn’t explain how he came to that conclusion but he seems comfortable with it.

I go back to my table but I’m still up in the air. The simple, sane-person solution is to say “So, umm, are you Hurley?” But unfortunately that isn’t an option.

The day before, I was playing with someone that I remember from Vegas in July, a Ken or Kent someone or another. He was an ex-sports figure, basketball I believe, though with my vacuum of knowledge on all things sport I still have no idea who he is. Nonetheless, he was great fun to have at the table and we got along, so he remembered me when I saw him this time. As we were talking at the table, one of the players next to us jumped in with “You know, I’d really hate to be that guy, I mean I’m not really that guy, I don’t want to bother you, I’d hate to make you think I was that guy … but do you play basketball?”

I wouldn’t say this upset Kent, but he definitely wasn’t going to let this guy get off thinking he was not the type of guy who interrupts famous people to make sure they’re famous.

“Do I look like I play basketball? Look at me, I’m 44 years old! How many 44 year olds you know who can run a court an hour straight? And what are you trying to say anyway. You saying I’m not big enough to be a football player, is that it?! I’m going to tell you something about those football players, they ain’t so big in real, if you catch my drift.”

The “I-Don’t-Want-To-Be-That-Guy” guy meekly accepted this and didn’t pursue the issue.

This is the exchange that comes to my mind when I am sitting with JB. Now obviously, like you, I’m not “That Guy”. I’m way too cool let myself do anything that might make me look like “That Guy” (even though I know with every cell of my body that I’m so totally “That Guy”). So I decide to not actually ask JB who he is. I figure I am way smart enough to slap a read on him. I’ll just play junior detective and figure it out for myself.

Eventually DiCaprio and Haas take off to bang supermodels 4 deep or run covert Afghan missions or whatever the hell I imagine you do to ring in the New Year if you’re Leonardo DiCaprio. At this point someone asks JB if he knows DiCaprio. Now, if the guy asking the question also thinks JB is a TV star then this is a logical enough question to ask. Since I went to the University of Michigan (go blue), it is natural for people to assume that I should know every other person who has ever gone to U of M, ever, at any point in the history of the school. In the same way, every person who lives in Famous Land should know every other person who lives there.

What JB says is something like, oh those guys are way bigger than me. And I figured that settles it. This was the type of question that would be asked of a celebrity, and that was the type of answer a modest TV actor might give. So Matt the floor man was wrong. This is Jorge Garcia. I would feel perfectly comfortable with trying to get Christi to think I was cool for hanging with Hurly.

So there I am hanging with Jorge Garcia playing poker until the wee hours of the morning. And obviously I have a million Lost questions I would love to grill him with: how hot and/or bugshit crazy is Michele Rodriguez in real life, why didn’t Adebisi wear his little hat when he was on the Island, etc, etc. But I don’t want to bother him.

This is possibly strange since bothering people with excessive questions is not something I’m normally averse to. The only sport I ever really liked watching as a child was the gloriously surreal shuffle board on ice sport of Curling. Playing at the Mirage once, many years ago, I ran into the only professional curler I have ever met. I had no qualms whatsoever about grilling him ceaselessly on the minutia of his life as a curler, team rivalries, the groupies and whatnot. I would imagine being at the center of a major worldwide pop culture phenomenon, as Jorge is, would be as interesting to hear about as being a curler.

Still, for whatever reason, I think it would be unseemly to acknowledge Jorge’s fame and pester him with my questions on celebrity and acting. In the end I imagine he probably just wants to be one of the guys hanging out and playing poker. So I don’t bother him and we just play cards.

The next afternoon, after a couple hours of sleep, I’m back at the Bellagio. I see JB, and in the course of exchanging small talk he says something about Vegas not being like Florida or New York. It occurs to me he must actually have been listening to me the night before when I was talking about living in NY and Florida. And that’s when something weird and possibly annoying happens. I feel really flattered. For some reason I’m actually impressed that someone remembers me after sitting with me for hours and hours.

The obvious problem is that if JB was not a celebrity, I can’t say that I would be “flattered” to be remembered. And I have to imagine this makes me superficial. Even if I’m the only one to find out, I’ve just been outed as “That Guy.” And this is all really embarrassing.

In my defense I did enjoy having JB at the table. He was pleasant and well humored. He took his bad beats gracefully and while he’s obviously a competent player not giving anything up, he isn’t one of those guys that is going to jam a screwdriver into your neck every time you turn your head. So that’s good.

I’m comfortable in my belief that I would find him genuinely likable independent of any possible celebrity or lack thereof. So this allows me to feel a tiny bit less superficial.

And then, we get to talking a little more. It comes up that he was actually a prop player (a house player at a poker club) all through law school, which I find really interesting. He acknowledges that propping was pretty tough work, but of course that’s all behind him now that he’s “living the Dream” as he describes it.

Since I don’t know anything about his life outside of his acting I find it fascinating that he was both a prop player and went to law school. So, the next morning I get up and do a little Google-stalking to read more about it. I look at his Wikipedia entry but for some reason it doesn’t say anything about going to law school or ever playing as a prop. Could there really be that large a hole in his online biography. Is this not an age of zero privacy for celebrities.

Wikipedia does talk of Jorge Garcia playing poker on a celebrity show, so he does play poker, but there isn’t anything about law school. I check a couple other sites and read about Jorge Garcia once working in a book store, and how it was a small part in Curb Your Enthusiasm that got him an audition for Lost, and how he had to miss his sister’s wedding due to filming, but nothing about law school.

This freaks me out more than a little bit. I really start to second guess myself. It was a natural assumption to think that when he mentioned that he was “living the Dream” he was describing what it’s like for an actor to land a show like Lost. However, I would imagine that after playing 4-8 limit as a San Diego prop, a lot of people might consider it “living the Dream” to be playing $10-20 No Limit at the Bellagio with Leonardo DiCaprio (and obviously Mike May). It occurs to me that maybe JB isn’t Jorge Garcia after all. Maybe I’ve just been enjoying time with some regular old normal person. For some reason I feel a slightly cheated.

So now I’m really confused and have to reanalyze everything I remember him saying. I remember him saying something about how humid Florida was before I said anything about my living there. If it is Jorge then why would he use Florida as an example of stifling humidity instead of Hawaii where he lives and works? I mean I assume it has to be humid in the rain forests that they film in. Maybe it’s not humid in Hawaii after all. What the hell do I know about Hawaii?

I check out Jorge’s blog and find a picture that he posted a week or two ago. It looks like JB, but he’s got sideburns in the picture that he doesn’t have at the Bellagio. Did he just clean himself up a little bit knowing that he would be in a swanky casino? I have no idea.

I’m becoming honestly concerned about whom it is that I actually like, JB or Jorge Garcia? I thought Jorge’s blog was fun and attributed it to JB. But if JB is not Jorge, isn’t that kind of a bonejob for Jorge? Grand theft literary respect?

And the more I obsess about it the more I keep coming back to a different Jorge: Jorge Luis Borges or more specifically his classic micro story of identity, Borges and I. It’s a little autobiographical one pager about being Borges, an actual guy who likes hourglasses and maps and the taste of coffee, but also having this other Borges who likes the same things but is not him. The other Borges is the one who everyone knows from Borges’ works. I, Mike May, can never know the first Borges. He died in the 80’s. However, I can find out anything I could possibly want about the second Borges, the one that is filtered through his writings and the interactions he’s left upon the world, the one whose stories I have read.

In a loosely similar way, there’s JB and then there’s Jorge Garcia. JB is an actual guy I met playing poker on New Year’s Eve, while Jorge Garcia is the actor who plays a beloved character on TV and who occasionally writes a blog and who, as I learned on his Wikipedia page, used to do stand up. Even if JB actually is Jorge Garcia, they are not the same person.

And the fact that JB could be some random John Bowden, an entirely third person, illustrates this idea as well as anything from my Intro to Philosophical Literature class. With no disrespect meant to him, I actually wouldn’t be flattered that John Bowden remembered me from the day before. I’m not in any way saying I didn’t have fun and enjoy hanging out with him at the table, because I did. I’m just saying that the irrational superficial part, where I was honestly flattered that an actor whose work I have enjoyed so much actually knew that I existed, that part came from the nebulous, public Jorge Garcia that I had draped over JB like a cape, whether it was justified or not.

Eventually this all leads to a fairly annoying realization. It occurs to me that I have to avoid JB if I go back to the Bellagio. I really don’t want to find out whether he is Jorge Garcia or not. To think I sat at the same table with someone as distinctive as Jorge Garcia for two days and still wasn’t 100% sure that it was him would make me feel amazingly stupid. And to find out that I had spent two days with John Bowden and actually thought he was Jorge Garcia is going to make me feel even stupider. It’s Kobayashi Maru. The only chance I have to win this is to never find out who he is, to let him always stay as he is now, existing simultaneously as both a particle and a wave.

Needing to bounce all this off someone who can give me a little outside perspective, I give Christi a ring. I ask her if she thinks this whole obsession makes me “That Guy” and whether this would be an interesting post even if JB turned out not to be Jorge Garcia. Her response is wonderfully Christi, in that it is concise and puts it all perfectly into context. After I explain everything and ask what she thinks, she pauses for a second and then simply says “Uhmm… you’re really creeping me out.”

OFFICIAL UPDATE:

So I originally posted this story on Saturday, January 5^th, 2008. On Monday, January 7^th, 2 days later, I see my first reply in the comments section:

“Yup. You're right it wasn't me. However I did spend the New Year playing cards. It was in Kauai with my uncle and cousins.” Signed Jorge Garcia and coming from the account of Jorges’ blog.

Hmmm.

O.K., in relation to this new information I would just like to make 3 comments.

1) I fully understand that celebrities are much more powerful and well informed than regular people, but still… On a good day, it would take my own father maybe a month or two to find out that I have a new post up. And even if someone held a gun to my head, I don’t know that my mother would be able to Google her way to this blog. So the fact that Mr. Garcia found this post in less than 3 days impressed me more than a little.

While this is not necessarily scary, it is illuminating. So much for being able to slander a celebrity in the privacy of my own blog without them finding out. I assume that I can still write nasty text messages about celebrities (granted they aren’t scientologists), but who knows.

Shortly after receiving Mr. Garcia’s comment, I went to his blog and apologized profusely for my daftness in misrecognizing him. I’m assuming that there shouldn’t be any lawsuits pending.

2) Naturally I would love if people thought that I was not actually stupid, and that instead I simply realized that misrecognizing this poor slob would give me the chance to cram money, celebrity, and existential philosophy into what should have been a boring holiday post, but unfortunately that isn’t actually the case. I actually am just dumb.

and 3) Regardless of who JB actually is, I would like to point out that Borges still comes out of all this as relevant as ever. So, for all of the quantitative types out there who like to keep count of such things, the current score is Borges: 1, Mike May: 0

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.

Take Me to the River (or Mike May: “neurotic and slightly balding”)

If you could take both the wisdom of Solomon and the strength of Hercules and somehow turn them into a bubble gum, that bubble gum would probably have the powerfully satisfying taste of Take Me to the River, the single greatest piece of literaturousity ever put to page.

All right, I might be exaggerating. In fact I'm not sure how objective I could really be in reviewing this book. The problem is that the subject of the book is something that I find myself eternally fascinated with day in and day out: myself.

I always knew I was vain but it never occurred to me how much more I would enjoy the reading experience when one of the little people running around inside a book was actually me. In fact, I so enjoyed this book, I may never again read books that are not specifically about me. I understand this will radically limit my reading choices but I'm a pretty slow reader anyway.

Of course technically the book is about my friend Peter Alson, but if you can read between the lines it's pretty easy to see what it's really about.

The focus of the memoir is on a writer of questionable maturity taking tentative steps towards responsibility. With a marriage coming up, as well as a child, he realizes that changes have to be made. The willy nilly finances of a freelance writer just aren't going to cut it anymore. He understands that he needs money, reliable money. So, accepting that he is now an adult, he does the adult thing. He goes to Vegas.

Ostensibly, it's about Peter going to the 2005 World Series of Poker to make money for his upcoming wedding/new life, the wacky characters, the ups, the downs, etc, etc. Ostensibly.

But if you can read between the lines it is pretty clear what Peter is trying to get at. There's a character that pops up occasionally, a friend of his by the name of Mike May. Now this friend of his is barely a minor character, and he doesn’t really do or say anything all that interesting, but personally I thought he was a powerful presence within the book. I felt a crackling jolt of electricity whenever I read about him.

Again, this may be a fairly personal reaction but I think that a sophisticated reading of Take Me to the River will show that, in essence, it's a book about the powerful sexual prowess of Mike May. You have to read between the lines, pretty, uh, pretty far between the lines but that was my initial reading.

As I mentioned, your reading may be different than mine but I like mine better. The problem is that my life is not so fascinating that I get to see it in print so often. So when it does happens, and I don’t come out looking like an ass-monkey, it’s exciting for me. Of course, I suppose not everyone is such a whore for attention.

A friend of mine read Peter’s book and gave him a wonderful if backhanded compliment. He told me how incredibly happy he was that he’s never ended up in one of Peter’s books. Knowing most of the people in Peter’s book rather well, my friend felt that Peter did an eerily accurate job of describing who they really were. He wasn’t sure how he would feel about having a similar portrait of himself flapping about in the domain of the public.

I thought about this for a little while and once the initial excitement subsided, of seeing that there are no slanderous untruths (or more humiliating actual truths) in Take Me To The River, I did have a secondary reaction, a weird anxiety that I may have just dodged a bullet.

Personally, my narcism usually trumps my fears of public embarrassment. But that doesn’t mean I wasn’t a little scared about this book coming out. I gave Peter the key to my room last year, so that he could store a couple things while he jetted back to NY for a week, meaning that he had unsupervised access to my life at the Gold Coast. He could easily have written about the rancid smell of legionnaires disease wafting about my old laundry, the NakkidNerds.com bookmarks on my computer, or any of the many more inditing things that he might have found, and that I won’t incriminate myself by mentioning here.

Luckily though, if you take out the stuff about S and M clubs (which Christi was none too thrilled with), the portrait Peter painted of me was thoroughly benign. Nonetheless, it did remind me how dangerous it can be for someone with control issues to have friends who are writers. In fact my obsessive need for control was one of the vast many reasons I started this whole blog thing in the first place. So even though it predates Peter’s book, the very existence of this blog can, in a way, be blamed on Take Me to the River.

A while ago I was interviewed for a book on Jon Finkel, a different friend of mine. When this book came out I rushed out to pick it up and tore through it. It was reminiscent of the moment in The Jerk when the Steve Martin character sees his name in the phone book. He starts to jump around flailing his arms frantically, yelling "Look! I've made it, my name's in print!!! I'm somebody!"

Of course, later, I looked back at what was actually written about me in the Finkel book and I saw that I was introduced as Mike May "neurotic" and "slightly balding". I realized that while "neurotic and slightly balding" will probably turn out to be the most concisely comprehensive description, ever put to print, of who I actually am, it nonetheless may not be what I would have written myself.

This turned out to be one of the fulcrum point moments that allowed me to understand how much my industry was changing. By most poker metrics I'm really something of a nobody. While I am quite content with the career I've had, my TV resume is less than inspiring. And yet here I was being interviewed and finding myself in print. When nobodies like myself were subjected to a spotlight (no matter how faint it might be) it became apparent a new facet of poker had entered the industry.

Reading about myself in the Finkel book was a strange experience. While it was exciting to have someone care about my story enough to write it down, it was disorienting to realize that someone besides myself would have final edit on it. I thought about how many more people would get to know Mike May through this book than would actually meet me in person. How very strange.

So to stave off any possible lawsuits it seemed as though it wouldn't be a bad idea for me to premptively put my side of the story, whatever that story might be, into print. Hence, Mike May: The Blog. And that’s why I blame Peter, and the various other writers who have tried to bring the poker subculture to the masses, for this blog’s creation (in a rather roundabout way).

So if you at all enjoy this blog you may want to thank Peter for it's creation by picking up a couple copies of Take Me to the River. Even if you hate this blog with a passion that will not die you might want to give Peter a try. And especially if you can't make it to the World Series of Poker yourself, you should definitely read it and make a vicarious trip via Peter. Of course, come to think of it, the 7 or so friends of mine who make up the readership of this blog were all at the Series last year, so I guess that might not be the best sales pitch.

Instead, lets just work with simple economics. It’s actually very expensive to play in the final event of the World Series, and I’m not just talking about the $10,000 buy in. Consider for a moment all the expenses:
-10,000 dollar buy in,
-travel to Vegas,
-food,
-hotel,
-back waxing to look good at the pool,
-hookers and blow,
-lawyers fees once you realize that "what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas" doesn't actually apply to federal statutes,
-bail,
-hastily purchased ticket to undisclosed south and/or central America country,
-rental of beach front bungalow,
-monthly retainer for Paco to keep "them" off your trail,
-hush money to cover that local incident that was simply a misunderstanding, and it wasn't your fault what happened to Paco since he totally should have expected you to run, considering how it came down,
-the Viking funeral for Paco (really it was all he ever asked for, and clearly something he deserved),
-dry cleaning,
-and of course tooth paste, you always forget to pack tooth paste for some reason.

You add up all these expenses, and I have no idea what it comes out to, but it's probably a heck of a lot more than the $16.32 it costs to buy Peter's book from Amazon with this link. So next year bag the trip yourself and just lounge by the pool with a relaxing copy of Take Me to the River. Let Peter do all the work for you.

And if that isn't reason enough for you to buy the book I should mention that if you use this link and buy Peter's book, I think (if I set the link up correctly) I'll make something like 60 cents in Amazon kickback payola which will be the first penny I’ve ever made off of this blog.

Yay Peter!






Peter Alson hard at work experiencing things
and then writing about them, so you don’t
have to go through the trouble of experiencing
them yourself.

Thanks Ralph!

I realize that I've been spending too many post with boring thank you’s and well wishes. Very soon I hope to go back to rambling, overly wordy stories that better serve the true purpose of this blog. However, overcome with the moment, sitting here in Central Park, I want to give a fast shout out and thanks to Ralph Lauren. If you ever happen to find yourself on the upper east side of Manhattan and need to drop a deuce, do treat yourself and drop it at the Ralph Lauren shop on 72nd and Madison.

A half an hour ago I had to take the dump of the ages and easily amortized the cost of my new cell phone by using the "find bathroom" feature on Vindigo. It listed the Ralph Lauren store as being the closest 5 star bathroom, and let me tell you Mr. Laren did not disappoint. I doff my chapeau to you, sir. A doorman at the front of the store wearing a pink shirt and sports coat, three urinals downstairs all with different sections of the New York Times, clean sinks and even toothpaste. I'm not quite sure what degree of homeless I would have to be to scrub the inside of my mouth with something I found in a Manhattan bathroom, but it was reassuring nonetheless to know that if it ever comes to that Ralph's there for me. I love this city.

Good Luck

Being on a plane for multiple hours, I had planned to work on a couple posts. Instead I watched the in-flight movie Failure to Launch, and then I slept. So this post is going to be a little shorter than I had hoped.

On the poker front I want to wish Allen the success he deserves today. And on a more personal/important level I would request prayers and/or wishes of a speedy recovery for Kareem Fahim and Chancellor Hanley who both happen to be undergoing vital operations today. Get well soon.

The Dream is Dead

All right, don't spend too much time scanning today's results for my name. The dream is dead. Perhaps I'll post about getting knocked out at some time but it's not really that exciting. I was a 75 or so percent favorite when the money went in so it was an honorable death, and I did cash, but still the details are probably not worth your time.

Right now I'm a little on the tired side, but I do want to give a fast thanks to everyone who wished me well and a special thanks to Andy, of Dealt Out fame, for letting me pimp this site on the MSNBC blog. Take care everyone.

Also, if for some reason you would like to actively shun the blog of the person that knocked me out then definitely don’t go here.

Above Average!

As I left the World series tournament area last night I checked to see what the listed average chip stack was.

The listed average: 72,376
My stack: 73,200

Awww yeah! That’s right, above average.

Of course there were fewer players in day 2A than my day 2B so once they combine the two fields and crunch the new numbers I should come out right where I generally belong, slightly below average. But for a couple hours at least I will bask in the glow of my above averageosity. In your face, Average! I am so 1.138 percent above you it’s not even funny. Suck it!

Harrah's, Heck Yeah!

Considering that I’m trying to write more while out at the World Series of Poker, I feel a little guilty about not actually writing about the WSOP itself. Unfortunately I don't do very well with real time in this blog. I didn't finish putting up my coverage of last year's WSOP until some time in the middle of January. So to keep you informed about this year's series, or more specifically what Harrah's is screwing up this year, I will simply direct you to 2 posts that other people have written. The problems covered run the gamut from simple "I remember going to class at the old school, it was so much cooler than this new school" issues, to the confusing level of incompetence and lack of consideration that Harrah's has shown to those people dumb enough to be in the middle of Nevada in July.

I guess I always understood the concept of an efficient corporation being a ruthlessly self serving entity. But the life I live tends not to put me in the corporate world very often. Watching the WSOP evolve over the last 3 years has been rather educational. Harrah’s leaves no stone unturned in the hopes that there might possibly be a penny under it. I am impressed.

The posts I'm linking come from Dr. Pauly (here) and Shane (here). I link them because they are both informative and well written but much more importantly because they save me from witting about this crap myself.

I also want to take this opportunity to give Shane temporary favorite person status. Shane has given me what is easily the best link I’ve gotten yet in describing me as "like the Terrence Malick of bloggers." Of course, I am going to make the assumption that this is a reference to the lush and awe inspiring vistas that my cinematographer and I create and not a reference to my being a lazy load that only produces something once every decade or so. Either way it made me smile.

The only thing I’ll add to the WSOP discussion is how amused I was by the double-plus-ungood rights that Harrah’s has granted us this year. Last year there were draconian cell phone rules and if you wanted to play an event you lost the right to use the F word (which I will not sully your eyes with here). This year however those loses of freedoms have been replaced with rights.

The second event I played opened with a rambling speech over the loudspeaker that told us about all these new rights. Apparently we now have the right not to have anyone at our table use offensive language and by offensive language I mean the word "fuck" and only the word "fuck." I checked and luckily this new right does not cover the words "ass-monkey," "cock-munch," or any racial slurs whatsoever.

And we have also been granted the right to not have someone at our table carry on a 20 minute conversation with a stock broker over his cell phone. Of course with this also comes the right to have your hand declared dead if you look at the screen on your phone to see what time it is (which I first thought was an urban legend until I actually saw it happen.)

This later proved a source of amusement for me as I watched a new dealer in a live 100-200 game tell the big blind, with an impressive level of indignation, that since he answered his cell phone his hand was dead. The other players tried to explain that this new right of ours only applied to tournament games. He was having none of it though and refused to continue the hand until the floor came over.

And after that I watched a security guard go to a 10-25 pot limit Omaha game and tell some European players with cell phones sitting on the table that they couldn’t have them out in plain sight. The amusing part was that the Europeans complied and just laughed it off with an I’ll-never ever-ever-ever-play-in-this-silly-place-again look on their faces. Apparently they’re not afforded the same rights in Europe that we have here.

In My Entire Life This Will Likely Be The Most Memorable Hand I Will Ever Play

I tend not to talk too much about specific poker hands in this blog. However, I recently played what I’m pretty sure will be the most memorable hand I will ever play in my life. Since it is going to take me at least 3 posts and a couple of weeks to even scratch the surface of this hand, I’m just going post a picture of it now. (And yes I am counting this minipost towards my at-least-one-post-a-week-while-at-the-WSOP pledge)

Almost Cool

I’m at a wedding a while back (Jean-louis and Katie) and during dinner I’m talking to a stranger about blogs. He asks me what mine is about and my knee jerk reaction is to say "poker". However, it occurs to me that this guy is a stranger that I just met, and as a stranger I have nothing emotionally invested in him. For that reason I don’t see any reason to lie to him. So when he asks me what my blog is about I tell him the truth. "It’s about trying to make me look more interesting than I am."

As it so happens there are a lot of reasons that I started this blog. Above most though is the desire to tell self aggrandizing stories in the hope of creating someone interesting. Truth be told, the bulk of my life is spent lying in bed, eating cookie dough and staring at the ceiling, both figuratively and literally. However, occasionally something nonboring might happen and it is my hope that if I put enough of those nonboring moments here I might be able to skew perception of who I am, perhaps help people get the wrong idea about me. At least that’s my hope.

Of course for some people I imagine that interesting things happen quite often. Unfortunately I’ve never really been one of those people. So to supplement this blog sometimes I have to settle for interesting things almost happening to me. As it so happens I recently had a week filled with interesting things that almost happened. So now I’m forced to write not about being cool but being almost cool. I take what I can get.

I’m having dinner with a friend who will remain nameless. This friend happens to be closely related to dork director extraordinaire Sam Raimi. Sam Raimi, whose brilliant Evil Dead 2 ranks among the top five greatest slapstick movies of all time and who also directed a little indie franchise by the name of Spiderman.

As it happens, Sam is in New York to shoot Spiderman 3. With the Raimi’s being a fairly tight family, my friend, Sam’s cousin, is expected to stop by the set to say hi, maybe grab a bite. As I’m having dinner with my friend he gets a number of calls from this assistant or that to coordinate a set visit.
"You’ll be filming where tomorrow?... I suppose that would work... What time is Sam’s meeting?... No, the afternoon would be better for me...Yes, I’d prefer to stay in Manhattan." Etc, etc.

Welllll... my friend has a good sense of what a big comic book dork I am, as well as my reverence for Mr. Raimi’s work. And besides, Toby Mcguire and I go way back (insomuch as I played at his table once a couple years ago when he was just learning to play poker). So it seems like my joining him on the set visit is a no-brainer. Still considering what a coup a visit would be for my blog I figure I can’t afford to be subtle.

"So... you’re going to stop by the set tomorrow?" I inquire.
"I think so."
"That should be fun."
"It’ll be nice. I haven’t seen Sam for some time."
"Yeah, I just mean it would be fun to be on set like that. I mean, especially if you were a big comic nerd. "
"I suppose."
"I mean for someone a little familiar with the source material it’d be even cooler. You know like someone who was really curious how they’re going to present Venom, the villain of this sequel. I mean like someone who wondered how Sam might present the alien symbiote which Peter Parker initially dons as a costume but that later melds with fellow photographer Eddie Brock and transforms him into a psychopathic black mirror image of Spiderman that calls itself Venom, I mean, considering that in the comics the symbiote was originally found by Spiderman out in another galaxy when he was whisked away by the Beyonder in order to fight in the Secret Wars miniseries (not the recent Brian Bendis series but rather the original Jim Shooter one from the 80's). I mean for a comic nerd like that a visit to the set would probably be something that would really raise his street creds in the dork world. A real once in a lifetime kind of thing."
"I would imagine" was his reply, followed by "so, when are you leaving for the World Series?" And that was pretty much that.

Considering that subtlety has never been my strong point I always figured that I would be better at being unsubtle. So much for that theory. And so much for being cool.

But as it turns out that was nothing compared to the almost coolness that came a couple days later.

If you’ve ever heard the phrase "It’s good work if you can get it" and wondered exactly who it was that was getting said work, his name is Peter Alson. Peter will probably come up here quite a bit in the coming weeks due to the publication of Take Me to the River, his latest masterpiece about my time at the WSOP (technically, it's actually about Peter's time at last year's WSOP, but as much as I loved it I tended to ignore everything but the paragraph or two where he mentioned me). For now all I’ll say is that Peter is running pretty well.

It turns out that Chinese uber-auteur Wong Kar-Wai happens to be making a movie by the name of "My Blueberry Nights". In it, Natalie Portman happens to play a poker player, and it happens to be that someone needs to help Ms. Portman understand what it’s like to play poker. As it happens this person turns out to be Peter.

I ask him just what such a job entails.

"You know, we just covered general stuff and watched some video of Jennifer Harmon."
"You were paid to be alone with Natalie Portman in a dark screening room."
"It wasn’t anything so formal. We just went back to the hotel."
"Her hotel?"
"Yeah, there was a VCR in Natalie’s bedroom."
"In her bedroom?"
"Yeah."
"You’re sitting in a chair with Ms. Portman in her hotel bedroom."
"Well, there weren’t really any chairs. I mean, it’s a hotel bedroom"
"So you’re on the bed with her."
"Well, yeah, I guess."
"And you’re being paid. Movie production money... to sit on a bed with Natalie Portman."
"More or less."
"Oh..."

I’m not sure, but at a time like this, when a peer tells you that he’s getting paid movie production money to watch TV sitting on a bed with Natalie Portman, I think the only response that really makes any sense is "Oh..."

I try to think of all the reasons, given his lack of juice in the film world, that Peter might get such a job. And try as I can, I can think of no better reason than it’s the kind of thing that, by association, will make me feel worse about my own life. I know this doesn’t make too much sense, but that’s the way my mind works.

My new found loathing of Peter thaws quite rapidly though when he calls me up a few days later to ask for a favor. He explains that he needs to leave for his summer vacation a little early. He doesn’t think that Natalie will need him for anything but he wants to have a backup for the slim possibility that she needs something poker related while he’s gone. He wants to know if I’d be able to look after her in the off chance she needs something.

Uh-huh. Working in the poker industry I get a fair number of calls from people asking for help. Really not so many like this though. Oh, and I’d also get movie production money for my time spent hanging out with Natalie Portman, talking about myself.

Now I did try to consider the downside here. I did want to consider the possibility that I might be a little intimidated and I might in some manner grotesquely embarrass myself in front of one of the more attractive woman I’d be likely to meet this year. But the more I thought about it the more I realized that she’s far enough out of my league that it’d be hard for me to be intimidated. To feel nervous that you would blow a chance with a young starlet you would first have to be able to believe you had a chance with said starlet. I didn’t think that would be a problem in this case.

Of course I did make the mistake of watching the movie Closer the other day which might have complicated things. Every so often a movie produces an image visceral enough that it stays with you for quite some time. Hannibal Lecter behind glass talking about Fava Beans, Tony Montana and his little friend being gunned down, etc. Closer had a moment that stuck with me as well.

As it so happens, I’d like to believe that I could see Ms Portman as I should, as a three dimensional individual not completely unlike myself, and interact with her accordingly. However, face to face with her, I’m not quite sure I could muster up enough focus to not continually think of absolutely nothing other than the scene in Closer in which Natalie Portman is in a strip club bent over on all fours showing her hoo-ha to Clive Owen. And I imagine that might possibly prove a little distracting. If I was working with her I would definitely make a concerted effort to try not to think about such a thing, but I couldn’t make any promises.

Of course as Peter is telling me all this I know that the true possibility of anything ever happening is probably well under 1.3 percent, tops. Still, if there’s anything poker players understand it’s the value of a free-roll. And for a little while it makes me happy to think about that 1.3 percent. It’s not unlike buying a lottery ticket. You know you’re not going to win but for 1 dollar you get to sit around for a little while and think "yeah, but what if...?"

Not surprisingly, I never get my call from Ms. Portman, which is too bad because it might have made a decent blog entry. As it is I’ll just have to settle for writing about my underthings or jiggly woman parts. But of course if I can’t be cool myself it is a blessing to have friends who are occasionally cool themselves (and from whom I can leech second hand cool off of). I take what I can get.

In regards to complaints about my blog (or rather the disheartening lack thereof)

I’m not sure how I should feel about this, but no one seems to complain about my blog. I’m reading some of my friends’ blogs and they all have posts about people being upset that they don’t write more often. Chris Fargis and Matt Maroon write apologies to all the people who say they should post more often. Here at the world series I’m talking to Richard Brodie for maybe 6 minutes tops and someone comes up to him desperate to know when his next post will be. For whatever reason, that doesn’t seem to happen to me. No one, uh, no one seems quite similarly concerned about my prolificness.

I am of course sincerely thankful for the couple of people who have come up to me and said kind things about my content. But when they do this I usually apologize for my dismally infrequent output and invariably their response is almost identical, some variation on "oh my, don’t trouble yourself with such thoughts."

Of course I want to read this response as "my lord, who could be expected to produce such brilliance more than once every 3 months." However, I don’t know if that’s a correct translation.

More accurately I picture a five year old finger painting a father’s day card, and then apologizing for the lack of semiotic unity with some of the themes he’s explored in his earlier works. "Oh my, don’t trouble yourself with such thoughts."

As it so happens, I’ve usually been rather comfortable with aiming low. However, the problem I realized is that it’s one thing to have low expectations for yourself, but it’s something entirely different when you realize those expectations may be contagious.

So I’ve unilaterally decided to try and raise the bar a little. I make this promise to you, while I’m out here at the World Series I’ll be trying to get a post of one sort or another out at least every week or so.

Regardless of whether you care or not.

So screw you.