Nah, I get it man. I was just trying to think of an outlet for some of your creative energy since you've said that you are currently bored and have no plans for the immediate future.

What happened to the plans of going to Colorado and/or finding employment?

I think I'm probably going to Colorado but I was having second thoughts today. Considered going to Barcelona instead or maybe walking the Way of St. James (Camino de Santiago). So I'm all over the place and that's got something to do with why I'm delaying. Then if I go to Colorado how long do I even want to stay? Getting a job would have to be at least a somewhat long-term plan. I'm not sure about anything really. But I have to decide to do something. That's where I'm at.

The past few weekends I decided to go to the casino to play poker, and that's been going well so I'll probably keep at it. Since I started keeping track a little over a year ago I've put in 150 hours of mostly $1/$2 and I'm up $2132. (I've also played 5 tournaments and failed to cash in any of them which cost me $2251 so overall for my live poker "career" I'm still slightly down but lets ignore that.) Just looking at the cash game results, it's too small a sample size to meaningfully calculate a win rate, but it seems likely that I can be profitable playing $1/$2. So that's nice, but in the best case playing $1/$2 is going to generate income at a "living in a van by the river" level (if I was willing to grind significant hours every week, which I'm not, that sounds tedious as ****). So I'll try playing more at $2/$5 and see what happens there. I don't need the money and I'm not entirely clear on what my motivation is, but it would be kind of cool to have an activity I could do to make money, and without having to go to an office on a schedule dictated to me by somebody else. I think I just want to prove myself in some way. Climb a mountain, run a marathon, make some money, attract women, whatever. It's all a game and asking what it means doesn't seem to lead anywhere positive. If I peel away the layers I suspect I'll find nothing at all.

Still need to gtfo of my dad's house. Jesus. Not ready to settle down to anywhere in particular. How's the live poker scene in Barcelona? What about Buenos Aires? Plenty of options within the US and I could just drive around from place to place for a while.

Something very exciting almost happened today! I was driving to dinner with my dad when I noticed that an oncoming car was a little over the center line, seemed like no big deal for maybe half a second, and I moved slightly to the right to give the terrible driver some room. He kept veering further into our lane though and to get out of his way I steered us onto the gravel, then partly onto the grass (paved road in a rural area), but he continued to head right for us and OH MY GOD HE'S NOT STEERING AND I MIGHT NOT BE ABLE TO AVOID HIM but I did, barely. Felt like a matter of inches and I'm not sure we all would have survived that one. The other driver must have regained control just as he went by us though, because his anticipated crash into the ditch / a tree / one of the cars following us never happened, so I guess he managed to swerve back into his lane somehow. I don't know if he fell asleep or had a stroke or was playing "hogs of the road" Clockwork Orange style. Holy **** that was close.

I attribute no cosmic significance to essentially random events like this, but I would find it useful as of now to treat it as a wakeup call. Life is a negative freeroll when you're doing nothing with it and today could have been a very big day. Spun out a little on the grass and got back on the road, gave my heart a nice workout, scared the hell out of my dad, and we got some dinner. Life goes on.

See that is the beauty in writing comedy pilots though. They are like 20-30 pages in script format. You write a few pages and you are a third of the way done. The same hopeless feeling you have about writing a book I had about writing a movie. Then I wrote a few short scripts and writing a movie seems completely doable. It also made the idea of writing a book less daunting for me. Thats a really cool site. I didn't know about National novel writing month.

I meant you can submit a script full of jokes. If its good enough or you win their pilot wars then you get to be executive producer of your own comedy show or some ****. I dont know exactly how it works. Like anything else you can learn to be a good storyteller. The reason I suggested it though is its something to do that is easy to complete and rejection is almost certain. More for the fear of failure than anything else.

For me its fun and a bug. I like to make music and write. I just bought oil painting crap. If you dont enjoy it then you should do something you like. Stand up comedy and poker seem like they would work together really well.

On the other hand, late night on weekends seems to be prime time for both so there's a cannibalization of hours. On his podcasts Ari Shaffir has talked about playing poker as a source of income when he was just getting started doing standup and barely getting paid.

Started playing $2/$5 and I'm off to a nice start: +$156, +$276, +$555 playing 18 hours total for the three sessions, so it looks like I'll be sticking around at 2/5 for a while. One bad session at this level could easily wipe out those gains of course. I've been bringing $1200 with me to the casino, with the idea that if I run through that I'm done for the night (buying in for $300 each time I bust out because I'm still not very confident in my ability to play deep stacked). I'd still feel pretty sick after losing $1200, enough to negatively affect my play, although at least with this winning streak I'm on I'd be able to handle it better than before. On my most recent session I pretty quickly dropped $600 before I started winning. I felt like I was playing ok, so the initial loss didn't bother me too much. That's progress. I used to get way more upset when I'd lose. Dropping a few buyins just seems like a normal thing now and nothing to worry about. What does worry me is when I get too deep stacked. Toward the end of my last session I had almost $1500 in front of me and there was another player at the table with a similar stack size who seemed at least competent. I was afraid to get in a big pot with him, and I decided to leave a bit early for that reason.

Two more sessions at 2/5 since then: +$711, +$77. I'm sure I've been running good but it's looking more and more like I can hang at that level, at least in the Detroit casinos (maybe the games are tougher elsewhere). Still haven't put in near enough hours to really know where I stand though. If I was going to grind the 2/5 games on a regular basis I'd want to get my own place closer to the city, because right now it's an hour drive each way assuming light traffic, and that's too far. For now these live poker sessions give me something to do to get out of the house on the weekends but it's time for me to make travel plans again, as I've been threatening to do on this blog for some time now. So maybe a few weeks in Barcelona, and then I'm thinking Peru in October because of this:
http://www.lapt.com/tournaments/peru/

Or, you know, I could keep complaining about being stuck here.

I've got a cold and I've been clicking on 2p2 and around the internet compulsively and without purpose. I don't even have enough of an attention span right now to watch a movie/video for more than 15 minutes at a time. No big crisis, just general ennui.

It sounds like you are able to function in a karaoke environment, so that may be a useful catalyst for you. Just be sure to select the songs so that you send the right message. If you considered doing standup comedy then singing a song that clicks with humans should be within your abilities. You will receive credit for the words even if someone else wrote them.

Learn when and how to do an arm touch during conversation. It is powerful, relatively non-invasive, and creates some intimacy. You missed an opportunity to re-define the relationship.

Your are an INTP which means that you prefer solitude, looking for reasons and patterns, logic more than feelings, and open possibilities rather than structure. But that does not mean that you should ignore the opposite characteristics. And devote some time to observing and classifying other people. It is like poker.

How's life Steve? Just realized it's been a couple months since you've updated.

I had abandoned the blog and 2p2 but this would be a good time to update, and then I'll probably leave it at that because I've decided I'm not really comfortable with the level of sharing I've done here. I'm fine with it so long as my interactions remain anonymous, internet only type affairs. But I don't want any of this spilling over into real life. This possibility makes me paranoid. So it's time to wrap up the story of this EvilSteve character, now that his life is in a not-too-bad-all-things-considered place and even showing some promise, and I can leave him there forever. It's not a feel good story exactly, but it mostly feels ok, to me at least. I can stick around for a brief Q&A session afterwards too. Just not for too long. Pretend I've got a train to catch or something.

So two weeks after my last post I decided it was time to get out of my rut. I got on expedia and booked a one way flight to Barcelona. I got on airbnb and booked a cheap room near the casino (also near the beach) for two weeks, which I later extended to three. I did a poor job of being a tourist and missed most of the doubtless amazing sightseeing opportunities Barcelona has to offer, but then again, I was there by myself. How much fun is sightseeing by myself ever going to be anyway? But I did very well at the poker tables. In 74 hours playing cash games I won over 6000 euros. I also won the only tournament I played there, bringing my total for Barcelona over 7500 euros. After that I went to Lima, Peru for a week to play in an LAPT event and while I only had one minor cash there and ended up losing money, based on the currency exchange rates I calculated a few days ago that I still made about $8200 overall for the trip. I'm also up about $7000 for the year in the Detroit casinos, most of that since August when I started playing more often and moved up to $2/$5, and I'm up almost $14,000 total over the past three months.

You might think... but I'm independently wealthy, surely this amount of money makes little difference to me. But it matters, because it's money I made on my own, not money that was given to me by my father. Being able to make enough money to live on (if I had to) is a big deal for me and it's starting to look like poker gives me a way to do that. So this is an exciting development. For the first time I'm seeing a way to provide for myself without having to sell off investments or dip into savings, and I didn't have to get an office job to do it. I'm not tied down to a 9 to 5. I can travel when I want, take time off when I want, etc. All the usual freedoms associated with being a poker player and these are things I've taken for granted for a long time (not having a job), and I don't have to give them up to generate an income stream. I also have a new answer to the dreaded "WDYD?". In addition to "Nothing" and "My rich dad gave me money", I can now add "I'm a professional poker player" to the list and for the first time it doesn't feel like a bull**** answer. Self-esteem++.

gl then

But of course I'm still very lonely, have nothing to live for, should probably just jump off a bridge tomorrow, and so on. I mean that's not the most objectively balanced way to look at things, but my thoughts still go there sometimes. The loneliness and the pointlessness of it all. I've always had money and now I have a way to make more at a non-negligible rate while maintaining the leisurely lifestyle to which I have become accustomed, but so what?

I got on Tinder in Barcelona and clicked accept, accept, accept (or whatever the Tinder term for that is), keeping my standards low and clicking a hell of a lot, and I maybe got four matches total. One never responded to me, one was a link to a webcam site, one seemed cool and chatted with me for a while but turned out to be in Mexico not Barcelona because apparently her phone's location services weren't working properly, and the other one when I asked if she'd like to meet somewhere asked if I would buy her dinner. Being desperate and really just wanting to meet someone, I said yes, I'm buying, where would you like to go? She never got back to me.

So this set the stage for my interactions with Laura (my Chilean Spanish tutor who I became infatuated with even though she's neurotic at the very least, controlling, moody, and generally awful to be around a lot of the time, but also capable of being clever and fun and charming sometimes too; see earlier in thread) when out of the blue she started texting me. I told her about my poker wins and she took a keen interest in that. Can you guess why? Right, she needed money. Can you guess what I did about that? Right, I sent her money. No strings attached. $3000. I'm an idiot but at least that's that, that's the end of it. I won't initiate any further contact with her. But what if she says she misses me and would like me to come down for a visit? I'd probably get on a plane and go down there, that's what, fml. I'm writing all this as if I have no control over my actions. I just need to meet someone else, that's the fundamental reality here.

You know what? That's not even close. I've got one positive thing going right now but I'm still completely lost. The story ends where it began. Nowhere. Not sure what to say about it, I'm a mess.

That is the way it works. When you have not found the right woman, it is an extremely high priority. Once you get her, it moves way down the list.

Yes until I either find the right woman, or give up on that side of life entirely, there's going to be a massive hole that can't ever be filled by anything else. And I'm going to leave it there. Mods: The blog can stay up but since I won't be posting to it anymore, lock it up, please.