shut up all your time is free

Just read through it all. Amazing stuff. Moar.

Says the man with 16k posts.

My goodness - this is captivating!

Your writing style really puts you in there where I can get a glimpse of how you must have been feeling - I was nervous for you during the whole trial!

I'm not kidding - this could be a movie, or at least a really good double episode of Law and Order

twomarks

PART VII : The End


Gatekeeping and the Almanac of Pain.

After all these years, I may have the timeline all botched up, but I believe that David Sklansky walked into my bookstore for the first time just a few months after Chris Moneymaker won the 2003 Main Event. I was in particularly bad shape from the meth, but I recognized him. Sklansky was a thin middle-aged man who carried the slightly sour air of a math prodigy stuck with teaching another semester of Intro to Calculus to a class full of young idiots.

Sklansky and Mason Malmuth's 90's-era 2+2 website was linked to Stanford Wong's blackjack website, and the latter had been my digital hangout during my years as a card counter. I had also read Mason's Blackjack Essays book and enjoyed it, and I knew that Sklansky was celebrated for his Theory of Poker book, and that he had written several others, a few of which were currently on my bookstore's shelves.

My standard protocol for visiting writers was to take really good care of them: walk them over to their books on our shelves, ask them to sign them, slap a fancy 'signed by the author' sticker on each cover, and then to see if they wanted to set up any signing events with us.

I did none of these things for David Sklansky.

At that particular time I was--at best--trying to make it a week in between bags of meth. There was no attempting to quit at that point. I was just trying to space it out a bit, maybe show myself that I could make it a few days without it, and those few days were always hell.

Day 1 away from meth was no sleep. Day 2 was all sleep. Day 3 was pain: depression, crushing anxiety, paranoia and rampant hallucinations. Sklansky walked into my store on a Day 3.

He made a beeline for the Gambling section near the front of the store. I trudged over to him, head down, got there, and slowly picked up my gaze and caught his eye. Like almost everyone else that day, he was imbued with a ghastly greenish aura. Sections of David Sklansky's thinning hair were standing up on their own and slowly dancing back and forth like so many current-blown patches of albino sea anemones.

"You Sklansky?" I grunted.
He asked me where the rest of his books were. I pointed out the three of his that we had in stock currently. He mentioned that he had several more in print.

I knew all of that, in fact. I had ordered some of his other books for the shelves just a few months before. And while at the time I didn't know Mr. Chris Moneymaker from John Moneyloser, I had noticed a recent uptick in interest in poker books for whatever reason, and I had ordered accordingly.

I was free to order titles that I thought would sell. But mall shelf space was at a premium, so if my picks didn't sell within thirty days, they would all be tagged and returned to the main warehouse, or to the publisher. Thirty days was never enough for any title that hadn't been heavily promoted. So all of Sklansky's other titles that I'd ordered had been pulled.

My intention was to tell Mr. Sklansky all of the above, but I didn't have it in me. All I could manage was a few "yeah them's the breaks," kind of grunts. I was hurting, and I only wanted him to take his green-tinted undersea biome self and go away.



Anyways, I regret being a gatekeeper in that spot, and I regret not being nicer to David.

After Sklansky left, I called my long time dealer, Dean. Dean both knew of and approved of my attempts to stretch out my habit.

"I need a bag."

"So soon?"

"I can't do it...this time. I can't ****ing take this ****."

"You're doing too much, you know," Dean told me.

"How the hell do you do it, Dean?" I asked him. "All those years on the gack and you look--I'm not gay or anything--but you look great."

"I said you're doing too much," he told me. "Take it easy. Just eat right, get some exercise, treat it like high-test coffee, don't do any more after 5 o'clock, and try to get some sleep most nights. It's not rocket surgery."

I couldn't get over it: twenty years of daily meth intake and he looked healthy. Dean had a wife, two kids and a steady day job, and he came across as completely sane, normal and average. He may have talked a little fast and clipped off some of his words, but that part seemed only like a natural quirk of his.

Dean's wife Mandy; however, was like me, or worse. She was painfully thin, with a mop of brittle straw blond hair framing her tired, lined face. She was a super nice person, always, but the meth had done its work on her face and body. Mandy was my age, I believe, early to mid-thirties. Dean was 42 or 43 at the time, and he easily looked to be the youngest of the three of us.

So on that particular Day 3, I picked up my bag of okayness from Dean, and that cut my hell week short. Day 4, had I chosen to see it, would have been mostly Day 3 all over again, only with the addition of a small ray of light peeping out towards the end. This time, it wasn't worth seeing it through to the next day.

All this, my life on meth, went on for another 2 1/2 years. Nothing of note happened. I had come to Las Vegas with a dream and here I was: a card counter who didn't play cards, and a writer who didn't write anything. I was just hanging on, feeding and caring for my habit.

Here's the weird part--aside from, like, all the other weird parts in these tales--I have a memory of David Sklansky visiting my store again, more than 2 years our first encounter, again on one of my withdrawal Day 3s, again with him walking over to his books, and again with the two of us having almost the exact same abortive conversation that we'd had the first time, starting off with me grunting, "You Sklansky?"

Don't hold me to this. This was getting right towards the end of my Las Vegas run, and my memories that late are folded up and perforated and full of wormholes and spiraling anomalies.

My clearest memory, right towards the end, was my obsession with and paranoia about a certain class of professional shoplifters.

The Grey Men:

My store shrink percentage was getting out of hand. Shrink is the term for the amount of stuff that disappears out of the store. I can't remember what the number was, but it wasn't good.

After investigating my current crew and confirming that all of them were still pretty honest--extremely honest in that case, adjusting for my general and growing paranoia--I began to keep a closer eye on our customers.

Now, I'm going to give an opinion here that I've formed from careful observation and reflection across the 18 years that I spent in retail, and it's going to be more or less a racist opinion: shoplifting is largely a white people activity. So, believing this, my next question was, what sort of white people were stealing from me? Given that there are so many of us, we truly come in a lot of varieties.



Years before when I'd clerked in a convenience store, the shoplifting culprits there were mostly drawn from three groups: young dirt bags in their twenties, upper-middle class teen girls, and elderly people. We didn't get many from the first two types in my bookstore. The old folks from the third type visited the bookstore in the morning; but here's the thing, old people tend to steal little things for themselves, and I was missing big ticket items: high-end coffee table books and medical reference volumes, stuff that could be resold to used bookstores or sold online. We were getting hit by professionals.

Let's go back to the old people for a second. It's surprising to find out that sweet old Gammy and PopPop are stuffing pilfered items down their stretchy, high riding waistbands. I wouldn't believe it myself, except that my old boss at the convenience store had caught a ton of them on camera doing just that--but why?

The answer to that question is that old people steal because they can, because no one anywhere is paying any attention to them--my former boss having been an exception. He had cared, and he had caught them by the bushel; but again, he had only caught them stealing small items for their own use.

So, what would a professional mall bookstore shoplifter look like? It would have to be someone not an elder, but someone who nevertheless drew almost no attention, good or bad, in a mall setting. Someone who had recognized that fact at some point, and who had decided to turn it to their favor.

The answer eluded me until one day I finally caught sight of it out of the corner of my eye, blinking past me in a flash of grey.

The flash came from a man dressed in a grey Champion hoodie, loping in a quick beeline straight from the mall hallway to the back of my store. I sidestepped out to the center aisle and caught sight of him. He was holding a big black shopping bag and heading towards the back. I looked away almost immediately and thought of other things to do.

Why? How was I being so distracted? Here was a guy with a big bag who had not lingered in the front like everyone else generally did, as we had all the eye-catching stuff up there.

I followed after him, finding him in the health aisle; the section with all the expensive medical reference texts. I can only describe the man as being almost supernaturally nondescript: white, male, late-thirties, light brown hair, not fat nor thin, not tall nor short; with no features of any interest. The face: I can't remember it. I wouldn't be able to remember his face if I stared at it all day.

The words "grey man" came to my mind, and that's just what he was. While he stood there, still as a statue, looking at the row of books in front of him, I kept thinking of other things to do besides talk to him. With a great effort I stuck around. I looked down at the logo on his big shopping bag.

"Sephora?" I prompted. "I hear they make, um, some good cosmetics."

"The best." he answered, smoothly, without turning to look at me.

"You looking for...uh...can I help you find any...medical reference books?"

"If I need something, I'll be sure to ask."

"Great. I'll just be right across the way here in the photography section, if you need anything."

I sauntered across the center aisle and parked myself about 20 feet away, with nothing obstructing my view of him. I pulled a portable scanner out of my work apron and pretended to work for a while, doing my best to give the impression that I was there for the duration.

The grey man stood stock still for what seemed like several minutes. Every time I looked over at him, I had to fight the overwhelming urge to look away, to get up and leave and go do something else that I should have been doing. Finally, when I felt I could no longer hold my position, I held up the coffee table book I'd been flipping through. "Guy in this book dresses up weimaraners and gets them to pose for pictures. It's fantastic."



"You in the market for anything for your coffee table?"

He picked up his bag and left without a word. On his way out he looked at me, he must have looked at me, I can't remember. I can't remember his face.

I popped back to the bathroom and celebrated with a toot of meth up my nose. It was around lunchtime then, and I had the distinct feeling that he would be back later, likely towards the close of business, when I ought to have been long gone, and when we only had single coverage in the store. But that night we would have two people working the floor, because I would be back.

I left at 5 PM and got back around 8:30 PM, and I parked myself back in the photography section. He flinched when he walked around the corner. When I spotted that, I knew that I had won.

"Still hauling that heavy bag around?" I asked. "Leave it up front, if you want. We'll keep an eye on it. Don't worry, I won't let you leave without it."

"I was just heading out." he answered.

I did not tell him to have a nice day.

Around two weeks later, I spotted a different grey man in the store. It's hard to remember how I could have told them apart. He must have walked a little differently. I think he might have been a little older than the first, maybe in his mid-forties. This one had on a black golf shirt and grey jeans, and he carried a big grey cloth bag with no logo on it, as if he'd ordered the bag that way special.

He darted to the back of the store, and I popped back after him and served him up the same sort of passive-aggressive customer service as the other grey man. Again this was just after lunchtime when he appeared, but this grey man didn't return later that night. Still, I counted on that as another victory, and I rewarded myself with another nose candy blast.

While all of this was going on, I felt that I couldn't tell any of my crew about my findings on the grey men, not without sounding crazy. To be honest, I had a few lingering doubts as to whether or not those grey men really existed. I'd been hitting the meth steadily towards the end there, having run straight through three or four bags with no time off in between. The drug had served me faithfully, keeping me on point enough to be lucid and nimble in my battle against the grey men (assuming that they were real,) but the meth was quickly reaching the outer limits of its effectiveness, and I wanted to attempt another hell week away from it to reset.

The Breakdown and the End of the Run:

So we come back to another withdrawal Day 3; the last Day 3. I was in atrocious shape. Just opening my eyes to start the day with was an actual 30 minute ordeal. Being someone who never calls in sick for work, I went to work; hating myself, and hating everyone else, and hating absolutely everything: actual and conceptual.

Just after opening the store, I was confronted with a shoplifter who was essentially the opposite of a grey man. I recognized him from a few years back, when I'd been an assistant manager at a different location in town. Back then I had kicked this same young kid out of that store after I'd watched him brazenly pull a hardcover book off the front display, then come up to me and try to return it with a receipt for an audio version of that title.

That kid was now a young man: one who either didn't recognize me, or who didn't care, and who thought in any case that he could do the same kind of stupid thing again, right in front of me. I snatched the receipt and the book away from him. (Here I'll fold the distracting all-caps text and censored asterisks into a spoiler.)



tl;dr: I completely lost it on him.

The kid had it firmly fixed in his head that he was not going to stop until he got paid for that book receipt he'd found somewhere out in the trash several weeks before; and me, I think I just wanted to rage and scream out in frustration and grief at the hash I'd made out of my own life.

It took a lot of screaming--more than I thought I was capable of--but I finally got him to leave. I'm still surprised to this day that security didn't come by at some point.



I looked around me. There were two guys standing at the magazine rack, staring at me with their mouths open like--well, like I'd just been screaming my head off for the last 6 minutes. And also, there, in the center aisle, was Madison, my coworker, looking at me with a genuine fear in her eyes; fear of me, her boss. Madison was a small young woman; 5'2, and maybe 19 or 20 years old. She always liked to act like she was a tough broad, but that was a bit of a front.

It hurt me to see her scared like that, and to know that I was the cause of it. There was no misunderstanding here, no explanation, no backing up.

"It's okay now Mads." I lied. "Can you do me a favor and watch the front for a minute? I'd like to have a cigarette."

"Please do." she told me. Then she called out to me as I was leaving.

"You're not going after him, are you?"

That stopped me. Was I?

"I'm just going out for a smoke." At the mall hallway I turned and headed in the opposite direction of the kid's retreat. I banged out of one of the service doors and pulled out my pack of smokes and was immediately hit up for one by a homeless guy, and it was off to the races again for me.

I laid into him. This time I managed to mostly keep from yelling. I told him that bothering people at the mall was going to drive our customers away, and that some of the stores would close because of that, and that people who lived in the neighborhood and worked in those stores would lose their jobs, and that the neighborhood would get worse, and more people would show up at the mall asking for handouts, and more customers would stay away, and more stores would close, and...

"What are you on?" He asked me.

"What the ****? I'm not on..." Nobody had ever asked me that before. Maybe if someone had once ever asked me that, I might have...stopped? But that was nonsense. I had stopped. I was on Day 3 without it. "I'm not on anything, honestly. I just don't want all...my customers...getting..."

I saw something in his eyes that froze me. Obviously he recognized the trajectory I was on. He could see what was coming for me, what I was approaching. There was a sadness in his eyes, and it wasn't a sadness for himself or for his own lot.

Somehow, I had managed to earn a hobo's pity.

I gave him a cigarette and lit it for him, tossed out my own and walked back into the mall.

I called Dean.

"I need a bag."

"So soon?"

"I can't do it this time. I can't ****ing take this ****."

Sometimes Dean didn't have any on hand to sell, and I had to wait a day. This was the case this time around, and I suffered through the rest of Day 3, until I managed to get some sleep. I had the next day off from work, and peeling open a fresh bag would be the perfect way to spend it.

The knock on my door the next day wasn't Dean's knock. I peered through the peephole. It was Mandy, his wife. She had never yet delivered any bags for Dean, but there was always a first time for everything. Hope springs eternal. I opened the door and only then noticed that she was crying. She hugged me tightly, her tears soaking through my tee shirt and on to my shoulder, flustering me. Then she told me what had happened.

When I'd called Dean the day before, he'd been working alone, refurbishing one of my landlord's rental houses. A few hours after I'd talked to Dean, my landlord had shown up at the property and found him on the floor, dead from a massive heart attack. Dean was 45 years old when he died.

As Mandy shuddered in grief in my arms, a series of thoughts scuttled up from the lizard part of my brain and squatted down in the forefront of my head. All of these thoughts had everything to do with meth, and with my crippling fear of a future without meth, and what I should do about that potential lack of meth. I hated myself then, more than I ever have since.

"WHY IS MY DADDY DEAD?"

"WHY IS HE DEAD!?" The question was directed at all of us, the adults standing around in the funeral home. The boy was too young to question God or the universe. We were the grownups. It was our responsibility to keep the children safe and to make sure that **** like this didn't happen. How could we have ****ed this up so badly? That was his question, and no one could answer him.

I couldn't take it. I couldn't be strong for Mandy, or for her and Dean's kids, or for anyone. I walked out out of Dean's funeral, and I kept walking. And I hated myself, again.

Nothing to Show for It.

I'd been asked to come back to New England and work in an office for some people to whom I was close, but I'd been putting them off for some time. As I understood it, the job consisted of selling machine repair parts to businesses who needed the parts right away to get their production lines up and running again. But a lot of these parts had long lead times, making for a stressful work day pretty much every day.



On the other hand, the bookstore business was dying a quick death due to online sales, and I didn't rate my own chances of living much longer very highly if I chose to stay in Las Vegas and find myself another meth dealer. I also had my old college friend, Will, back in New England, and I knew that he would help me quit, although not in the way that one might think. Will and I always try to out-Stoic each other. No amount of physical pain or suffering or emotional scarring will allow for one of us to complain about it to the other.

When I came back to New England in 2006, I was 20 pounds underweight, pale and drawn-out like an old used up piece of chewing gum, and still sporting a few fading meth sores. It would have been against our unspoken rules for Will to remark upon it, and it would have been an undue imposition for me to admit to the weak sauce of getting hooked on a stupid drug like meth. In any case, Will was a big help. Since I came back from Las Vegas, it's been almost 12 years since I last touched the drug.

Of course, Will and I drank like fish. But sometimes kicking the can down the road is the easiest way to keep moving forward.

Why Can't We Make the Boring Parts of Life Into a Montage?

A few years passed without incident, and without much joy either. The office job, as I expected, was plain awful and highly stressful. My coworkers, pay and the benefits were fine, but the job...psssh. The drinking at the end of the day and on the weekends helped a little.

Then the summer of 2008, something came around to stir me out of my rut. Somebody had given my father a cheap handheld Texas Hold 'em game. Dad had no interest in it, so he gave it to me. "You like video games." he told me. "See if you like this one." I took it home and fired it up. My first thought with playing this new poker game was: why the hell do they only give me two cards?

Easy Game:

I had no idea how to play the game, so I bought a compact guide called The Everything Texas Hold Em Book written by a Mr. Johnny Quads. One of the first things that Mr. Quads assured me of in his little guide was that everyone who played Texas Hold Em played it terribly, and that if I played the solid strategy that he laid out in his book, I would soon be printing real money, hand over fist.

I had no idea something like that could be done. I had just wanted to learn how to play my handheld game. I read the book and learned the basics of the game. At the same time I happened to run way over EV, so I proceeded to kick the game's ass up and down. Next I bought a WSOP game for my PlayStation 2, and an entire world I never knew about opened up on me.

I didn't have cable TV back in Las Vegas, so I had not seen any ESPN coverage of the WSOP in any of the years, nor had I watched any poker coverage at all on television, so having digital PS2 versions of Norman Chad and Lon McEachern commentating on my check raises and suckouts was something that was very surprising and bizarre.

Then came the unlockable Easter egg video clips, all of them featuring Mr. Phil Hellmuth. Here we had Phil giving tips on the top 10 hands to play preflop; then we had Phil giving a tour of his comped high-rise penthouse suite on the Strip. Then there was the clip that sealed it for me.



I believe that I unlocked the clip in question after the first time I won the game's Main Event, a feat that I achieved by save-whoring past a few of the bad hands. It showed Phil Hellmuth and Mike Matusow joshing around with each other in a private suite, replete with its own poker table and dealer, and challenging each other to a $10,000 heads-up match, and then playing it out right there--and within minutes, Hellmuth owed Matusow $10,000.

Who the hell are these goofballs? I asked myself. Is this for real? Can they really be throwing around $10k like it was a hundo bet between buddies? I unlocked the Hellmuth v Matusow clip right around the time of the actual 2008 WSOP. I flipped over to ESPN and watched some of it, and then I fully became hooked on the game of poker.

Next, I went out and bought $300-$400 worth of poker books, many of them from TwoPlusTwo Publishing. I got on Full Tilt and proceeded to tagfish my way to some modest wins. I might have made more money pre-Black Friday if I hadn't been such a nit, or if I'd played more; but due to me being a tilt monkey when I drank, I didn't play when I drank, and I drank most of the time. My plan was to pile up the money from my office job for 2-3 years, then quit and turn myself into a live poker pro. That plan was formulated close to 10 years ago.

In late 2013, I sat down and calculated that I was spending $7000/year on beer and liquor, and $3000/year on cigarettes, so I quit smoking.

Meanwhile, poker play had developed and passed me by, and I was now a break-even player at best. I didn't notice the change, because variance is sky high when you're playing close to even, and even if I had been playing enough hands to get a good sample size, the random walk one gets at +/-0% ROI can take you almost anywhere.

In 2015 my buddy Will found it necessary to visit an emergency room in the middle of one night with a severe case of Delirium tremens, and from there he had to go into rehab and to quit drinking. Throughout Will's ordeal, I think he was more mortified at knowing that me and some of his other friends had found out about his problem than he was at the actual problem.

So I lost my drinking buddy. I then went on to become my own drinking buddy, with a devil sitting on my left shoulder, and another devil sitting on my right shoulder, and no better angels anywhere in the vicinity. There's nothing charming about a middle-aged drunk. Even the most dedicated staggering party lout can start to lose his joie de vivre once the grey hair starts to creep up around his temples.



As with the writing and the blackjack playing back in Las Vegas, I had once again spent years of my life deluding myself, this time in New England, this time thinking I was an aspiring poker pro saving up for a bankroll.

But In February of 2017, I decided to turn that **** around. I quit drinking entirely and dedicated myself to a new course of daily exercise and poker study, and I've stayed with it, and the money started piling up again.

Chips, please!

I mentioned in an earlier post upthread that I was waiting for the MGM in Springfield MA to open some time late this year, and that I would take a shot at grinding live cash games here in New England. I've since made a change in my plans. Basically this...



I'm not going back to Las Vegas, though. Too many bad memories there. I think it's going to be Reno this time; a little change of scenery, and they have a lot of poker rooms in a small area. I've already given my notice at work. I'll be finished with my job on May 4th. Then I'll be heading out to Reno soon after, to check the lay of the land.

And that's it.

Thank you for reading these incredibly tl;dr tales! Once I get established out West, I'll start a thread in Poker Goals & Challenges and the story will continue in real time or close to it.

Brag: Posted a BBV fred that wasn't universally hated--not an easy task.

Beat: Nothing I haven't 100% brought down upon myself.

Variance: There ought to be some in an upcoming PG&C fred, starting in July. I'll bump this thread with the link when I get it going.

FIRST

Very good

I don't think I have yet to comment itt but I have followed it from the get go. Awesome SJ. Hopefully you hear from Sklansky or his dental hygienist if you haven't already in private.

Thank you! Sorry I didn't answer when you posted. I didn't want to bump the thread until I had the last installment.



Thanks, man! Feels good hearing that from a fellow 2008 poster.

Thanks Majik!

It would be cool if David posted here, and to see if he remembers me. As well-known as he is in the poker world, I can't think of too many other general bookstore people who would recognize him on sight like I did.

If he's not happy with me, then at least we'll get to see what a one-touch ban and clean looks like when done to a 5k poster...or you'll get to see it.

Incredible last post.

Looking forward to the PG&C thread!

Great thread,best of luck in Reno,with the **** you’ve been through,nitting it up thr SSNL should be a breeze.

Favorite passage:

Great writing had me LOLing with the weimaraner pics, good luck in Reno inspiring stuff SJ.

Thanks CleanoutKid, adam and Hank!



I won't bump this thread again until May, at least. That's when I'll be out in Reno for three weeks to see if that's the place for me to start with. If it sucks, then Las Vegas will be plan B. I'll post a quick tr if anything of interest happens out there in May.

first; i've enjoyed your stories so much i've re-posted to FB and cut/pasted to friends. you have talent. happy to see you use it.

second; re:Reno. a train runs through it. daily, 5am. loud whistle. also, everything shuts down with the sun setting. it is nothing like vegas. not sure what you are looking for but the odds it is Reno are quite long.

Mr. Justice,

Thanks for sharing your story. I am sure most of us itt can relate quite well in one way or another and the reason we are here til the end. You painted some amazing pictures in our heads with your pen to paper skills and I salute you. This is now the 2nd time I have read this thread from start to finish in one siting and do not regret it. I found humor, suspense, attraction (no ****) and inspiration in your vivid writing. Thanks again and best of luck in your future.

m

****ing nit

First of all, phenomenal entry SJ. Your writing style sucks me in, and the degeneracy helps.



that being said, i feel targeted by this

I started getting grey hair at 26 and am still charming af.

That being said, great post.

On a serious note, have you ever been to Ft Lauderdale and played cards down there? There is more PLO action than in vegas and i think 11 casinos with card rooms within an hour drive. IME if you are playing 5/10 or less NLHE or PLO below 10/20 the action is much better than vegas and there are plenty of dumbb locals with money to burn. If nothing else, it would be worth it to go out there wen they are running a tournament series, which they do frequently.

I said I wasn't going to bump it. I lied. You guys are being too kind to just let it go.

Thanks for the kind words from the beginning!

The plan for Reno is to use it as a sort of Tutorial Island -- lots of practice and basic available games without much risk. The next step is to travel around some, once I've leveled up.

Thanks man! May you run like a god going forward.


This.

Thanks tbh! I didn't quit the drinking until I was well into my 40's. That's middle aged. 30's? Ah Jesus, enjoy yourself, I say.

I suck at PLO. I'm just awful. If I ever get bored with nl, I might study it a bit, but I'm a huge PLO fish atm.

I'll prob be down in FL in the winter for 2-4 weeks visiting my elderly parents. They're around Tampa, though. Last time I was there the nl game at the Seminole Hard Rock was as soft as a cloud of buttered titties.

I just found this thread on Friday. I've been thinking about these two paragraphs the entire weekend.

Thanks for writing this. Goodluck going forward friend.

Tomorrow I leave for Reno. For that trip I started a House of Blogs...um...blog.

Suitedjustice's Ongoing Mid-life Crisis: a Poker Shot at Reno

I know that I said that I was going to do a PG&C. And I actually have a specific challenge in mind, but that won't happen until I'm out there and established for a while, probably later on in the year. So it's House of Blogs for now. Stop over and say hi. That front page moves quickly, so I'm not averse to bumping that thread whenever.

I read it once. I read it again.

I never commented because I was actually reading about methamphetamine in an elective called "Drugs of Abuse." The irony is thick. I can relate man, and it's well written. ****in' D.S. and the parrot though! Your ability to quit drugs and drinking as you have is literally the quest of millions: ya lucky bastard.

Thanks for the good stories.

Drinking again AF. **** these terrible meat shields surrounding us and to hell with their terrible needs.

Keep fighting the good fight brother. You're the inspiration, not me.

RIPSJ

Fortunately, making terribad drunk emo bumps is not fatal, though it probably ought to be.