New tides of immigration have so transformed New York City that classic ethnic foods and drinks are increasingly being prepared by people whose ethnicity does not necessarily match the menu's.

I haven't been posting shit for the past two weeks. Hey, I'm traveling, so give me a break. When I get back, toward the end of the week, I'll be posting about my last trip to Las Vegas and about the Pacific Northwest Museum Tour, which has so far been a blast.

Yeah, I know this bad boy is a little over two weeks late, but I was in Las Vegas, taking care of my poker business, the week after the game, and I’m typing this while I’m sitting in Blenz, a Vancouver, B.C. coffee shop, coming down from a day that started in a scary-ass SeaTac motel, went through Seattle [props to the Emerald City, currently my third-favorite city in the world], and ended up with my walking for what felt like at least fifteen miles, but which I was informed was probably closer to five. Whatever; it felt like ten.

Lawyers for the Defense Department are refusing to cooperate with a
federal judge's order to release secret photographs and videotapes
related to the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal.

I started this story 23 July 2001, finished it shortly thereafter, and sent it to Esquire. I figured, since the story was trivial and sort of stupid, that it would be right up their alley. A few short weeks later, I got the story back with a note that said that they, whoever "they" are, thought the title was pretty funny, but that they were taking a pass. That note is one of the most fucked up rejection letters I've ever gotten. Apparently, on that story, I did my best work on the first ten words that I wrote; it was all downhill from there.

Okay, I didn't get a chance to post a poem when I was in Las Vegas. Sorry about that, but here's a poem that  I'll be reading tomorrow at a taping for a local PBS show coming out of Fresno. I'm not sure when the show will be on, but I'll update once I do know.

The poem's in three sections, and the first section was the first thing that I ever wrote in a creative writing class.

Hello, my people. In about eight hours, I'll be driving out to Las Vegas to work on my poker game and to check out the World Series of Poker again. I've found a couple of Starbucks that have T-Mobile HotSpots, so I'm going to try to post little updates of how my trip is going. I'm also going to try to post the weekly poem and story tomorrow, but I make no promises. It's a lot of work trying to produce five content streams. How many other one-person outfits can keep up with that kind of pace? Exactly. Also, I might be too worn out to actually put together coherent sentences and/or narratives anyway.

His ordeal, however, was still not quite over. American officials told him that his United States passport had been destroyed in the course of an effort to test its authenticity, his lawyers said, and that he might have to wait a week before a new one could be issued.

It was probably one of my worst performances ever at a poker table. In fact, Bert, inventor of the Bert Death Spiral and the meatball sub, and Jesse commented that I wasn’t playing like myself. Great, you know you're really sucking when your competitors are worried about you.

Updated 10 July 2005! 

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