Okay, I finally figured it out, how to not have California be such a significant part of the West Coast Museum Tour: screw Los Angeles.

Last night, Burt kept his pimp hand strong, and he kept us in check the entire game. Every time one of us got uppity, he put the smack down with a quickness.

Dig it: I finished captioning most of the photographs that I uploaded yesterday, and I just uploaded lots more. There are now 129 images sorted into six albums in the Photography section of my website. Get going; the images aren't going to look at themselves.

Check it out: I've just added a bunch of images to the Photography section of my website. They're not captioned yet, but I've got to head out to my weekly poker game. The photographs should be captioned by Monday, though, if you want to wait until then.

 

Be cool, beautiful people. 

I play poker at the Excalibur. Look for me; I'll be the one with death in his eyes.

He showboats when he's got a winning hand, waiting until somebody else thinks he's won and is about to reach for the chips, or is even reaching for the chips, before he turns over his cards, which is about the biggest dick move that you can make at a poker table.

The fact that I’m a writer doesn’t really get mentioned at the game, mostly because it’s hard to instill fear and/or respect in other poker players when the fact that you’re a poet comes up. Who’s scared of a poet? Only a smaller poet, or a really young child.

You wanted to hear Blue Monday because the speakers were doing lovely and permanent damage to your delicate hearing and the strobes were strobing and you knew the dance floor was going to fill up and it was gonna be physical and sweaty and nearly perfect.

I'm reading A. Alvarez's The Biggest Game in Town, a book about
the 1981 World Series of Poker, and I ran across a quote about a poker
player losing his roll and then "sleeping for an hour, then crying for
an hour, then sleeping for an hour."

Ours is a tough game. Some new players have come for some action and then lasted for only one game; they come in, buy in for forty dollars, quickly get down to felt (run out of chips), get this shocked look on their faces—What the hell just happened?—and then never come back.