Las Vegas for five days. Forty-one hours of poker. Free food. Freeway driving at two in the morning. Watching Cloutier play in the $5,000 buy-in no-limit at the World Series of Poker and win it all. What did he win? $600,000. The whole experience was great, and the homies and I are going back in about three weeks.

I knew that I couldn't go through with driving to Los Angeles and having to deal with the traffic and the smog and the wastelandy vibe that it gives off, or at least that it gives off to me. Bad vibes, man, bad vibes.

I made some pretty funny jokes, but most of them were pretty off-color, and I felt cheap and dirty (but not in a good way) afterward. I seem to recall something about my being willing to poke an old lady in the eye for a pair of aces.

A joke: What's the best part of Los Angeles? The freeways out of it. Snap! I just made that up; feel free to work it into conversation.

What happened, transpired, went down? There’s no gentle way to say this: my big bro beat the fuck out of me, almost as if we were little kids again and I had pissed him off.

So now, on top of walking around with a general feeling of failure, I also have to walk around with a specific feeling of failure because I can't even manage running my own website. Great.

Damn it, I can't get the mail thing to work correctly. Sorry if you've been trying.

Originally, only registered users were going to be able to leave comments on the various blogs or contact us via e-mail, you know, to keep the hoods and/or thugs from leaving lame stuff here or in my e-mail.

Rock and roll, fuckers.

History is above all a succession of challenges, of repetitions, of preseverances. It's an endless cycle of oppressions, humiliations, and disasters, but also a testament to man's ability to survive.