I’ve Been Downhearted, Baby: You know your life is a wreck when the best four days of the year take place a thousand miles north of where you live and with a person who lives three-thousand miles east of where you live and who you will be lucky to see every few years, if you’re lucky, if you don’t drift out of each other’s lives the way that people always drift out of each other’s lives. Drift, drift, drift until she is gone and you think to yourself I haven't written to her in forever and you wonder if your contact information for her is any good anymore, but you are too scared to find out that it may not be and so you don’t try, don’t try and hope that it will be she who is the one to try, and that your information will still be good. If life weren’t such a relentless series of letdowns and disappointments and failures (large and small, though the small always add up and take on as much weight as the large but are much, much sadder because they happen a little at a time and you barely notice them until it is far too late), it would be so fucking funny.

But that’s on Saturday, and most of those sentences will form while you drive the lovely and curvy and lonely roads of Madera, California, as you head to your favorite coffee shop so that you can breathe and clear your head and write.

You will have seen her off at SeaTac on Tuesday night. You will have continued on your little trip for two more days. You will sense that all of what you had been feeling—the energy, the will, the absence of unhappiness—has flowed out of you and you will feel like you are now going through the motions. You will question the trip plans that you had so carefully made. Of course the last two days would be a comedown. How could they not be? You should have seen that and you should have seen her off and then driven and driven and driven until there was no more road to drive. Instead, you will arrive home on Thursday night/Friday morning, ten hours after you set out from the Jordan Schnitzer in Eugene. Goodbye to the hotel life (The Hotel Life now being the title of a story that you want to write; you don’t know what it will be about, but it will be full of melancholia and longing).

You will awaken Friday morning, and the last thing that you will want to do is to do anything.

But, of course, there are things. There always are. After all of the things will be a thing that isn’t usually a thing, but is normally the best part of the week: your Friday-night poker game. You will be honest with yourself, however, and sense that this is the least that you have ever wanted to play poker. Moping seems like a better use of your time, moping and giving in to the sadness that seems to follow you everywhere.

Here Is the Segue: (I know what you're thinking: Where the hell is the funny stuff? I don’t read this site for the self-involved, writerly nonsense; I read it for the lame-ass jokes. Don’t worry, I’ll take care of you after the next few paragraphs.)

You drive to the game and you tell yourself that you will try to get through the evening without being a downer. Once everybody arrives and the cards are in the air, though, you find that you are actually having a decent time. The decent time becomes an okay time becomes a good time, and, just like every other Friday, you end up having a great time with the poker crew.

And it works; for the six hours that you play, it will be as if the PNMT didn’t even happen and there is nothing and no one to miss.

(Here comes the funny.)

I Don’t Want to be Gross: (Those of a delicate constitution may want to skip the next section.)

I arrived from the PNMT with a lack of a certain type of garment. You know how you think that it’s impossible to run out of certain articles of clothing? Well, after nine days on the road, I still had plenty of shorts and shirts, but as I was getting ready to go out on Friday, I couldn’t find any, uh, boxers anywhere. I’m digging around in my stuff, not believing that I don’t have one pair buried somewhere among my clothes. I don’t, and, finally, I come across a pair of briefs: tightey-whiteys. I’m not some unschooled savage, so I don’t really have a choice in the matter. I take a breath, try to become one with the universe, and…go for it.

It’s a completely different world, sisters and brothers, to have to trade the classy comfort of boxers for what I can only describe as self-inflicted unease and imprisonment. Let my people go. But I’m stuck, and I’ve got to walk around for the entire day under these strange and unhappy circumstances.

I manage to survive the day, and while I’m playing poker that evening, I ask the guys in the poker crew, “How can anybody walk around like this? How do the caballeros get any air in these things?” I have to get up a few times to make some, ahem, adjustments to the situation.

The whole experience was unpleasant, man. I’m going to go out tomorrow and buy about four dozen pairs of boxers and strategically leave them any place that I may need them. A few in my computer case, a few in my man-bag, a few in my glove compartment, a few in the mailbox, some in the fridge, some at the neighbors’ house, some buried in the yard, maybe some in a safe-deposit box, just to have my bases covered.

What About the Game?: Relax, dude, I was getting to that. Ivan, poker player deluxe and designer/programmer of this here site was in Las Vegas, at some kind of computer guy thing. Jesse said that he’d try to be there, but he didn’t show. Not to worry, though, Bert, inventor of the Bert Classic and jumper cables, invited his younger brother, Oscar, to the game, and Oscar handled himself quite well. Most guys who don’t play with us that often usually throw away their chips as if they were on fire, but Oscar battled and fought and fought back and got his chips in when he thought he was in the lead and folded when he thought that he wasn’t and, after six hours of play, he was down a few dollars, which was pretty impressive.

My big bro, bought in a new guy to the game, Roberto, and Roberto is no joke at the poker table. He’s a pretty aggressive player, but those of us in the poker crew aren’t gonna back down if we’re holding something nice, so he was up and down for most of the night because he got called a few times when he was on bluffs or semi-bluffs, though he did end up making the second-most money, a little over twenty-seven dollars. He also made a pretty hardcore max bet after fifth street in a hand of Omaha. There were possible straights on the board, as well as high two pairs, and, thanks to a spade landing on fifth, a runner runner flush. Roberto got one call and then he turned over the two and three of spades, giving him the winning flush and the pot. That’s right, Roberto had bought the heat with the lowest possible flush and had gotten paid. Most people would have checked his hand and hoped for the best, but Roberto tried to maximize the value of his hand and got an extra $4 out of it. That’s core.

Who made the most money? I don’t want to brag (well, maybe I do, just a little), but it was me. That’s right, our long national nightmare is over and I was the chip leader for the first time since early March, more than four-and-a-half months ago. I’ll be honest and admit that I was worried (more than usual) about how well I would play since I hadn't played live poker or practiced on my poker simulation program or even read from my books on poker theory in almost two weeks and also because, post-PNMT, I was completely out of my head, all of which I thought would get me killed by the bad-ass vatos in our game.

Well, I was way up early, about sixty dollars, and stayed ahead the whole night, though there was a stretch near the end where I was barely up about fifteen dollars. I caught at the end, though, and came out $50.25 ahead, which isn’t great, but it is the second-best night I’ve had in a long, long time.

And I could have been much further ahead, but I took some beatdowns that I didn’t think were coming my way. Five times, I was dealt American Airlines, pocket aces, and each time, they didn’t get better. I’ve never caught American Airlines so many times in a session, so it’s a little bit funny that they paid off exactly zero times. I didn’t let it affect me too much, though, and tried to hold it together.

Bad Beat of the Night: Bert, inventor of the Bert Light and streaming video, deals out Omaha and I’m looking at pocket kings. What am I thinking? I’m thinking how good it feels to be alive. I bet it and everybody stays in for the flop. The flop is one of those truly terror-inducing flops: three aces. Flushes and straights are pretty much dead. It will either be a battle of pocket pairs, in which case I am beyond golden, or somebody is holding the fourth ace and is thus absolutely unbeatable. My job now is to try to figure out if anybody is actually holding the fourth ace and my cowboys are already cracked.

After the flop my big bro checks it to me, but I don’t want to make a move until I have a sense of the relative strength of my hand, so I check it down, too. Well, everybody else checks it, which doesn’t really mean anything; a bet at this point would probably have driven everybody out of the hand and you wouldn’t have gotten paid, or somebody would have re-raised because he had the pocket ace, in which case you would have had to fold. In other words, nobody wants to make the first move and hang himself.

What I’m hoping for on the turn is that the fourth ace hits, which would mean that, because I’m holding two of the kings, the best anybody could do would be to chop the pot with me if he were also holding pocket kings. More realistically, though, a fourth ace would mean that I was locked in tight to win the hand. The turn, however, isn’t an ace, and the card isn’t of any help to anybody. There isn’t any betting because nobody has been able to read anybody yet or because some players know that they can’t possibly win. It’s all going to be post-river action on this one.

Fifth street was a king. It’s now a lock that I’m was alone in holding the second-best possible hand since a king on the board means that nobody but me is holding cowboys. Only somebody holding an ace could hurt me. I’m looking around the table, but I have no clue. I’m only really sure about one player, who shall remain nameless, that I’ve got him beat, but that’s the extent of what I’ve been able to learn.

My big bro checks it, and now the action’s on me. I thought about checking because I hadn't been able to discern if somebody was holding the fourth ace, but if you can’t bet the A-A-A-K-K boat, then you probably shouldn’t be playing poker. Even if somebody is holding the ace, and you get killed, you at least get the consolation of knowing that you didn’t punk out and that you tried to attack with your hand. Oscar folds, Roberto folds, and now it’s up to Bert, inventor of the Bert Death Spiral and the self-cleaning oven, to make his move.

Bert bets right back at me, my big bro folds, and now it’s back to me. Now, either Bert doesn’t have the ace but genuinely thinks he has me beat with a high pocket pair (in which case, he’s wrong), is holding nothing and thinks that he can punk me with a max re-raise (which might be true sometimes, but not when I’m holding kings), or is holding the ace and doesn’t give a fuck about what I’m holding and would love a call and would love a raise even more. I could raise and try to get at least one more call out of Bert, but his only realistic play then would be to fold if he doesn’t have it (which means that I get nothing for risking a bet) or to re-raise if he does have it (which means that I get an ass kicking for risking a bet). I call.

Bert turns over an ace. He had flopped quad aces and I had been dead the whole way. Thankfully, I had waited to bet until after the river, so I didn’t lose as much as I possibly could have. In fact, the fact that the quads were out there early actually prevented Bert from extracting more money from me or anybody else.

Bert had hidden the fact that he had flopped a monster really well. Bert had been on the deal, so all of the action was in front of him and he had had position on the table the whole way, so he never had to give away his hand. But his position didn’t really matter that much because he didn’t have to worry about anybody possibly being able to catch up to him.

Even though I paid out a little with a truly huge boat, it was one of those hands where you can’t feel bad about losing

Poker Problem: Red, the color: I’ve never liked it.

And it works; for the six hours that you play, it will be as if the PNMT didn’t even happen and there is nothing and no one to miss. That feeling will last exactly as long as the poker game does. But then it will be 2:30 in the morning and the game will have just broken up and, when you get your car out on the road, you will be alone and it will be dark and you will have miles and miles and minutes and minutes to get through before you can sleep and shut the world down until the next day, the next beautiful and  bitter and sweet and sad and lovely day.