Sister Section

(I'm turning this in for my class, which meets for the last time tomorrow. I'll probably back off the short stories for a while after this.)


Dad took Jenny and me to Granny’s house last night. He said it might snow while he and Mom were at the hospital, so he made us take our snow pants and boots even though there wasn’t any snow on the ground yet. That made me excited because it was almost Christmas and I didn’t get to go sledding yet and Granny’s house had a big hill that was fun to sled on. We took the white car that had barbecue stains on the ceiling from when Mom almost crashed the car and my chicken nuggets box flew out of my lap, but Mom couldn’t go with us to Granny’s because Dad said she had to save up her energy for having my baby sister tomorrow.

Before we left, Mom asked Jenny and me to bring Brown Bear and White Bear to her in her bed. Mom says she made me Brown Bear to give to me when I was born. She made White Bear for Jenny when she was born, but now I called him Gray Bear because he was so dirty and it made Jenny get mad.

Mom held up a teddy bear that was just like mine and Jenny's, only it was black. She waved its arm at our bears and said "Hello Greg and Jenny, my name is Black Bear and I am going to live with your baby sister," in her silly voice.

I held out Brown Bear's arm to his and said "Hello, Black Bear. It's nice to meet you. My name is Brown Bear."

I know that our teddy bears aren't real, but Mom likes it when we pretend.

Jenny didn't say anything so I had Brown Bear say "And that there is Gray Bear." Mom gave me a look so I said "Well his real name is White Bear, he's just a little dirty," and Jenny smiled again.

Mom said "It's very nice to meet you both. I will take good care of your new sister in the hospital and I will see you again soon." Mom had all our bears hug each other and then she said changed back to her normal voice and said "and now I want a hug from my baby bears."  Me and Jenny kissed Mama goodbye and we kissed her tummy too and told our new baby sister we couldn’t wait to meet her.

I mean, we kissed Mom goodbye. Sister Ruth told me that first grade boys can say “Mama”, but second grade boys should say “Mom” and “Dad”. Jenny was in kindergarten and she called mom and dad “Mommy” and “Daddy”. Dad was a grown-up and he always called Mom “Your Mother”.

Jenny had to sit in the back seat because she was the littlest and she asked Dad, “Why does Mommy have to go to the hospital to have the baby? Is she sick?”

I said "Because sometimes ladies get hurt when they have a baby, right Dad?”

Dad said “And sometimes instead of a regular baby, a mommy will have a baby tiger!  And sometimes the baby tiger will scratch and bite everyone and they need to be in the hospital to fix all the people.” 

I knew Dad was joking because he always talked funny when he told jokes. Sometimes Jenny didn’t know when he was joking but this time she did and she giggled and said, “That’s not what happens, Daddy!”

I told Dad to make a left on Highway Q. Dad knew how to get to Granny’s, but sometimes when Dad driving, he would have me tell him directions because he wanted to see if I knew them. Granny’s house was easy to get to because it was just past Dad’s work and sometimes he would have to go back to work at night and he would take Jenny and me and we would play hide and seek in the big empty factory while Dad looked at papers on his desk.

Granny’s house always smelled like ham, but I always liked going to there because the house was so big and they had a swimming pool in the back. My cousin Mike and me used to play football in the living, but I bumped my head once on the stones on the wall by the fireplace and needed five stitches, so Granny said we couldn't play football inside any more. When we talked to Granny on the phone, we said we wanted macaroni for dinner and when I smelled the house I was afraid that Granny made ham again but then I saw the macaroni on the stove. Grandpa was putting up some Christmas lights in the trees outside but he came in right after us and Jenny and me gave both of them big hugs. Even though it smelled like ham, We took our bags to our room that smelled really dusty like our attic. When we came back Dad was talking to Granny and Grandpa about the sister section that Mom was getting tomorrow.

On Monday, Dad told me that is when they cut a lady’s belly open and take the baby out. Granny said to Dad she didn’t know why Mary had to get a sister section. Mary is Mom’s real name.

I looked at my belly and wondered if a baby could crawl out of my belly like the baby chickens crawled out of their eggs at Uncle Jack’s farm. But babies are squishy and they don’t have beaks and tummies are squishy too so I don’t know how they could make a hole. A sister section sounded like a good idea because Mom couldn’t move around too good any more with my baby sister in her belly. Granny actually called it a "scissoring section" I think, but I didn’t say anything about this because Dad was talking in his grown-up voice. Granny looked sad and she sniffled but she said it was because she was she just had a cold and not to worry.

Dad gave us hugs and told us to be good and went home. We ate macaroni and Grandpa ate roast beef and corn and Granny made pineapple upside down cake for dessert. I had two pieces because it’s my favorite. Then Granny and I played Yahtzee and Jenny watched Little Mermaid again. Grandpa smoked his pipe and read his tractor magazines in his big brown squishy rocking chair that no one was allowed to sit in.

In the morning Dad called at 7:03 and said that the doctor thought Mom was ready for the baby to come out, so they were going to start the sister section.

“I’ll call you at school as soon she’s done, okay buddy?”

“When is that?”

“I don’t know, Gregger, maybe three or four hours or so?” That was during recess and Penmanship class.

Granny took us to school after that. Saint Rosemary is my school but it didn’t have a kindergarten, so Jenny went to Maple Lawn, which was a little bit further down the street. Jenny will go to Saint Rosemary next year. Sometimes Granny teaches a ceramics class at Saint Rosemary, but that’s only on Wednesdays and only the 5^th and 6^th graders can go to that class. Today was Friday so Granny wasn’t supposed to come in to the school.

We had to go to church first thing in the morning. All the other grades go to church on Mondays and Wednesdays, but second graders have to go on Fridays too until they have First Communion, and that is in April. Sister Ruth said I had to read the petitions in the front of church today because there was a petition to pray for my family. I like to have readings in church because I get bored sometimes and then I can practice my readings in my head. I saw Grandma in church and tried to wave at her, but she had her eyes closed and she was praying and saying quiet words to Jesus, so she didn’t see me. Sister Ruth smacked my head and told me to turn around. Grandma goes to her church every day but I never see her in my church. She didn’t tell me she was coming or I would have asked Sister Ruth if I could sit by her today.

After church I had to go to the third grade room for math class because I did second grade math last year. Mrs. Dionne teaches third grade and I like her more than Sister Ruth. Sister Ruth always told me to sit still and be quiet but the boys in Mrs. Dionne’s class are naughtier, so I can hum or walk around a little bit and she won’t yell at me.

I like math the best and I was having fun so I didn’t think about my baby sister until I saw the clock was 9:56 and I remembered what Dad said. Recess was in four minutes but I hoped Dad would call after recess ended at 10:20 because I liked playing kickball at recess and I didn't like penmanship class because Sister Ruth always tells me to slow down because I write sloppy when I write fast.

Dad didn't call during recess, so I got to play kickball with my friends and I kicked a single. I was excited that Dad was going to call me during penmanship but I waited and he didn't call while I practiced writing twenty lower-case p's and twenty lower-case q's. And he didn't call while I was writing ten words that started with "p" and five words that started with "q". And then he didn't call during art class either. I started to think Dad forgot to call me.

After art class we had lunch and I asked Sister Ruth if I could go to the office to see if my Dad called. Ms. Monroe answers the phones for the school and I thought maybe Dad left a message with her. But Sister Ruth told me I should stop worrying and go to lunch.

Lunch is in the basement and the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd graders eat together at 12:00. I always sit with Tom and Jason at lunch and talk about Nintendo, so they saved me a seat while I talked to Sister Ruth. Granny made me peanut butter and jelly like I asked, but she didn't cut off the crusts like Mom did and she used the wrong kind of jelly, so I just ate my Cheetos instead. Right after I ate my Cheetos, the first grade teacher, Mr. Schmidt, came down and told me to go upstairs to Sister Ruth's classroom. I knew it was my Dad and I was so excited that I ran up the stairs and all the way to my classroom even though Mr. Schmidt yelled at me not to run. I didn't care because I wanted to hear about my baby sister and find out what took so long.

Sister Ruth was talking on the phone when I got to the room and she was wearing the special glasses she sometimes wore at her desk but not when she was teaching. I thought Sister Ruth always talked with the same voice, but she was talking real slow and quietly on the phone. "... Of course, of course, Frank," she said. "He'll be in the office." Frank is my Dad's real name so I knew she was talking to him.

She looked like she was crying, but I remembered that her glasses sometimes make her look like she is crying even when she isn't so I didn't know. She held her hand out and waved at me to come by her and she petted my hair while she listened to the phone. Sister Ruth never petted my hair before. "He just walked in. I will let you two talk," she said. "We will be praying for you."

She handed me the phone and leaned against the chalkboard. "It's your father."

I put the phone to my ear. "Dad?"

"Dad?"

"Hey Gregger." He had a new voice too and he was talking slow and quiet like Sister Ruth.

I turned away from Sister Ruth and took a step toward the wall with the coats. "Are you okay, Dad?" I was talking slow and quiet too, but I wasn't doing it on purpose. "Did Mommy have her baby?"

He was quiet for a little bit and then he said, "Grandma is coming to pick you and your sister up and bring you down to the hospital."

"Do we get to see the baby?"

"Your can see the baby, but your Mother is very sick and you need to come see her."

"Is she okay?" I asked. "Is she going to die?"

Dad didn't say anything.

"Daddy?"

"I don't know, Gregger. Hurry down here."

I told Daddy I loved him and turned around and gave the phone back to Sister Ruth. She knelt down and gave me a long hug but she didn't say anything. My forehead was touching her face and I could tell corner of her eye was wet. Then she grabbed my shoulders and looked at me and asked "Your dad told you your grandmother is coming?" I shook my head yes. She stood up and said, "I will walk down you to the office."

Sister Ruth walked me down to Ms. Monroe's office and she petted my hair the whole way. I was glad that Mom was already in the hospital when she got sick because she was right by all the doctors, so I didn't think she was going to die. When we got to the office Sister Ruth gave me another hug and told me, "Do not forget to pray, Gregory. God will be there for you."

Granny didn't get out of the car when she parked her black car outside the school, so Ms. Monroe walked me out. Jenny was already in the front seat so I sat in the back. Usually I would tell Jenny to sit in the back, but I was thinking about lots of things already so I forgot to say anything. Granny gave me the red and white rosary from off her mirror and told me we had to pray the rosary together for my Mom. Granny used her heavy black rosary but he didn't give Jenny one because she didn't know how to say the rosary yet. We said one whole rosary and some of another rosary when we got to the hospital.

It was snowing by the time we got to the hospital but not enough to need boots. I left my rosary in the car but Granny kept hers wrapped around her arm like bracelets. Granny held our hands and I could feel that some of the beads were warm but the metal cross at the end was very cold. Granny walked us inside the hospital through the big turning glass doors. When we got inside the hospital was bright and it smelled like the kitchen at home right after Mommy cleans it. I thought Dad would be waiting for us when we came in, but he wasn't there. Granny asked the lady at the desk where my Mom was and she said they had just moved her to the fourth floor.

I was only on an elevator two other times in my life, and it was the first time I rode an elevator made out of glass so I could look at other parts of the hospital when we went up. I decided maybe I would ask if I could ride it to all the other floors later with Dad. Granny didn't seem like talking much though so I didn't ask her. She just kept touching her rosary and holding Jenny's hand.

The elevator opened up and Granny took our hands and looked at the sign in the hallway. We turned to the right and walked to the end of the hallway and I felt very cold even with my jacket on. We turned to the left and there was another long hallway. Granny stopped and I looked at her and then I looked where she was looking and I saw Dad at the other end of the hallway. He was sitting on a red plastic chair and he had his elbows on knees. I couldn't see what, but he was looking down at something that he was holding in his hands. I let go of Granny's hand and walked a little bit forward and I saw that he was holding Black Bear.

I screamed out as loud as I could. "Daddy!"

But he didn't look up.

I started running toward Daddy faster than I ever ran before. I decided that I hated Black Bear more than anything else in the world. I wanted to knock him out of Daddy's hands and throw him out the window and never see him again.

And even though I was running so fast, Daddy seemed like he kept getting further away. And I turned around and Granny and Jenny were just as far away. I just kept running and running but my legs felt real heavy and I couldn't breathe and finally I tripped and fell. My face felt hot against the scratchy brown carpet and I pressed harder and I tried to bury my head like an ostrich but I couldn't do it. I was so tired I never wanted to stand up again, so I just pushed my face harder and harder and I cried and I cried until it was dark.

Feedback on Danny Slowe

The Pros:


- Each reader intrigued by the premise. Everyone wanted to read more.

- Good use of language matching the scene. A bit business-y and technical, but appropriate for the story and the relationships

- Good quotable lines and vivid imagery

- The Danny character is intriguing and mysterious, and the BFF relationship between him and Carlos feels authentic, with elements of comfort and openness but also tension. There is a compelling contrast between his desire to play God via technology and his need to be in nature and "off the grid" (this was actually an accident on my part... I didn't realize this about him until I was half-way through writing the chapter)

- Good instincts in choosing to tell this story from Carlos' point of view. Multiple allusions to Great Gatsby, telling the story of a "legend" from another's point of view.

 

The Cons:

- Danny doesn't do anything in this first chapter. He has two lines of dialogue, he stares at a fire, and he pours a cup of coffee for his friend. I was trying to make him mysterious, but I need to have at least a few more subtle gestures/actions/lines to let people in to his world.

- Along the same lines, a couple readers want to know why Danny "wants" this, or what's driving him to take such a big business risk with this idea. We don't know his values or character. I tried to make it clear that even Carlos can't make sense of the situation, and that Danny doesn't need reasons/logic to have a strike of creative insight. Evidently either I didn't do a good job at this or I did a fine job and it's unrewarding to present a character without a glimpse of motive.

- The dialogue and the action was too on-point. Four guys in the woods for a weekend aren't just going to talk about work. They need to discuss other stuff, and I need to describe in better detail the things that they are doing in the woods.

- My grammar sucks balls. I knew this already. The biggest problem is I bounced back and forth between past and past perfect at random. That's a no-no when I'm bouncing back and forth between two different periods of time.

- Also I let my point of view drift between Carlos and omniscient/objective.

- Not enough dialogue and too much summary/exposition. I agree completely. I used summary in places I would naturally use dialogue in order to move the piece along. I didn't want to subject the workshop to a 15-20 page piece that needed that needed to be marked up in a week. It was good to hear my instincts were correct.

- No action took place in the woods, just talking. A couple requests to spice it up by having something happen out there. I really don't know if I want to take this advice.

- I clearly underestimated how frightening Radical Transparency is as a completely fresh idea to drop on the reader. The tone I used while laying out the details was really dry. Now that I got to see a room of people react to my premise, I want to really spice up the language in that section to drive home the fear.

- The opener is a strong line, but it's not appropriate as an opener.

 

Overall, the workshop made me feel like the gap between where I'm at and where I need to be as a writer is a bit wider than I thought. It's a little disheartening, but it's not emotionally crippling or anything. I was really wrapped up in the philosophy of radical transparency, and I figured the power of the idea would carry the novel without much extra emphasis on writing. I thought the big hurdles for me would be organizing the novel, building my world in more detail in my head and then on paper, and choosing the most compelling characters and story lines. I now realize I need work on technical skills like character development and plot pacing. I guess that's the difference between writing personal stories and writing a novel out of thin air. I lean heavily on my eye for detail when I'm writing from experience, and I don't have that available to me for the book.

I really got a lot from having my stuff workshopped. I like having my weak spots defined. I'm sure I'll be joining one or more workshops off Meetup or something like that.

 

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A Dating Story

This isn't for class or anything. This just happened to me this past week.

 

Say hello to girl on okcupid. Tall. Fit. Wears glasses. Writes complete sentences. Smitten.


We're having coffee three hours later. God bless you internet.

I sweat profusely at coffee. Confused. Don't usually sweat. She calls me out on sweating. This makes me sweat more.

She is calm. Eerily calm. That's the problem. She is not pulling her nervousness weight. I have to carry the load for two.

We talk about things we aren't supposed to talk about on a first date. This calms me down. No more sweat.

We hold hands and we hug at the end of the night. Adorable. Like Tiananmen Square, only if it were a kitten instead of a guy.

That was Sunday. We make plans for Friday. Giddy? Giddy.

Wednesday I email her my story about Danny Slowe. This is because I do not know how to buy flowers for girls I like.

Friday afternoon I google her gmail handle.

Oh fuck.

Date happens anyways. She would later describe it as the single weirdest date she has ever been on, but that she still really wanted to see me again. I sent her this on Sunday morning.

 

C_____,

I wasn't totally honest on Friday night, and I think you deserve to hear the truth. Even if it makes you hate me or think less of me, I'd rather it be that than to carry on a bunch of stumbled upon half-truths. This isn't an easy email for me to write, but it's easier than trying to carry on in some less than honest way.

Here it goes...

I googled c_____ (her gmail handle) on Friday afternoon. I actually don't like that I did that, but I did it... googling you certainly wasn't my intention when I asked for your email address. I didn't think much of it at the time... My blog and a few other things pop up with my gmail handle, and I guess I was hoping it would lead me to something about you.

It led to a twitter account @c_____. That account belongs to a Cole [same last name], and it only has two tweets associated with it, both directed @RuPaul.

Long story short, between that and the insistence on wearing heels and knowing you identify as queer, it dawned on me right before our date that you might identify as transgender or some other non-mainstream gender identity. I don't know if that's necessarily true about you or not, and in a way it doesn't matter whether it is or not... I was kinda thrown for a loop by the idea regardless. As someone who has always identified as straight, I never really considered what I thought about the idea of dating someone outside of the binary gender classifications (I don't know if I'm using these terms properly... I'm trying to be sensitive, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't feel a little ignorant about this stuff).

I don't know if it's insulting or not to hear that you inadvertently triggered me questioning how I want deal with people with non-traditional gender identities in my dating life... If it is insulting, I apologize.

So I was trying to figure this all out on the fly, in real time on our date. Did gender identity matter to me? Am I okay with leading this girl on without knowing if it mattered to me? Is it acceptable to ask about her gender identity? Should I be hurt or insulted if she is gender variant and didn't tell me? Those were the real questions I was trying to figure out.

I feel awful for having that conversation on the pier and not really telling you what was racing around in my mind, but I just couldn't find the words. The stuff I did say about closeness and love and emotions and loneliness... that was all true, and it felt good to share with you. I would say I presented the darkest version of myself that night, but I didn't lie to you about anything. However, every minute was a battle to keep myself from blurting out "I think you might have been a dude or something and I don't know how I feel about that!" On some level, I'm sure I was trying to sabotage things so I wouldn't have to write this email, but I don't know how big of a role that played in determining my actions.

During those ten minutes of silence before we kissed, I was finally able to find enough space to realize I needed to put this philosophical stuff aside and think about C____, and figure out whether I wanted to kiss C____. One person, one moment in time... it's not fair to put her at the epicenter of some internal crisis about what I can and can't handle in terms of dating gender variant people.

I realized that's what I needed to do, but I just couldn't get myself to that place where I could think about C____ specifically. That's why I kept giving you the "I'm sorry" face. I wanted to see you for you and not as some symbol for something bigger, but I couldn't get myself to that place.

Finally I just said fuck it and went for it. I though maybe getting out of my head is what I needed.

When you said "that was intense," I thought "wow, what a perfect description." Kissing you overloaded everything for me and I just shut down. I gave up both thinking and feeling for the night. All I wanted to do was get you home safe and not raise the stakes any higher until I figured out how to be forthright and emotionally honest with you.

So that's what happened, in full disclosure.

I want you to know I think you're an amazing person, and I would love to keep you in my life. If nothing else, it's clear to me we share a spiritual connection.

I tried to put myself in your shoes and figure out what I would want to hear from Doug, and let that dictate the content of this email. Like I said before, I don't know if you're actually gender variant or not, and I'm not sure it matters... I think you deserve to hear everything that was in my head on Friday night, and I think you're the type to want full disclosure.

I would absolutely love to talk more in person if you'd like. If you decide I'm not the type of person you'd like to have in your life, I understand that too. But I'm going to stop typing now and let you lead the way.

Be well,

Doug

 

The date was on Friday. No contact Saturday. I rallied friends to figure out what to do. I sent email Sunday morning.

She sends cryptic text at noon. "The changes that deep intimacy evokes can look very dangerous"

I reply "So do you hate me?"

"That is a juvenile question, Doug"

"Ok, do you want to talk?"

"Yes, how do you feel about talking again?"

"Now that I've got everything off my chest I'd love to talk more"

"Ok great. How about tonight?"

"I have no clue what effect my email had. Are you sure you don't need some time to process?"

"Oh, I didn't see your email. Let me get back to you."

......

"Yeah, you should do that."

 

Phone rings five minutes later. She is laughing. This explains so much of the weirdness.

No I am not trans. Yes I think this is very funny. No I am not insulted. Yes I have already forwarded this to all of my trans friends. Yes they will think this is sweet.

Let's start over? Let's start over.

We meet for dinner. Her hands and feet have shrunk considerably since Friday. We giggle about Friday. She admires that I was so forthright. I admire that she is so unflappable and understanding. We must be awesome.

We talk about things we shouldn't talk about on a second date. Then we go for a walk. Then we talk about things we're supposed to talk about on a second date.

Then we kiss.

She's not feeling it. Where's the intensity from Friday, buddy?

Hard to match the intensity of a uncovering an unfamiliar part of your own identity in real time in the presence of a near-stranger

Sorry :(

She says things you're not supposed to say during the "let's just be friends" thing.

I am eternally grateful for this.

We will be friends.

 

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Danny Slowe

I've been writing like a madman, I just haven't done much I'm ready to post on here. It's weird, because my I don't think I'm learning a ton in my writing class, but I'm struggling to generate output. Each week the writing assignment is to write a 1000-2500 word story based on some prompt (for reference' sake, Officer's Discretion is 2250 words). I didn't finish either of my last assignments, though I did have to turn in a similar-length workshop piece last Wednesday along with an assignment, and I finished that (more on that later). That's pretty absurd, because I'm putting in 20-30 hours writing each week (it was actually 45 last week). There are 8 others in my class, and I would doubt any of them have more than 10 free hours laying around each week, but they seem to get the work done.

Best I can tell, my process is hindered by my unwillingness to embrace "write what you know." Whenever I start a piece, I want to create characters and setting from scratch and figure out what happens as I go along. That requires a lot of prep work. The 25-year-old actress in my class wrote a workshop story about a 23-year-old dancer. The 26-year-old comic workshopped a piece about a... 26-year-old comic. I'm writing about forty-something police officers, Elvis Presley (of which I knew nothing about), and tech CEOs. I don't know what the lives of these people look like. I don't spend much time thinking about what they value, what they fear, or what they want. I have to write up long character sketches about them before I'm comfortable starting a story.

I could say a lot more about what makes me such a slow fiction writer, but it's unnecessary. Bottom line is it takes me 20000 words of output to write a 2000 word story. I don't mind that, since I enjoy the process, but it doesn't make me feel great to come up short on deadlines. That part is discouraging. It's also taken away from writing my blog, which I had been enjoying until writing started taking up more time than poker. I do think I produce better output with an external deadline bearing down on me

My workshop piece is the genesis chapter of my Radical Transparency book. I'm actually proud of this piece, although it doesn't accomplish everything I want to accomplish. I got out a lot of good info in 2300 words, and I think the chapter should naturally be about 4000 (If I keep this storyline for the book, I'll lengthen it, but 4000 words is too much for a workshop). It will get workshopped next Wednesday, and I'll try to write up something on the feedback.

 

The Legend of Danny Slowe

No one ever really understands the true purpose of a new technology when it launches, not even its own creator. The difference between Danny Slowe and everyone else is he never resisted this truth. For him, reasons were perfectly nice things to have, but they were superfluous to the creation process.

 

“I don’t think I’m proposing anything earth-shattering. I’m simply following the arc of reality TV to its logical conclusion.”

“Jesus Christ, Danny. That’s not the point. This project might be feasible. We could probably free up enough capital to get the lights turned on for this thing. It’s obviously really interesting and something worth thinking about, and it might turn a profit in the right hands, but this is not us. It’s not you.”

Danny went silent in thought and Carlos looked on as Chin blearily stumbled out of his tent. Austin was still sleeping as the Sunday morning sun climbed up over the Tetons and went to work burning off the fog hanging over the lake. The breakfast campfire was starting to die down and the pontoon plane would be at the island in a couple hours to take everyone back to civilization. Carlos had been searching for those words for a day and a half now, and he was surprised at how discreetly they crept up from of his subconscious and slipped out through his mouth. Win or lose, at least now he said what he needed to say.

 

When they wrote the profile for 24 year-old tech mogul and Kwyjibo CEO Danny Slowe in Forbes in May of 2018, all anyone could talk about was the cover. In person, he was rail-thin with disheveled short brown hair and a perpetual ghost-white programmer’s tan. He didn’t look like much until you got him talking. Once he started talking about something he was passionate about, his gray eyes would widen and start shooting green sparks, and the flat affect in his voice would give way to a deeper, more frantic cadence as he desperately tried to help his mouth catch up with his mind. Photographs rarely captured this magnetic energy that turned on and off like a switch, but the photographer managed to catch Danny in an action shot during the profile interview. Leaned forward in his chair with a plain white flat-brimmed baseball hat and thin, scraggly two-week old beard, Danny’s arms were fully extended in front of him, mimicking someone white-knuckling a steering wheel. His eyes were wide open and his mouth was in the middle of forming an “o”. If you squinted, it looked like he was about to choke someone.

They didn’t even bother with the photo shoot.

At the moment the picture was snapped, he was talking about how these camping trips were essential to reconnect with who he was and critical to the health of Kwyjibo as a whole. The trips returned him to his roots, exploring the woods of Bend, Oregon as a kid along with his best friend and future right hand man, Carlos Castillo, and solving coding problems in the dirt. Later on, these camping trips would also be the crucibles Danny used to initiate people into his inner circle (the first eight Kwyjibo employees all had to interview around the campfire). Going into the woods and electronically off the grid, he said, was the only time he felt safe to let his mind wander. He would often (only half-jokingly) say that if the world knew all the goofy unrealistic ideas he came up with in the woods, he’d be locked up. The legend of Danny Slowe began as soon as the world found out that that picture came when he was relating that story.

 

Danny pulled the pot of coffee out of the campfire and poured a mug for Chin. “I’m not actually saying we should get in to the entertainment business. We’re not creating anything except a framework. It’s not our job to figure out what content is going to come out of this.”

Now that Carlos finally figured out what he wanted to say, he could barely let Danny finish. “That’s not what I was getting at either. Look, doesn’t it seem odd to you that you’re dreamed up this completely invasive environment while you’re out here in the middle of nowhere? It isn’t strange that you had to escape from the real world to imagine a world with no escape valve?”

Carlos was on a roll so he kept going. “When you first started Kwyjibo, you were trying to fix an education system that let you down. When we built Circles of Influence algorithm, it was driven by your passion for understanding how you yourself made decisions. When we were kids, we wrote apps for games that we wanted to play. But that’s not what’s going on here. You don’t want this for yourself. You already said you could never actually live in this world you want to create. It’s not who you are and it’s not what you value.”

Chin had sat down and joined them around the fire. “Maybe this isn’t as much about who he is as much as it’s about who he wants to be.”

“Well maybe he ought to do that his own time and not use a Fortune 500 company as his own personal art therapy.”

 

That’s why Carlos has always been Danny’s right hand man. Danny was a creator, but he created indiscriminately and he didn’t dream small. Carlos was the hatchet man. Carlos reined in Danny’s energy. He challenged him, buying Danny time to let his dreams battle each other in the dense unforgiving jungle of his mind. No one acted on any idea of Danny’s, not even Danny himself, until it spent 3 months at the top of Danny’s cerebral food chain. Together, he and Carlos built Kwyjibo on the backs of a handful of ideas that thrived in the jungle, which in turn stood on the corpses of thousands of dreams slain by Carlos. It’s been this way since they were little kids. Danny provided endless lightning bolts of creative insight and Carlos was the jar that picked which ones to catch.

Carlos had a suspicion that, unlike most of these expeditions, Danny planned this trip with an agenda in mind. Usually Danny would include at least one “grown-up” – a top-level guy from the Finance, Operations, or Legal departments - to help keep Danny’s energy focused. On this trip he brought two other creatives and zero people over the age of 30. Chin Yu, like Carlos, was a childhood friend of Danny’s, though unlike Carlos he didn’t actually work at Kwyjibo. He did freelance work as an industrial artist, however, and was commissioned by Kwyjibo whenever a new building was added to the campus. Austin Behar rounded out the group. Danny hired him a year earlier after striking up a conversation about Sartre with him after a Flaming Lips concert. Danny’s impulse hires typically subscribed to the philosophy of “accumulate talent and figure out what to do with it later”. With no apparent holes to fill, Austin made $150k in his first year to play philosopher and ask questions about projects, organizational structure, or whatever else came to mind. A quintessential misfit outsider with no real-world experience in the tech industry, Austin’s knack for asking egoless, naïve questions about new features and products led to several performance-enhancing tweaks, and earned him the unofficial title of VP of Antagonism.

Carlos was the only one in the group who could wear a collared shirt without squirming like a three-year-old in church. And even he only did so under duress.

They landed on Jackson Lake in Western Wyoming early Friday afternoon, and the pontoon plane hadn’t even disappeared into the sky before Carlos’s suspicions were confirmed… Danny just thought of something big, and he needed creative inspiration to flesh things out. Just that week, Kwyjibo had completed the acquisition of a company that had developed “rubbing”, a digital motion-analysis process that can identify and tag specific actions and differentiate different people in video, paving the way for sophisticated in-video searching. Danny didn’t waste any time, as he laid out his vision for implementing this new technology as they set up camp.

He called his thought experiment Radical Transparency.

A world with no privacy.

A fully functioning American town of 10,000 people and 100,000 ultra-res cameras plus reflective spatial re-imaging implants for every citizen, all with feeds to Kwyjibo servers to be “rubbed” and uploaded to Kwyjibo’s Mulch search engine to be accessed by the rest of the online world. Literally everything said and done and electronically sent into and out of this town would be captured and documented and shared with the world.

Ad revenue from the search engine and live feeds would be the first piece of the revenue pie, but Danny anticipated the largest piece coming from production rights. Professional and amateur producers alike could pay for higher-tier access to the Mulch engine and play Build-Your-Own-Reality-Show. The higher-tier material could also be a treasure trove of information for academic research and software developers would have opportunities to develop apps to mine, manipulate and report data and to enhance Mulch.

Chin and Austin immediately ran with the idea. Before they could get down to discussing the practical merits of the concept, Austin dragged the group into a moralistic debate about privacy more befitting of a college beatnik coffee shop than a high-powered meeting at a Fortune 500 company. Privacy had been a hot button topic since the rise of Facebook, and Austin had friends in ivory towers who were trying to persuade private citizens to shift the privacy battleground away from the losing battle of limiting government and corporate access to and sharing of personal data and shift it toward demanding increased transparency of the hows and the whys of institutional use of private data. He fell in love with Danny’s idea and spent much of the evening on his soapbox, predicting the positive developments in politics and business that could come from Radical Transparency.

To be fair, Carlos was transfixed with Radical Transparency as well, but he knew enough to hold back. It was Carlos’s job to play devil’s advocate and think of reasons why this experiment might not work. He’s supposed to provide a dry run for the gauntlet of protests sure to come from the grown-ups back at HQ in Silicon Valley.

The practical ideas didn’t start flowing until the Saturday morning hike, but they made headway.

They could lay out and build the town from scratch to minimize technical snafus and ensure complete control over the “set”, and the Radical Transparency division of Kwyjibo would be run from inside the town as a show of Kwyjibo’s commitment to being, well, Radically Transparent.

Aside from Kwyjibo employees, Kwyjibo should have minimal say about the makeup of the remainder of the citizenship. If demand outstripped supply, citizens should be chosen by lottery or online vote, not by an application process.

No minors and no convicted felons.

Honoring a five-year commitment to the project would be necessary from the citizens for them to earn royalties on the content beyond the yearly stipends.

To avoid incentivizing outlandish camera-hogging behavior, royalties would be distributed evenly to all citizens (not that they thought anyone could mug for the camera for five straight years without having a break down).

There were still plenty of details to work out, but it was a starting point.

Everyone split off on Saturday afternoon and Danny and Carlos spoke on their own as they wandered around the island. At this point, Carlos hadn’t found his own words yet, so he discussed the astronomical liability involved with exposing 10,000 people to the mindfuck of a life with no privacy. It was clearly both chilling and financially risky to potentially play a role in the damaging of the psyches of so many people, but it was debatably criminal behavior as well. Because Danny didn’t allow phones or computers on these trips, it was impossible to talk to one of the grown-ups and figure out exactly how big of a hurdle this was, but Carlos thought there was no way it was just a bump in the road.

Aside from the legal exposure, they were looking at several billions in startup costs and at least a few years of lead time before they could earn dollar one. Other projects would have to be delayed or scrapped entirely to free up capital. It would change the face of Kwyjibo completely.

That said, by Saturday night, Carlos had to admit Radical Transparency intellectually made sense from an implementation standpoint. It was a bold move, of course, but Kwyjibo shareholders were of a different breed and they were desensitized to bold moves. The cult of personality surrounding their Dear Leader Danny Slowe insulated them from shareholder revolt. No one was willing to stand in the way of the guy on the Forbes cover.

 

As the fire died down and the camp was packed up, Carlos wondered if he got through to Danny. This Radical Transparency didn’t fit in to the jungle of Danny’s mind. It wasn’t an animal at all, it was an alien that was eating everything in sight and growing stronger by the minute. It was something that Danny wanted, and Carlos could never remember Danny ever truly wanting anything. But with the soft whine of the pontoon plane in the distance, he knew his time was up.

 

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Officer's Discretion

I haven't been updating much here, but I have been writing. I started a writing class through the UCLA Extension program, and it's eating a ton of time. Turns out that writing fiction does not come easy to me (not that writing blog posts is a piece of cake, but at least I can get into a groove when I'm writing this stuff). Maybe that statement is a little harsh... it is possible that week 1's prompt just didn't set up well for me. Or maybe my inner critic gets louder when I'm trying to write from someone else's point of view.

I'll post the story and would appreciate any feedback (aside from grammar-nit stuff), either here in the comments or email/text/in person, whatever. Be specific if you can. Let me know what worked and what didn't. The prompt was to sketch out a character different from myself and have that character go through an important event from my own life. I sketched a young hot Vegas bartender woman (because why the hell wouldn't I?) and had her go through the night I got my DUI. I started by trying to write the piece from her point of view, but I realized I bit off too much. It was hard enough to try to get in the head of a woman character, but it was overwhelming to try to capture her in a high-stress situation. During my DUI, I went through a standard flat-line reaction, understating the entire experience in my own mind. Her reaction was to lash out. I just couldn't get myself into that place in a way that felt real. So I bailed on that piece and wrote from the cop's point of view. That went better, but it came to me very slowly, and I ended up turning in something I consider to be somewhere between first and second draft. It needs work, but I don't know if I'll have the time to add polish any time soon.

I'll withhold specific thoughts about the piece for now so I don't slant feedback. Actually, I will say I fucking HATE the title... it's befitting of a Skinemax softcore porn.

But please do give feedback.

 

Officer’s Discretion

 

He looked at her in the rearview mirror... check that, he looked through her in the rearview mirror. He drew in a deep breath and let it out silently and evenly.

"You know, my daughter has earrings like that."

"Oh yeah? Did you ever handcuff her like this?" Shana spit out.

And then, under her breath, “…sorry.”

Another deep breath and Lieutenant Mike Gerhardt breaks his gaze and stares into the deep twilight sky at the neon silhouette of The Stratosphere, the North Star of Las Vegas. You're never truly lost in Las Vegas as long as you can find The Strat. Even though Gerhardt has lived here for twelve years and knows every road, every alleyway, every shortcut, his eyes still instinctually gravitate toward hedonism’s gigantic neon middle finger to the civilized world.

During the field interview (right after her backwards recital of the alphabet went Z-Y-X-W-V-W-X-FUCK), Shana said she was driving home from her bartending gig at The Cosmopolitan’s weekly Saturday pool party. But he didn’t have to ask her to figure that out. Even though she was in simple black t-shirt and jeans, the painfully fake tits and meticulously curled shoulder-length amber hair were dead giveaways that she was Professionally Hot. The $3200 in crumpled, unsorted bills in her purse narrowed her down to bartender, cocktail waitress, or stripper. Anywhere else in the world, that kind of walking-around money might raise an officer’s eyebrow, but Gerhardt knows that thousands of industrious PH women pull down that kind of green by batting eyelashes and smiling over the course of a long weekend in Las Vegas.

This part of the DUI stop was predictable. The volume is going to go up. The voice is going to quiver. The tears are going to flow.

At the end of this little production, she’ll ask for her makeup back.

"I don't understand this! I saw your stupid little thing and it said .077 and the limit is .08. And I walked a totally straight line! Why are you doing this to me!"

"Why did you even stop anyways? It was all his fault! That dumbass in the pickup truck was probably more drunk than me or on meth or something. He slowed down for no reason! And you just let him drive away without even talking to him!"

"How long until I can go home?"

"You're going to give my cell phone back, right? I need to call my friend and I don't know his number! You better give me my cell phone back! Isn’t this against the law?"

Over a decade in this town and 17 years raising his firecracker of a daughter taught Gerhardt a thing or two about teaching lessons to pretty girls who are used to getting what they want. The only thing to do right now is tune out and let her get it out of her system. The fear can only come once the anger is exhausted, and frightened ears can actually listen to what you say. But sometimes he can't get that far into the lesson before he pulled in at the downtown precinct to turn over that evening's detained princess to booking.

But he thought things might go better with Shana. The great thing about this part of the job is it doesn't matter who she knows or whether she can wriggle off the hook on the DUI charge. At least for tonight, she’ll be treated like anyone else. A classic PH move is to play the "IKnowPowerfulPeople So YouBetterNotFuckWithMe" card. Other little princesses have threatened him with accusations of sexual assault. He's even been offered a blowjob to tear up a reckless driving ticket (this happens MUCH more often to other guys on the force*, because most Professionally Hot women can pick out an overprotective daddy from a mile away).

Shana isn't following the script if she wanted to push things to those levels. She’s self-absorbed and the array of condoms, spare underwear and prescription Xanax in her purse confess to a wild side, but at least she's drawn some lines in the moral sand that she isn't crossing tonight. And if she hasn't crossed them yet, maybe she won't cross them at all. Her soul might still be intact. There was no evidence of recreational drug use in her purse. The upscale Spanish Trails address on her license could be a shared rental or something, but it’s not impossible that she made a wise investment at the bottom of the tanking Vegas real estate market. The insurance for her newly dinged-up VW Beetle, the gym shoes and yoga mat in the back seat, no priors... he might actually get through to this girl.

Silence in the cruiser now, save for her sniffles. She’s curled up into a ball with her head on the passenger side’s window, staring absently at the sea of taxis and rental cars they’re passing on the I-15.

“My makeup is a mess,” she murmurs.

I would stop crying into it if I were you.

Shana’s shoulders scrunched up and her upper arms clenched her sides tighter (it’s hard to give yourself a proper hug when you trade in the Tiffany charm bracelet for a pair of LVPD cuffs). She was as physically far away from him as she could be. That’s the opening he’s looking for.

“You weren’t supposed to see the readout on the Breathalyzer. But it doesn’t matter. Breathalyzers can only be used to show probable cause. Your blood test at the station will be what actually matters. And even that probably won’t matter because any result between .05 and .08 is left to the responding officer’s discretion. You rear-ended that pickup truck and failed two of the three field sobriety tests, and I can’t, in good consci…”

​“That’s total bullshit! I was just in a car accident! You try to, like, stand on one leg or say a backwards ABCs after you a car crash!”

​“Shana, you’re not helping yourself right now. Calm down. Here’s what’s going to happen when we get to the station. You’re going to sit in a holding area while I write the officer’s report. Then you will be brought back for chemical testing. Someone will take your fingerprints and…”

​“What about my phone call? When do I get my phone back?”

​“You’ll get your phone call after we take your picture and fingerprints. But we cannot give you your phone back until after you are released.”

​She opens her mouth but thinks the better of it. She brings her lips back together and they form a tight O. Her jaw clenches. Eyes close. Head slowly rocks back and forth. She’s humming quietly, but Gerhardt can’t quite make out the tune. Springsteen’s Badlands, maybe? Can’t be. That’s before her time.

​“Look, I know you’re young and pretty and you make good money and life is good, but this is the kind of stuff that starts happening when you spend too much time in these scenes. You start doing stupid stuff and getting in to bigger and bigger trouble. Today it’s a DUI, tomorrow you’re getting in fights. Maybe you start waking up in strange rooms with strange people and you don’t remember what happened the night before. You loan money to the wrong people, you blow through all your money and you can’t make the money you used to make because you’re starting to lose your looks…”

​She sits up a bit and puts her feet back on the floor. Her pale blue eyes flash open and drive a frozen dagger into his right temple.

​“Stop.”

​He pauses. And just as quickly her eyes soften and follow his gaze out the window.

​Before he can get back on the rails, she quietly says, “Just… don’t. Don’t say what you’re going to say.”

​A minute passes by in silence.

She doesn’t break the silence, she simply unfolds it. “I’m sorry for yelling before. I’m really stressed right now. This is the last thing I need.”

​“I think it’s exactly what you need right now.” He loves using that line.

​“No, it’s not. You don’t know me, officer. You give me some lecture about how I need to straighten up and fly right, like there’s something wrong with being a bartender or something. Like I’m some out of control train wreck because I had a couple drinks at work and got in a little accident with that douchebag. You don’t think I have eyes? You don’t think I see what happens to girls in this town? I worked my ass off to get away from home and make it out here. I’m sorry I’m not a doctor or a lawyer like you want me to be, but what’s so terrible about taking it easy for a little while and, like, making some money and having fun for a little bit while I’m still young and figuring things out?”

​He waits a beat. “Yeah? Having a lot of fun right now?”

​Shana sighs and leans back against the door. The last two minutes of the ride pass by in silence.

​In his station’s garage, Gerhardt opens the door and reaches in to help Shana out of the cruiser. Before he can reach in to help, she pulls herself out and up to her feet. She pins back her shoulders and lifts her chin. Only her running makeup suggests that she has been crying. As he closes the door, she tries to start walking toward the entrance, but Gerhardt snatches her arm. She flinches, pauses, and submits. They walk.

​Outside the holding cell, Gerhardt finally frees her from her handcuffs. She rubs her wrists without looking down.

​Despite the t-shirt and jeans, Shana is overdressed for the holding cell. Far from the glitz of The Strip, the holding cell at the old downtown police station is a throwback. The metal bars have been exchanged for a new high-density composite door and plexiglass windows, but the dank concrete, the dingy and dented metal benches and the unmistakable smell of urine are all holdovers from the Late Mob Era of the 70s and 80s. Shana’s new pals are three vagrants (two of which are sleeping) and a larger Latina girl with a black eye who doesn’t look a day over 16. Later in the evening, the cell will mostly be filled with other drunk drivers, as the downtown station is the central chemical testing facility for the city, but most people in Vegas are just getting started drinking at 9pm.

​Meanwhile, Gerhardt disappears behind a partition across the station to start filing the report at his cluttered desk. He absently gnaws on a cold Snickers bar and checks his cell phone as he settles in to his chair.

​

​Text Message from Rachel Gerhardt:

​I told kaitlyn it was ok for her to stay at sophies house tonight

 

​He replies:

​I thought we grounded her?

 

​Gerhardt starts the painstaking process of hunting and pecking his way through typing the report. He curiously walks over to the partition every few minutes to watch the princess go through processing. He strategically times his coffee run to talk to Deputy Coulton, who just finished her booking.

​“Hey, Frank, did you happen to catch who she called?” Gerhardt asks.

​Coulton chuckles. “Dialed the wrong number… even gave her two tries. Don’t matter though, she said she had enough cash on her to post bail herself. God bless Las Vegas, ey?”

​“I thought that might happen. Pity for her she never told the arresting officer about posting bail. I’m just about to put all her personal items into evidence.” Technically, he’s correct about this. The arresting officer decides whether personal items remain in booking or if they get kept as evidence. But evidence almost never gets checked for standard DUIs.

​Coulton laughs. “Jesus, you sick fuck. You’re going to make that piece of ass spend the night in CCDC** over a .08?”

​“Trust me, she could use it. It’ll be good for her.”

​“What about me, Mikey? I’m the one who has give her the bad news and deal with the shit fit she pitches.”

​Gerhardt grins and pats him on the shoulder as he walks back to his desk. “Trust me, rook, it’ll be good for you, too.”

​The next half hour passes by quietly. Gerhardt hears the buzz of the holding cell door opening and watches Coulton walk in to deliver the bad news and prepare the two women for transfer to CCDC. Gerhardt moves over to booking to get a better view of Shana’s perp walk. He cocks his ear to listen for the inevitable shriek of disbelief once Shana learns she can’t post bail and has to spend the night in an orange jumpsuit. But the shriek never comes.

​In fact, he doesn’t hear another sound until the cell door buzzes and Coulton escorts Shana and the Latina girl out of the cell in plastic handcuffs. Far from outraged, Shana looks puzzled. She ten steps out the door before she looks up and sees Gerhardt with his arms folded. Shana searches his eyes for an answer to her question, but the answer is the sly grin that he allows to creep across his face. She’s ten paces away from being out the door when she puts it together. She lets out a quick laugh through her nose, looks him in the eye and shakes her head slowly as she's led out the door.

​

​* This is unsurprisingly effective when done correctly

** Clark County Detention Center​

 

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Good Mourning

I've been in Wisconsin for the past week for my Grandpa's funeral (dad's side) and opportunities to write have been few and far between.  The trip was definitely a bummer, because I always enjoyed grandpa’s company and found him interesting when I spent time with him.  But I was never really close with him.  Visits were infrequent (< 1x per year) since I left home.  My dad didn't have a lot of good things to say about grandpa's childrearing technique, and that will always be the first thing I think about when I remember him, but he seemed to gain a level of self-awareness in his later years.  My dad's relationship with him thawed as well in the years leading up to his passing.  At the end, the anger had melted away to make room for grieving and closure.  The whole experience was gratifying and draining for me and I'll leave it at that.   

Taking a trip home to see extended family is always a bit jarring for me, especially when I visit with my dad's family.  I'm not the black sheep of the family, like many other poker players, I'm more of the purple sheep.  My family is filled with farmers and handymen, and everything is so tangible in rural Wisconsin.  When my family works, their environment changes.  A piece of equipment that didn't work now works.  A field of hay is now bales of hay.  Where there was once nothing, now there is a shed.  When I try to describe what I do, I never get far before they get that glazed-over look in their eyes.  I'm sure it's the same look I get when they are talking fixing the manure spreader.  The glaze doesn't come from a source of disdain, it comes from a feeling of hopelessly large disconnects.  The payoff I would get from connecting with them on this level isn't worth the effort... I just don't see them often enough. 

So instead I just sit there in silence and observe and listen.  After grandpa's burial, everyone went to my grandparents' farm to decompress and shoot the shit. 

Men outside or in the shed, women in the house.  Just like it's always been. 

There are 10 guys outside drinking beers: three sons, seven grandsons.  Only one guy talks at a time, and it's nothing but personal stories.  70% are work-related, either some idiot fucked something up and they had to correct it and chew the dumbass out or our lovable protagonist fucked things up himself and went through hell to cover it up.  The rest are either about peripheral characters that showed up for the funeral or about the recently deceased ornery old bugger.  Sometimes I struggle to follow along, but the stories are clearly hilarious and engaging.  They have to be.  Only one person talks at a time.  This is the way it's always been, for as long as I remember.  I don't know how this social more started, but I know why it keeps going:  If your shit isn't together when you open your mouth, you lose the crowd. 

Another thing: no one checked their cell phone once in the two hours I was there.  I started taking notice early on, because I wanted to grab mine to take notes, and it felt uncomfortable to do so.  Soon it was all I was thinking about. 

Cell phones are sorta new to the rural Wisconsin community.  During grandpa's service, an older guy's phone started ringing right in the middle of the gospel.  The incident was painfully drawn out, because his phone first had to announce "INCOMING CALL FROM 9-2-0-BLAH-BLAH-BLAH" before going into the ring (On full volume, obviously, since the guy is probably around loud equipment most days), and the guy doesn't turn it off because he doesn't know how to.  It's probably a 30-40 second ordeal when it's all said and done.  Cut to a minute later and the celly is blowin' up again.  He's two rows behind me in the dead center of the pew and flanked on both sides by a half-dozen mourners, and the most waifish of the group might be considered "robust" at best (keep in mind we're in Wisconsin here).  In short, it's a tarp(!) and he ain't making a graceful exit.  I don't turn around, but I hear fumbling and aggravated sighing, but nothing he does works.  By the time the caller ID lady was done speaking her piece, the guy weighed his options and decided to answer the call.  And yeah, the church is as quiet as you're thinking. 

"Hello... I'm at a funeral, I'll call you later"

....

"Okay, bye"

Not a soul turned around (as far as I could see).  It's probably not the first time it's happened. 

I think it has to do with that tangibility thing.  A cell phone isn't a closed system.  Until you can get your hands dirty with a tower and a satellite, you're never really going to know how a cell phone works.  You push some buttons, magic happens, and you're talking to the person you want to talk to.  I think that's disorienting for these guys, who invest so much of their identity in their ability to exert control over their environment.  Bad things happen in the country when you can’t exert that control.  I’d bet the average number of fingers on the males aged 50+ at the funeral was 8.5… that’s what happens when you try to use a tool before you completely understand how it works.  Hell, at one time, they probably knew how every thing in their lives worked.  The onslaught of technological complexity needs to be resisted as much as it can to keep their identities intact.

It's obviously risky to create that kind of tension with our technological reality, but I think there's a lot to be said for the simplicity of lone storytellers and landlines.  Back at the farm after the burial, I marveled at the size and frequency of gaps in the conversation, and how meaningful they seemed to be.  A story would finish, everyone would laugh, and 30 seconds would pass before anyone opened his mouth again. 

I'll let that sink in.  30 seconds of silence around 10 of the people you're closest with. 

And I'll say something else.  Those spaces make room for emotions and processing.  Those pauses weren't awkward at all.  No one felt the need to discuss the pauses.  They were just... there.  Organically.  And you knew where they were going during those periods of silence, not just back at the farm, but during the entire week I was around them.  Even though there was a lot of emotional distance between grandpa and his kids, those fuckers mourned the shit out of that old coot. 

And when I brought up the topic here in my blog, my instinct still was to hide behind my four-letter defense mechanisms.

That probably means something.  

Showing my work

I've been trying for a week to write this post about the incredibly smooth run I've had playing poker in LA this past year (my previous time in casino poker in Vegas was just as smooth as well).*  It was supposed to be about how running good for so long has its own set of challenges.  But everything I wrote felt long-winded and inauthentic. Apparently, it takes a lot of mental gymnastics to try to frame running good in a negative light.  That's why they call it running "good".  Yes, there are psychological attachments that need to be guarded against, and it's not all free puppy dogs and red balloons, but mostly running good is pretty sweet. 

What this piece really needs to be about is what it's like to run good when lazy and reliant on a unique skill set.  I was lukewarm on poker when I moved to Madison in 2009, and I decided to coast on my poker skills while I pursued more interesting subjects like counseling.  When Black Friday hit, I knew I had to put the brakes on my counseling path and spend more time playing poker, but I wasn't sure whether I just needed to shuffle my priorities and move poker to the forefront in terms of study and improvement.

I can think of probably two dozen players who play in my games who I would like to tag in to make my check/bet/call/fold/raise decisions during hands.  I don't think I'm particularly good at this aspect of poker, and I think most if not all of those two dozen players would agree with me on this assertion.  I don't really know what to say about this.  I have a decent brain in my head, and I could probably get really good at the k/b/c/f/r stuff if I wanted, but times when I enjoy thinking about that stuff are fleeting.  When I moved to LA, I realized that I might have to spend some time on raw strategy study just to regain competence at a form of poker I hadn't played in 4 years, so I begrudgingly put time into that stuff for a couple months.  This probably helped me start winning at a decent clip, but it also really wore on me.  I was away from home, I was putting energy into something I didn't really enjoy, and I spent most of my time in a toxic casino environment.  By Thanksgiving, I almost completely stopped studying strategy and re-focused on stuff outside of poker (I'll write about that in one of my next posts).  I was content to leave my k/b/c/f/r skills where they were.  The poker skills I developed since then are mostly higher-level operational skills (as opposed to the tactical k/b/c/f/r skills) and are mostly psychological in nature.  This happened naturally... when left to it's own devices, my mind typically splits time evenly between figuring out how minds work, boobies, and imagining what it's like to be Jack White. 

So this is the part where I say my poker results during my first 12 months out here would almost certainly fit right in with the aforementioned 24 players.  That my results are comparable with an "expert's" expectation would, I imagine, be surprising to many of these players.  For all but a few extreme cases (e.g., extreme tilters, world-class zen master types), I think poker players believe that skill level in the k/b/c/f/r tactical arena is the primary factor in determining a player's true win rate.**

(By the way, I imagine plenty of players are now clamoring for their LOLSampleSize Pitchforks and Torches)

Here's the center of the matter.  I would really like to take credit for my results this year.  I have an ego that needs feeding.  But anyone with an understanding of statistics would be quick to point out that a player with a true win rate half the size of my actual win rate has a ~4% chance of having similar results over this sample (statisticians say that number has to be under 2.5% to be 'significant', though the distinction is pretty arbitrary).  I think most of my peers would point to this tail of the distribution curve and use it as the primary explanation for my results.  I have to concede that I have been probably been somewhere between lucky and astronomically lucky this year.  This is the trump card that can be played on any claim I make from here on out.  In return, they would probably concede that my stronger operational skills probably plays some sort of role.  As almost always when we seek explanations for results in poker, "It's probably a little bit of both."  

I'm going to let my ego state its case for "Why operational skills are marginalized and undervalued."  I'm doing this because:

1)    A year is a long fucking time to constantly tell myself "I know you think you 'earned' this money, but really you just 'won' it." Sometimes I slip up and let my ego convince me I'm earning what I'm winning

2)    Sometimes I actually think my ego has a good point

3)    Fuck everybody anyways

 The tactical skill sets are definitely the biggest barrier to entry for poker players.  Any player who can't be bothered with studying and understanding stuff like FTOP, preflop strategy, pot odds, etc. isn't going to make it longterm.  And this stuff isn't easy for most people.  In order to even jump to Level 1*** as a poker player, you must have some vision to comprehend the underlying math/logic that drives the game.  It's a necessary (but insufficient) skill set to be a winning player.  That comprehension is part of the poker gene.     

My ego wants to argue that this basic trait that is present in every winning poker player influences the collective poker belief system more than we would like to admit.  Tactical strategy is one ingredient that can be manipulated, tested, and proven right or wrong.  This appeals to that part of us that was capable of grasping Level 1 concepts during our poker infancy.  In a psychological sense, this ability to understand, predict, and control aspects of our environment is important in establishing our identities.  The first question out of our mouths when we meet someone new usually is "What do you do?"  That's not an accident.  For most people in our culture, choice of occupation is the single biggest aspect of their identities that they control.  For the sake of our identities, it makes sense to focus on the more controllable, measurable variables within the profession (in poker's case, this is tactical strategy), since it offers the best evidence that we are "good" at what we do.  Putting work into tactical strategy offers consistent positive return on investment... it is hard to get measurably worse or even measurably stagnant at tactical strategy through study. 

Most of my work this year has been in areas much less measurable.  I have different criteria for game and seat selection than what is commonly accepted.  I have thought long and hard about what makes a losing player stay at the table longer and what I can do to foster that attachment.  I have a better idea of what I want people to notice and not notice in regards to my play, and I have a better idea of how to elicit the desired notice/don't notice response.  I am (and always have been) a great quitter.  I think I'm great at neutralizing hostile table environments and eliciting more docile, predictable play.

For the most part, operational strategies are too chaotic to measure.  Because I can't really measure stuff like how much longer a losing player stays at my table due to my efforts to emotionally engage him, my identity as a poker player is put into a tenuous position.  My focus is on a lot of shit that most players don't focus on.  I'm tinkering with new ideas and concepts with no real way of measuring whether the old or the new idea works better.   All I can go by for feedback is my results, and every poker player will tell you it's dangerous to read too much into results, especially over a sample like 1500 hours of casino poker.  Honestly, it sorta sucks this is the case.  I'd love to point to my results as proof of concept.  But I know I can't.  Even if these results hold up for a sample deemed to be significant, it still proves jack shit.  Working within the unmeasurable human element necessarily dismisses the entire concept of proof and scientific method. 

I would really like to not give a shit about this stuff.  Why should I need to prove that my efforts are good?  I know I'm not "supposed" to care.  The fact that I wrote this piece shows I haven't fully bought in to the Poker is Art paradigm.  Artists don't try to sort out cause and effect.  They don't try to understand what it is about them that makes them successful.  They just do what they do until they can't or don't want to.  I guess that's probably what I need to take from this.  Maybe I need to just trust the process.  Trust the inner voice that guides me.  Trust that the universe is playing out the way it needs to.

 *Worst downswing in 3 years: 200BB.  # Of losing months: 1 (-50BBs).  The typical professional player in today's environment will experience troughs in the 300-500BB range, with several instances of players having 500-1000 bet downswings.  Worst months (out of a 36 month sample) typically weigh in at -100 to -300 bets, and losing months typically occur at least once per year. 

 ** Maybe it's more accurate to say they believe many skills besides k/b/c/f/r are crucial to success, but that they also think there is much less disparity amongst pros with respect to skills such as quitting, game selection, and table talk. 

*** In poker parlance, a player at Level 0 never considers the perceived strength of his opponent's hand when making decisions.  A player at Level 1 considers the strength of his own hand and the perceived strength of his opponent's hand in decision-making.  A player at Level 2 takes into account how strong his hand looks to his opponent; a "I think that he thinks my hand is strong/weak" dynamic.  Levels 3 and up are iterations "I think that he thinks that I think....." cycle