After aimlessly riding my bicycle through the thick mist after class, I found myself sitting at a booth in a Johnny Rockets alone. It was a little after ten o'clock and I had spent twenty minutes sitting between my bike and the curb staring at the bright neon sign before walking in.

Since all Johnny Rockets restaurants look exactly the same, the storefront reminded me of times I'd spent at them in the past. Every year, my mother and father would drag my brother and I up route 128 to the North Shore Mall in Peabody, MA to buy us new clothes for the upcoming school year. The drive felt like hours even though it never took longer than twenty minutes.

When we finally arrived at some department store, my mother would have about a half hour of our undivided attention before my brother and I would mess around in an uncontrollable manner, obviously frustrating the living shit out of our mother. Once our attention spans were shot, my father would take us to Johnny Rockets as my mother would shop around on her own.

Every hour or so, the staff would dance around to some 50's song in a half-assed manner as the patrons would look on, eating their one-cut-above-fast-food burgers and thick shakes. I loved the atmosphere of the place. It was my favorite restaurant when I was younger, probably because of the time I was able to spend there with my dad and brother.

As I got older, I worked at the mall briefly and got fired for not being enthusiastic enough. In the short time that I was employed here I met a girlfriend of four years. We'd spend time at the Johnny Rockets, talking about our petty family/friend issues. The conversations I had with her there eventually lead me to fall in love.

Tonight, the booth I decided to sit in was suited to fit five people comfortably. It was difficult not to imagine those that I love sitting around me: my little brother laughing uncontrollably as my father would make goofy faces at us or looking across the table at a beautiful girl smiling and eager to listen or talk about anything at all.

It was even more difficult to realize that those days are gone.

I can't seem to find motivation in anything.

On Pot Limit Omaha and Drunk Driving (Bicycle Edition)

Across almost every poker site that is allowed for U.S. residents, I am getting pretty much zero volume in. I have two reasons for this:

• my screen name has become familiar (since I have the same/similar screen names across all networks) and those that are break-even/small winners avoid me. Oblivious fish buy in for 10 big bets and either lose it to me and quit or win 5-15 big bets and run away. I cannot put in a large sample of hands. Ever.
  
• my screen name is Talue Vown, which is an inverse of the phrase Value Town. People notice this and automatically assume that I am a thinking player. This was an ego driven, dumb decision on my end. Changing your user name is not allowed.

I have decided to invest some time in studying a different form of poker altogether, six handed pot limit omaha. The variance (over the short and long term) is much more prominent in this game, which may prove to be a major frustration while I take classes at the city college. I'm currently exchanging sweat sessions (sessions where you watch another player's desktop and critique their play) with heads up limit holdem (my game) and pot limit omaha (Alex's game). It's required that I put in a ton of study hours before I jump in to multi tabling the 50 and 100 max games. I'm excited about playing a more robotic/mechanics oriented game in comparison to the often creative and mind fuck of a game that I normally play.


Oh. And I drove my bicycle across town completely shithoused (see: enebriated, drunk). My shoelaces got caught onto my toe clips which lead to a narrowly evaded head on collision with a fellow bike-lightless rider in Golden Gate Park. It was completely my fault and yet he apologized to me.

Rather than biking up hill for a quarter mile, I decided to jump on the owl bus. The owl bus is the late night bus system that is often filled with some interesting characters. I befriended a set of twins on the bus and talked with them about nothing. A few seats down from us was a toothless "Yankee fan" yelling about complete nonsense. "Red Sox fucking suck I'ma motha fuckin' Yankee fan. Holler back!" was pretty much the bulk of his monologue. I asked him to name 5 Yankee pitchers on the current roster and this obviously leads to some verbal fumbling on his end. Minutes later, he felt the need to swing his backpack at my face. I lose my temper, clearly, and tell him to get off the bus. Thankfully, the bus driver gave a shit about the happenings on her bus, and sat him down as he spit in my direction.

Nonsense.

After consuming three half pitchers of sangria, I vaguely recall resting in a thicket of wiry shrubs in a park along the highway. Danni's milk crate snapped off of her bike while we were rolling through Lincoln Street, and everything fell out of her bag, including her wallet. Also including the belongings inside her wallet falling both out of her bag and out of her wallet, miraculously. We eventually hopped over the barrier separating the road from Golden Gate Park, and looked for any more lost items. This lead to a wrestling match in the shrubs, which I obviously won by a large margin.

We left our bikes and bags along the sidewalk as we napped in the park; an idea implemented by a collaboration of two drunken minds deeming it safe to leave our shit behind. In my bag:

1. Two different types of Old Spice deodorant.
2. Two pairs of the same shitty headphones I bought at Walgreen's.
3. One pair of not-as-shitty headphones that I stole from Danni.
   
4. 4 napkins in case my nose gets mad runny from allergies.
   
5. David Foster Wallace's, "Infinite Jest."
6. Roughly one dollar in change.
7. One pair of Nordstom's underwear that have not ever been worn.

In Danni's bag:

1. Danni's mad tight journal with Sagittarius written in gold print across the pink cover.
2. Probably a pen to write in the journal.
3. David Foster Wallace's, "Infinite Jest."
4. Both vinyl and compact disc editions of Jay-Z's "Bitches and Sisters" single.
5. Limited edition Andrew Jackson Jihad ipod with autographs engraved on the metallic backside. You're probably not even close to punk enough to have ever heard of this.

Moving on, a girl passing by the scene of the spill noticed our bikes and bags abandoned. She was wearing an adorable black helmet that was bobbling around the top of her head as she was talking to us. She was probably rollin' up to our shit thinking, "Yo this is hella tight. XFREE SHITX!!!11." until she realized that we were laying in the distance, listening to her thoughts. I calmly told her, "Get with the program." as I rolled up my sleeves to reveal my gargantuan biceps. She wisely got with the program.

Danni was so impressed with how I dealt with the situation, and rightfully so, that she took her right shoe off and threw it at a bush in a moment of raw excitement. I took it to be a west coast way of showing her appreciation for my actions, and a very nice one. I showed her the east coast way of showing appreciation for people showing appreciation to you by giving her my right shoe as a consolation. She put it on and we started pedaling home until I thought to myself, "This is bullshit. Why should I be the one to ride home with one shoe, having the metal teeth of the pedal digging into my foot? Why should I encourage spastic behavior?"

The rest of the night sadly becomes a blur. I remember falling onto the couch, taking my shoes off, and falling asleep.

CORRECTION: 3 half pitchers of sangria were consumed. As we were leaving, Danni noticed that someone left between 1/6th and 1/7th of a pitcher behind. We also sat at their table and finished it for them.