Aces

I think I’m back.

Where have I been?

Same place I’ve always been, just not writing about much of it. I’m not talking about things much either, even to the point of completely blowing off some guy at a poker game the other night when he asked me about the book and about my “writing career.”

I told him I’d “retired.” Several people heard me say this and it confused them a great deal, but I couldn’t clarify my position because clarification would’ve entailed engaging the initial inquisitor in a conversation I didn’t want to have.

I haven’t retired, of course, because in order to retire, you need to have been employed in the first place, and I wouldn’t exactly label my scant literary experience – at this point, anyhow – as gainful employment. In any case, I’d been suffering from a miserable head cold all week and pretty much wanted to avoid, at all costs, talking about myself in front of strangers.

So yes, Jim – intrepid cousin of the great “Clint” - this post is directed at you.

Jim is not the gentleman I blew off. Jim is a very nice fellow whom I unintentionally misled as a result of my angry-about-to-snap-guy poker persona – a table image I’ve managed to develop through a complete and utter abhorrence of live poker ring games. I despise live – as opposed to internet – poker games because they’re hot, they’re cramped and people talk too fucking much – all things that conspire to make me want to flip the damned table over and start savagely beating people with chairs until we arrive at the silences I cherish so very much.

There are very few things, relatively speaking, worse than sitting in a folding chair for eight hours listening to a group of tipsy twenty and thirty-somethings blathering on about “string raises,” “gutshot straights” and “runner-runner flushes.” This is time life won’t give you back.

In any event, I’m not retiring. Far from it, in fact. I just figured I’d kick off a new round of consistent posting by expressing my hope that everyone’s 2008 is off to a happy, healthy beginning. Mine’s been fairly rewarding thus far, save for the alcoholic haze in which I spent the past few days.

The departure of “Clint” – back to his beloved Texas – will do wonders for my liver.