Just A Geek has stared me in the face for months. It quietly sits here: ~/justageek/working/22augustrevisejustageek.sxw and dares me to open it and get back to work.
As you can see, I haven’t had the courage to work on it since the 22nd of August . . . but I’m starting again today, and I won’t stop until I’m done.
I’m so terrified of this book! I’ve given it a great deal of power over me, and I’m terrified that it won’t be as good as I thought it was a year ago, and that it won’t be as well-liked as Dancing Barefoot has been.
In all the interviews I’ve given, I’ve talked about the blessing and curse of the writing I do: on the one hand, it’s just me, with no filters (not even a speelchek). What I write comes straight out of my heart — mostly because writing honestly is much easier than making stuff up — so when it touches someone, that gratitude they express goes right back into my heart. Of course, when someone savages it for not being cynical enough, or whatever . . . it goes right into the same place, with just as much weight as the praise.
The thing with Just A Geek is, it’s a lot more work, and a lot more of that heart invested in it than Dancing Barefoot . . . so it’s a much bigger risk (and potential reward, I suppose). So I’ve been terrified to work on it, and release it.
When I woke up this morning, I lay in bed and talked with myself about it. It’s so close to being completed, it’s like I’ve run 22 miles of a marathon. It’s stupid not to finish it, and I’ve delayed it long enough.
Normally, I listen to Boingo when I write, but for some reason I felt like hearing Radiohead this morning, so I’m listening to The Bends, and now I’m going to get to work.
If everything goes according to plan, blogging will come to a virtual standstill while I finish this.
Heh. “Just” just started. Thom sang, “You do it to yourself, and that’s what really hurts . . . you and no one else . . . you’ll get no sympathy . . .”
I needed to hear that. Time to write.

I gave an interview to Millionaire Playboy (which is funny, because I am neither) about a week ago. The interview is up today.
And E! Online put Dancing Barefoot on their Hit List! Cool!

Okay, I know I’m really late to the party on this . . . but I just bought Massive Attack’s 100th Window from the iTunes Music Store.
Holy mother of monkeys. If you like obscure ambient like Global Communication or Earth to Infinity, you’re going to love this record. It’s deep and dark, but it’s also moody and ethereal.
Of course, if you like obscure ambient like Global Communication or Earth to Infinity, you probably already have this record, because I am so late to the party on this one.

I play lots of poker with Ryan. While most parents would talk about Joe Namath, Wayne Gretzky, Bob Gibson and Jack Nicklaus with their children, I fill Ryan’s head with tales of Amarillo Slim, Stu Unger, Doyle Brunson, and Johnny Moss. Most of our “stepfather and son” talks center around the wisdom of guys like Mike Caro, David Sklansky, TJ Cloutier, and Tony Holden. Ryan has a good grounding in the fundamentals of poker. Ryan knows how to be a tight-agressive player, so I usually play him that way.
Every poker book I’ve read (and I’ve read a lot of them) says that poker players can recall, down to the way the chips were stacked, memorable hands they’ve played. I can attest to this fact. They also say that a poker player can recall, in present-tense, exactly how certain hands went down. I can also attest to this fact . . .
We’re on our fourth or fifth hand, playing a no-limit freeze out. I look at my hole cards and find that I’ve dealt myself the Big Slick: A-K, the second best starting hand in Hold ‘Em.
Ryan checks, and I decide to limp in, hoping to get some action on this hand.
“Bet 10,” I say.
Ryan doesn’t even blink, and throws in a blue and three greens.
“Raise 75,” he says. It’s a huge raise this early in the game, and I think he’s bluffing. Ryan hardly ever check-raises.
I put him on a king, maybe a little pair . . . I’m pretty sure that I can blow him out of this pot if I bet into him, let him know that I’ve got cards worth playing.
“Raise 25,” I say, as I deliberately set one green chip in front of me, and flick it into the pot, followed quickly by three others.
“Call.”
The flop is a rainbow: K, 10, 4. I look at my cards, and imagine that it hasn’t helped me at all. I look at Ryan, but can’t read him at all. The kid’s got a good poker face.
He bets 10.
I take a second to wonder if he’s slow-playing a pair of kings. I decide that he’s on a draw, and try to bully him out of the pot again. Even if he calls, my pair is gonna hold up.
“Bet 50,” I say. This time I take five blue chips and two reds, and push them into the pot in a stack.
“Call,” he says, and splashes two greens and a blue.
The turn is the 9 of diamonds. Ryan checks, I bet another fifty, and he calls. We both have too much invested in this pot to get out now, and I’m certain this is going to teach Ryan a valuable lesson about overvaluing cards.
The River is another 4, and I have two pair.
Ryan bets one hundred, a stack of ten blue chips.
I think for a moment, just to make him squirm. I contemplate folding, though I have no intention of mucking this hand, and look at my stack chips. It’s only the fourth of fifth hand we’ve played, and already the pot is bigger than both our stacks.
I check my cards one last time, and say, “Raise 50.” I take my remaining two greens, and put them on top of a stack of blues. I set them in the pot right next to Ryan’s.
“Call,” he says, again without hesitation.
I turn over my A-K. “Two pair,” I say.
He looks down at his short stack of chips, and says, “I got trips, Wil,” as he turns over J-4.
“What?! You played J-4 when I hit you ahead of the flop like that?! What the hell were you thinking?!”
“I was thinking I may get lucky, Wil,” he says, “Looks like I did.”
He smirks, and starts stacking his chips.
“I can’t believe you did that,” I say, “I can’t believe you stayed in until fifth street with a pair of fours.”
“Me neither.” He grins.
I know that I was a statistical favorite to win the hand, and I know that in the long run, I’ll kill him if he stays in a hand until fifth street like that . . . but I don’t care about the bad beat. Sitting here with him, trading barbs like a couple of cowboys in a saloon . . . that is why I like to play cards with him. Some parents play catch with their kids. I play poker with mine.
I pick up the cards, and slide them across the table to him.
“Do you have enough to keep playing, Wil? Or do you need a loan?”
“Shut up and deal, Kid.”

You know, I have never been a drug user (other than alcohol, and then only in Guinness form. 😉
I don’t know why I dodged this particular bullet that seems to have hit so many of my acting peers squarely between the eyes, but I’m glad I did. I often joke that I wasn’t “cool” enough to hang out with that crowd (it sounds better when you can hear the sarcasm dripping off my words, trust me.)
Personally, I think a lot of our drug laws in America are incredibly stupid, and obviously ineffective. I think that a desire to appear “tough on crime” for “the children” is what drives the colossal failure that is the war on drugs, and I hope some courageous politicians will take some steps toward acknowledging this failure, and start treating addicts like the sick people they are, and maybe bring our drug laws here in America into step with the rest of the civilized world. As far as I can tell, prohibition just doesn’t work, but education does.
And don’t even get me started on the stupid “Just say no” campaign . . . how about we “Just say no” to idiot politicians who just want to appeal to a narrow bloc of voters without really doing anything to solve a major problem?
Sorry. This isn’t intended to be a rant at all. The whole point of this post is to link you all to one of the funniest Fark Photoshop competitions I’ve ever seen: Photoshop your own anti-drug poster.