In Vegas for the summer again. In a lot of ways, it feels like we never left.

In 2006 there were strippers holding court in the hallways outside the Amazon Room, million-dollar lounges run by every online poker room imaginable, swag-hawkers and promo girls galore.

Plus I didn't have credentials and spent the summer in exile, laptop in hand on a bench opposite the girls from the Sapphire, listening to bad beat stories and the laments of the bored poker wives while I struggled to look like I knew what I was doing.

In 2007 the lounges were gone and the strippers were too. I had credentials, though, and spent most of the summer posted up in the media room breathing smoke from charred burgers in the poker kitchen next door. Oh, and wandering through the sweltering heat inside the poker tent wondering if and when the desert wind would tear the damn thing down.

We stayed at the Palms and I made the walk from the Amazon Room to Douchebag Central at least twice a day.

In '08 the Poker Kitchen was outdoors and the tent was gone. The media room was moved to its third location in three years and my credentials gave me the best access I've had at the World Series thus far.

We stayed at the Rio, a situation which at first seemed ideal but then quickly became nightmarish as every meal and moment of leisure was spent surrounded by fat people clamoring for beads and photographs with Chippendale dancers before the Masquerade Show in the Sky near the elevators to the rooms.

I don't think I went outside for seventeen days, and when I did it was only to the smoking area beside the Poker Kitchen.

This year, Team PokerListings has a house. A ranch, even, complete with stables and corral and ranch-themed decoration. We have a pool and a basketball hoop and - my god - a lawn. We have some separation from the strip. We have some humanity.

And yet when I walked into the Rio yesterday it might as well have been 2008. Nothing seems to have changed, but I don't think that's a bad thing.

On the contrary, I'm actually happy to be here (for now). The WSOP is a job site, but my friends from all over the world are here. For the next seven weeks we'll be hanging out in poker summer camp, putting in work but having some fun as well.

And my god, the ranch. The ranch is going to save us all from this deadly WSOP grind. No more room service or dodging fat people or spending the off nights shunning humanity from the claustrophobic comfort of my hotel room.

Instead, we have exercise, decent food, a living situation that sounds like the premise for a reality show and a chilled-out atmosphere to boot.

So I'm pretty happy, if you can believe it, to be in Las Vegas. For now.

This World Series also marks my return to existence as an independent contractor. And when it's done, I'll be a freelancer. So I'm not sure if this is my last WSOP or not, but it's a bittersweet feeling to be experiencing my swan songt as a member of the PokerListings team just when everything is starting to go so well.

Anyways I guess I have seven weeks to formulate a plan. Maybe I'll stick around.

Word, I'm going to try to write a bit more from Las Vegas although I have tons of other shit on my plate, including sleep. There's an unopened MCAT prep book on my desk that's giving me the guilt trip and I should really do some writing of my own.

But for the love of god, come out and visit us at the ranch.

The cruel reality of this job is that it pulls me away from Vancouver just when the city's at its finest and deposits me in the oven-baked inferno that is Las Vegas in the summertime.

On Tuesday I fly back down to Sin City for my fourth World Series of Poker and my tenth visit in total to the city, a place I have never been able to understand and cannot begin to want to love.

Every year at the end of May I find myself staring at an empty suitcase and wondering how the WSOP has crept up on me yet again and this year is no exception. I always feel as though I should be mentally prepared for the trip, for seven long weeks in the blast furnace, but I can never see that far into the future.

And it always has to happen just at the time when the last puddles of winter rain are drying, the sun is out, the mountains are green and the ocean is blue and Vancouver is wonderful again.

I spent this weekend out in the sun at a couple of beaches, doing nothing really noteworthy but enjoying the sun and the company. I wore shorts. I played frisbee. I ate barbecue.

Vancouver is heaven on earth in the summer time. The first year I worked the WSOP I came home in August after two months of scorched earth to find myself in one of those quintessential summer days.

The WSOP team gathered for drinks on the patio at Earl's downtown and I remember being so happy to see the ocean and the mountains and the green, green grass, to be able to walk around outside without constantly having to gauge the distance to the nearest air conditioner or bottled-water machine.

It was paradise then and it was paradise this weekend.

It's not that I'm not excited to go to Las Vegas. I mean, I'm not, but I can certainly see how this year will be better than the rest. We're not staying in a hotel anymore. We'll have some separation from the chaos and it will be easier to be social with a common room and a pool.

But as I've cleaned up the loose ends this week and run my myriad errands I can't help but see the WSOP as a seven-week speed bump in the way of what promises to be a great summer.

The World Series will be fine. It has its things going for it. I'll have a ton of friends to see and some interesting stories to chase. The people on my team are among the coolest in the industry and I like the idea of spending a couple months shacked up in a house like some degenerate-ass reality show.

But after the WSOP...

I'm flying to Windsor for my friend Jay's wedding. I grew up with Jay and I've known his fiancee, Angele, for like nine freaking years. And I cannot wait to see them again and to see them get married. That's July 18th.

Then I'm headed to Prince Edward Island for the traditional week on the beach to recuperate from the WSOP and this is one of my favorite times of the year too. No casinos, no poker, not even a computer. Just a book and the red sand and some much-needed relaxation.

After PEI I'm flying back to Vancouver, where I'll pack my shit into the back of my car and set off towards the East.

My plan is to hit the road sometime in the first week of August and drive from Vancouver to Toronto and I'm looking for a copilot in the first of the Laukkanen Rallies.

The route has yet to be confirmed, but I think my plan is to drive up to Edmonton, take a day off, then to Regina/Winnipeg/Thunder Bay/Sault Ste. Marie and Toronto in rapid succession. So seven days or so. With any luck I can convince my friends along the route to let me/us crash at their places to cut down on seedy motel costs.

Anyways, apply within for copilot status. And if that doesn't work, Yummy Udon and I are driving it through the States, I think.

Right, so I'll arrive in Toronto/St. Catharines sometime in the second week of August and probably spend a lot of time bumming around Toronto with Yummy Udon and/or bombing around Southern Ontario catching up with friends.

Then I'm going on a road trip to Cape Cod with Yummy Udon which will be spectacular in and of itself.

And then, depending on my brother's wants and needs, I might drive to Winnipeg to help him move in and get ready for Law School. And if this happens I might need a copilot for the return leg to Toronto.

My plan here is to drive down to the Minnesota/Ontario border and then follow provincial highway 11 (aka Yonge Street) through Thunder Bay, Longlac, Hearst, Kapuskasing, Cochrane, North Bay, Barrie and Toronto. It's the longest street in the world and it would be a cool drive I think.

Anyways by that point it will be September and I'll have to start thinking about normal life things again. But even that is exciting to me.

I'm sad to be leaving Vancouver, for sure. It's only temporary, but I love this part of the world and I know I'll miss it terribly.

At the same time, and maybe it's just nostalgia for my youth, I grew up in Ontario. I have friends scattered all over the map in Ontario, some of my best friends in the world. I miss them. I look forward to being able to see them without having to catch a plane.

There are things I miss about Ontario. Wide open space. Long, lazy summer evenings. Hot, humid days spent playing ball and jumping in the pool. Wandering around Toronto with Yummy Udon. Going to Jays games. The Great Lakes. The small towns. Road trips down the 401. Winter.

I grew up in Ontario and it's easy to idealize it as something simpler and less superficial than Vancouver. But I think in some ways it is.

So if you've got some time in August and feel like going for a drive, let me know...

***

The other day the Chrysler dealership called me and told me they wanted to exchange my 2007 Liberty for a 2009 version. The catch was there was no catch and I wouldn't have to pay a penny more.

So in essence they're giving me a new car and I'm headed out to Maple Ridge tomorrow to pick it up. I'm debating trying to swing a Wrangler out of the deal since the '09 Liberty kind of looks like a boxcar, but I guess we'll see how it all pans out.

My eternal misfortune is to have done this deal with Chrysler instead of GM or Ford, both of whom offer far more attractive prospects in their lineup.

If I'd blacked out at a Ford dealership I could at the least be driving an F-150 right now and paying 0% interest blah blah blah. Or I could have gone used and maybe even picked up a Harley-Davidson F-series. Or a hybrid Escape or a bright yellow Ranger straight out of Baywatch.

If I'd blacked out at a GM dealership I not only would have been able to use the points from my GM card and my graduation discount, but I could have picked out a black GMC Canyon with a quad cab and slapped some massive black wheels on it with some of the money I would have saved. And I would have OnStar, Goodwrench maintenance and whatever the third thing is that they're offering this time around.

Or I could have picked up a Silverado, a Suburban/Tahoe/Yukon or maybe something sportier.

Instead, I find myself staring down the Chrysler lineup. As far as options are concerned, it's pretty grim.

With the exception of the 300, Chrysler's cars are a miserable breed.

Dodge has the Charger and the Challenger, but the latter ain't happening and the former is only worth it if you get the SRT-8 or w/e with the bumblebee striping and the gas-guzzling engine. Otherwise you look like a taxi cab.

The Ram, meanwhile, is a monster truck. It feels like twice the size of the F-150. And the Dakota is too big to be a small truck and too small to be a full-sized truck. Plus it's a bit ugly.

So there's Jeep. And the new Liberty, like I said. Boxcar. But maybe it will grow on me. Or Wrangler, which are supposedly hell on earth to drive anywhere but off the pavement.

As far as incentives, from what I can tell a firm handshake and a five-person tent are what counts for incentives in Chrysler land.

Anyways, I'll be getting my third new car in three weeks tomorrow. And I'm conflicted. I would like a Wrangler I suppose but it would have to be the bigger, uglier four-door version. I've enjoyed the Jeep experience so far, but I'm also kind of making eyes at sportscars these days. And pickup trucks. So I might drive off in a Ram and I might drive off in a Charger.

Or, hope against hopes, somebody traded in a brand-new F-150. Lol @ life.

Don't ever do what I've done.

Well, I got rid of Erica. I traded her in, although that's hardly the phrase for it.

I guess I'm still in a bit of shock over it. I loved that car. To an extent, I defined myself by that car. She was my dream car and I certainly enjoyed driving her. But my god, it was time. And I think in hindsight I can say that owning that car was a terrible mistake.

Here is the story of a boy and his car:

Two years ago, I owned a great car. A BMW 3-series coupe in great shape. Reasonable KMs and paid off and didn't cost much to operate. Elisha.

Every day for years I'd walk past a BMW dealership on my way home from school and those three-series coupes man, they called to me. So when the opportunity arose to buy my first car that's what I chose.

And I was so happy with that car. I swore I would only trade her for an M3 or a Porsche 911 and it was just my misfortune that the Kia dealership (yes, a Kia dealership) up the road somehow came into a 1997 993 at just about the time my eyes started to wander.

So the 993. The last of the air-cooled Porsches and in my mind the best-looking 911 ever made. A couple years later Porsche would take a couple steps backwards with the 996, which looked like the Boxster and lost a lot of that 911 charm.

So I was smitten. And that's how it all began.

I headed up to the dealership one night after work for a test drive and found, to my delight, that I actually fit behind the wheel. So that was a plus. And the salesman - a greasy, slick-talker of the snake-oil salesman variety - promised me I could finance.

I was so smitten I made about a million rookie mistakes. I didn't get the car inspected. I barely looked at the car myself. And when the salesman told me the car had a rebuilt title I barely flinched, so in love was I with the idea of my owning a Porsche.

It took me months before I realized I was rolling on winter tires for eff's sake.

The salesman, slimy as he was, made about a million promises about the car.

The wheels weren't in great shape and the shop didn't have the manuals or service records on them. Some sort of window seal needed fixing. And of course they could get me a warranty. Full tank of gas? No question.

"Xenon headlights," the salesman said, gesturing to the car as he handed me the keys. I was running late for a weekend road trip with Kara and had a ferry to catch so I couldn't substantiate his claim.

I drove off, happy as a clam, leaving Elisha sitting forlorn in my wake and having taken far too little in trade for my first love (it should have been a clue when the financing officer told me outright she thought I'd paid too much for the Porsche).

It was only as night was falling on the outskirts of Nanaimo that I realized that the car didn't actually have headlights at all, and that I had a two-hour drive with high-beams ahead.

And oh by the way, about that full tank of gas? The second I got off the lot the damn "Fill Me" light came on and I was out my first $75 of 94-octane gas.

Little things. The guy didn't give me both license plates. They fixed my headlights on Monday, free of charge, using low-quality bulbs that burned out within months.

The manuals and service records? Come back next week.

I came back next week for the manuals and service records. The salesman, they said, no longer worked at the store. Nobody knew what I was talking about. That window seal wasn't getting fixed either.

But I was thrilled. I owned a sweet black Porsche. I was the man.

I took her on another road trip the next weekend. Saturday night we got off the ferry just south of Powell River and the engine oil gauge was at deathly low. If I'd had had the manual I would have known that Porsches do this and that to get an accurate reading you have to let it idle for like eight minutes.

But I didn't have the manual and I didn't know. So I was left panicking in the middle of nowhere, hoping I could limp the car home and get some oil in the damn thing.

Anyways.

I had some good times with the car. I couldn't drive her in the snow or park her just anywhere, but it doesn't snow much in Vancouver anyway and I didn't mind the 90-minute drive to work every day. But the knowledge that she was a rebuilt vehicle just left me forever stressed, knowing that I'd bought her from a disreputable company and that any number of things might actually be wrong with her.

The Kia dealership kept jerking me around on the warranty. It would be a full year before they would own up to the fact that I could not, in fact, get a warranty on the car and give me my $2,500 back.

In March '08 I was rear-ended by a guy who thought he'd just hit a Camaro. It took two months to get in to Burrard Autostrasse to get the damage fixed. I picked up the car the day that I was to fly to Vegas for the World Series. Good as new, I thought.

I spent the World Series fantasizing about replacing the rims, which were the same crap chrome abominations I'd been rolling on since Day 1.

So I came home and in August, Kara and I went on another road trip, this time up into the Thompson River Canyon where the air conditioning system's myriad failings quickly became apparent. $200 to fix.

That month I rolled into the nearest wheel and tire dealer and pixed up a spiffy new set of 19" wheels. Black with red pinstriping and riding on Pirelli P-Zeros. $3,500.

When they came in, the wheel guys asked me for my lock key. Never heard of her. Turns out the Kia dealership hadn't given me the key to the lug nuts on my original wheels.

So I had to get somebody to break the locks. $200, plus the hatred of the mechanic, who nearly ruined his tools trying to do the job.

Went back to put the new wheels on and they didn't fit right. Too big. The rear tires rubbed against the rear fender. I had to go away on a six-week trip but when I came back in October, I took the car to the Porsche doctors at Weissach downtown.

"Shock absorber is blown," said the doctor who was charging me $110/hour in labor. "You need a new suspension setup."

So that was about $4k. But they also swore they would fix that window seal that the Kia dealer was supposed to fix. They did not.

Anyways they fixed something. I was still rolling on the old rims and for the 45-minute drive out to pick up the new wheels the car handled wonderfully. Then I put the new rims on and within five minutes of driving away the rubbing started. And didn't stop.

Every time I hit a pothole I would hear the rear wheels scrape against the fender. The new P-Zeros were getting chewed up before my eyes. And every time I came back from a trip I was heading to Weissach to try to get the problem solved.

Well I racked up a bit more in labor costs but the doctors couldn't solve anything besides telling me the wheels were too big. I shut down the car for the winter and then in late January I went back to the wheel and tire guys at Volco.

I told them what Weissach had told me and after sending me for a second opinion that took about a minute, they agreed to take the wheels back (the wheels, it transpired, were for wide-body Turbo Porsches) and get me a new set.

By February the new wheels had arrived. 19" Victor equipment Le Mans, black with a machined lip. No red pinstriping, but what are you going to do?

Before I put the wheels on I took the car back to Weissach for an oil change that wound up costing around $900. But they got the window seal fixed at last.

Of course the wheels didn't fit. The Volco guys sent me to Richmond, where Johnny at Advance Auto promised to make things right if I'd only leave the car with him over Easter.

I shuttled my wheels to Richmond and headed out on another trip, once again buoyed by the idea that this, at last, would fix up my car and end the ridiculous cycle of hope and disappointment that had characterized my relationship with the car since August.

Obviously, it didn't, and it was then that I decided I'd had enough.

I mean, look, I minded the expenses (I think I probably put $1x,xxx into the car since August), but I was making good money and I felt I could afford it.

"All part of the experience of owning a Porsche," I told myself. "I knew what I was getting into when I bought the car."

What I didn't know I was getting into, though, was the misery that resulted every time I came home from a trip believing that this week would be the week I would finally solve the problem. That useless optimism and the terrible bleak frustration that resulted when yet another auto expert shook his head and handed me another bill.

It was soul-crushing.

I got home after Easter and from the airport went directly to Advance Auto, where Johnny told me in no uncertain terms he thought the car was fucked.

In Johnny's opinion, Burrard Autostrasse was at fault. They'd fixed the superficial stuff after the car was rear-ended in March, but to his eye there was more below the surface that was contributing to the "rub issues."

He could do nothing for me but charge me for his time and I drove the car home in disgust. At this point, even with the original wheels, every deep pothole or dip would result in that godawful scraping sound from the rear wheels.

And oh yeah, due to some sort of battery issue while the car was at Advance, the radio would no longer work without a secret code that was conveniently located...in the manual.

So I went away to Italy and Monte Carlo, already plotting on how I was going to trade the Porsche for a murdered-out F-250.

I got home and within a couple days was lurking around Ford dealerships plotting and scheming.

Then it happened.

I was headed downtown to check out a low-mileage 2008 F-150 when I stopped at a Subway for lunch. I snapped up the only reading material I could find, the community paper, and suddenly found myself staring at a flier for the Chrysler dealership in nearby Maple Ridge.

"Get a 2008 Dodge Ram and for $1 more get a new car, tent, boat or $15k in cash" was the headline.

So I turned the Porsche around and made for Maple Ridge where I blacked out and four hours later drove off in a 2008 Dodge Ram, sans new car, tent, boat or $15k cash. Don't ask.

Erica, meanwhile, effed me one more time. The dealership gave me the bath of all baths on the trade-in and I was so eager to be rid of her that I mindlessly agreed.

Anyways that Ram was not for me. I realized this roughly 28 hours after the fact, when I found myself in that Ford dealership trying to flip the truck for that low-mileage F-150 I was talking about. No dice, obviously.

The next night I put a couple two-foot scratches in the side of the truck trying to pull into the driveway. This was the dark night of my soul.

With some five-hour brain fart I had rid myself of my white elephant Porsche, sure, but had also purchased a ridiculous, totally impractical monster truck that consumed gas at a voracious pace and that literally could not be parked anywhere.

And I'm planning to move to an urban area. And maybe quit my job. Yes, I am a fool.

So anyways, by force of coincidence I found myself back at the dealership on Tuesday last and explained the predicament. The salesman was sympathetic and agreed to take the truck back provided I exchange for another vehicle on the lot.

So that's how I find myself driving an '07 Jeep Liberty. It can go off-road, it can carry stuff, and it still feels a bit sporty when I put my foot in it. I overpaid but I'm rid of the white elephant and I guess that's something.

But I still have sleepless nights. I miss plenty of things about the Porsche but I'm glad I got rid of her. No, it's not the Porsche I'm missing.

It's the BMW. It's Elisha.

If I had kept that car I would be in so much better shape financially it boggles the mind. And I probably would be happier, too. I would have traded the social cachet of driving a Porsche, but at the end of the day, Erica was just a car. A fun car, but an expensive and impractical car as well. A headache.

I enjoyed being the guy with the Porsche, but I can safely say that if I could take a time machine back to October 2007 when I was in the process of shooting myself in the foot in that Kia dealership, I would give myself a bitch slap, give the salesman a bitch slap and drive off in Elisha.

And then give myself another bitch slap, for good measure.

So here I am in Italy.

Life is good. I'm staying in a little hotel overlooking the Mediterranean and I have a few days to just sit around and explore and hang out with my friends and it's pretty grand.

Even the work wasn't bad. There were some hiccups and some frustrations, but mostly that stuff fell by the wayside and what was left was a fairly fun few days and a bunch of nights spent drinking Italian beer, eating great food and enjoying some good company.

It's funny, too, because when I found myself at the airport a week or so ago about to embark on this three-week tour of the Mediterranean I was about the least excited anyone could ever be.

Tough life, I guess. I can be a spoiled brat. But it's turned out to be a wonderful trip thus far.

It started in the best possible way. Almost immediately after I realized my heart wasn't in the trip, the good people at Lufthansa paged me to the gate and swapped my economy class ticket with a business class version. Win!

So for my flight from Vancouver to Frankfurt I was utterly coddled. Massive seat, seatback entertainment, three-course meal, and when I got tired I reclined the seat into a lie-flat bed, pulled down the screen between me and my Austrian bio-engineering professor seatmate and crashed for a few hours. Bliss.

Ahead of me, Trevor Linden and some other hockey player looking guy were taking over first class, which looked absolutely decadent and just added to the glamour factor.

Anyways, after we arrived in Frankfurt things kind of came back to earth - connection to Nice was delayed a couple hours and getting from Nice to Italy is a pain involving a train, two taxis and a few hours' waiting in the train station in Nice, conveniently designed without seats.

But I got to my hotel after about 21 hours' travel. Originally I was a bit discouraged by the place - no internet in the room, no minibar (I was starving), ancient elevator, a weird shower wherein the showerhead points out from the wall into the room, as opposed to towards the back of the bathtub.

But I've grown to accept the hotel and get over my spoiled business-traveler mentality and it's really quite nice. My room has a view of the Mediterranean. The people who run the place are quite nice and it's only a couple minutes' walk to the casino. So no real complaints at all.

And like I said, Italy is wonderful. The food is spectacular, as is the gelato. The weather has been iffy, with rain earlier in the week, but it's been sunny lately and warm. A lot of my good friends are here. Life is good.

And as I live it up here on the Italian Riviera, I contemplate my future. I've waffled on things about a hundred times in the last week and I'm still not sure how I'm going to end up, but at the moment it seems foolish to want to quit the chance to have experiences like these outright.

I think there's a compromise, but I guess we'll see.

In other news, I've been doing a bit of writing since I've come down here. The inciting incident for my latest productivity was my reading a kind of sub-par book called The Attack, by a Muslim man writing as a woman.

It was one of those books that seems to have an amazing conceit but after that conceit has been established, little to talk about in the aftermath. Like Reservation Road (not to be confused with Revolutionary Road, by Richard Yates, which is spectacular), which begins with a man speeding home to bring his son back to his mother and accidentally hitting and killing another man's son with his car. And trying to cover it up.

Compelling stuff, but in the aftermath the writer just kind of seemed to drift about aimlessly, his talents or his imagination not quite up to creating a satisfactory resolution (or even a path towards a resolution) to the problem.

In the case of The Attack, the amazing conceit concerned an Arabic surgeon in Tel Aviv whose wife is killed in a suicide bombing. It's quickly established that his wife was the bomber, and so the doctor is left trying to put together the pieces.

But putting together the pieces sounds easier to write than it is, I think. The writing drifted as aimlessly as the doctor himself after the attack.

Moreover, the writing wasn't great. The man seemed to relish describing the various dawns experienced by his character in great, poetic detail, but his character's inner monologues and relationships with other characters were sketched-out and inconsistent.

And then, of course, the story ended in spectacular fashion. So the beginning was great and the end nearly saved the whole process, but the middle bits were terribly unsatisfying.

So I read a little bit of this book every night before I went to bed and felt entirely unproductive and lazy, and consequently I've been writing a little bit before bed myself.

I have a few short stories in my head that I've wanted to write for a while, so my goal is to write four of them over the next month or so, just as practice or whatever. It's been pretty fun and I feel like I understand the idea of a short story a bit more now, so in the early stages I'm pretty happy.

I'm also happy because since I've finished The Attack, I have another Raymond Chandler book on deck. And I've been able to bomb through some more of The Wire, House and Grey's Anatomy (shut up) so combined with having fun at work, socializing, winning at poker and writing, I feel like a well-rounded human being at the moment.

Anyways, that's the general idea. I'm in Italy until tomorrow, when I migrate to Monaco for a little more than a week, and then I'm flying home for three weeks before Las Vegas.

That is all.

A person I know died last weekend. His name was Justin Shronk and he was 27, and while I didn't know him particularly well I'm still pretty saddened by the news.

Shronk was a fixture in the poker world for as long as I've worked in it. He was a multi-talented guy whose considerable talents as a producer, cameraman and reporter were surpassed only by his obvious and boundless enthusiasm for the game.

Why we never became friends I'm not sure; we moved in the same circles and crossed paths a handful of times per year, but there are people who become your friends and people who stay acquaintances, or familiar faces, and there's often no real rhyme or reason as to why.

Consequently, I don't have any really interesting memories of Shronk beyond the numerous stories I've heard from his friends and coworkers.

I don't think I had more than a couple of conversations with Shronk over the three years or so that we crossed paths. But in the poker world, Shronk was ubiquitous.

He was a presence in a media room and a prolific poster on most of the big poker forums and so I feel like I knew him more than our limited contact would allow.

Among my first thoughts when I heard that he'd died was a sadness based on the assumption that his death, tragic as it is, would be overshadowed and largely unnoticed by the poker world at large.

I assumed (falsely) that the death of someone like Shronk, who never played high-stakes cash games or got bottle service at Tao, would mean little to the players and fans around whom this game revolves.

I'm happy, at least, that this isn't the case.

I don't want to put words in Justin's mouth, but I got the impression that it wasn't just poker as a game that attracted him to this lifestyle, but rather the sense of community that the poker world allows.

In poker, he (we) probably found a group of like-minded individuals with whom he could relate.

The poker media world, in particular, is made up of the sort of oddballs, misfits and fringe-dwellers for whom a regular 9-5 job is neither appealing nor particularly possible.

I don't mean this in a bad way, towards Shronk or myself or the poker world in general.

It's a world for the kinds of creative people who spent their teenage years feeling out of place and it's a haven. It's a welcoming environment in which individualism is encouraged and friendships are forged in hotel rooms and casino bars the world over.

It's a place where people like Shronk thrive.

The outpouring of grief from not only the poker media but from players and fans as well exemplifies, I think, the best qualities of our little community. It proves that we have a community at all, and that despite the explicitly mercenary nature of the game we're able to come together as human beings and bond with each other over our common triumphs and our common losses.

Justin Shronk's death is tragic, and I cannot even begin to fathom what his family and friends must be feeling.

I wish I had gotten to know him better. It makes me sad that over three years neither of us really took the first step. That's kind of selfish, though; what makes me sadder is the fact that a 27-year-old guy, a man who by all accounts was among the most easygoing, hard-working and likable people in the business, is gone too soon. It's a dark day.

But I think that he would have been happy to know that he had so many friends in this community, and to know that the poker world truly cared about him and was grief-stricken by his passing.

I know it gives me a little bit of comfort right now.

I'm starting to think it might be time to give up this little writing experiment. Get a real job.

Every few years I guess I have this little crisis of confidence. If I blah blah blah, I say, then I'll know I'm going to be a writer and I'll devote my life to it. Or whatever.

But I dunno anymore. It might be that it's utterly immature to keep saying I aspire to be something so trivial and frivolous, and to actually choose a valid profession before I'm stuck blogging about poker for the rest of my life.

(Not that there's anything wrong with blogging about poker, but it's really not how I see myself spending my productive years.)

I guess - I think that with writing, and probably other forms of art, you have to have not only the technical proficiency but the imagination if you're going to succeed.

Like, you could have the most wonderful ideas in the world, but if you can't figure out how to string a sentence together, you're effed.

Or you could be really good at stringing sentences together, but if you can't figure out a compelling story to tell, then you might as well be writing instruction manuals for printers.

I feel like I'm a reasonably talented writer as far as the technical side of things go, but I dunno if I have the creativity to write anything beyond self-indulgent and narcissistic pap that's relevant to me but really says nothing about the human condition.

I was thinking today that in all of the writing I like, I'm left in awe of the magic the author has created on the page, and really, I'm not sure if I have the ability to create that magic.

Or the discipline, I guess. It's easy to say that my job situation and my living situation have contributed to my not really writing much over the last few years, but really, it's shit or get off the pot. If I really wanted to be a writer, I guess I would be writing.

Anyway, in a blow to what I've been told is my rather substantial ego, I didn't get into grad school. Well, three of the four, with the fourth rejection letter still forthcoming.

I didn't really expect to get into Iowa or Columbia, especially given the fact that I feel like I didn't give the applications my all, since I was filling them out from all corners of the globe on kind of a tight deadline.

But I didn't really expect not to get into the third school. I guess I'm not upset about it, beyond the usual "I can't deal with rejection" crap, but I mean it gets you thinking.

Being successful as a novelist or whatever is hard, but beyond that, aspiring to be a novelist is a pretty damn self-indulgent fantasy. You're basically saying, "I want to get paid to play make-believe in my head, and the rest of the time I want to live a life of indolence and leisure."

Maybe I'm attracted to it because I'm lazy.

Anyways, I don't mean to sound all depressed and mournful and mired in self-pity or whatever, but I'm trying to think about my future here. And although I'd really like to be a novelist, I'm starting to think it's maybe a stupid pipe dream and I should be concentrating on looking for a real career.

It's decision time in my world. I've grown addicted to the steady paycheque and the trappings of a comfortable lifestyle. I could buy a condo if I stuck with my job, pay off my car and live out my twenties in fairly spectacular fashion. But god, where would I be when I turned thirty?

So I could quit my job, sell the car, wean myself off my credit cards, move east, travel the world, have an adventure, write the MCATs, write the LSATs, have a normal relationship, continue to indulge the writer fantasy or whatever.

I just don't want to end up some failure in my mom's basement, broke, writing shit nobody wants to read and having wasted my potential having forever taken the path of least resistance.

And looking back at where I am now thinking I was stupid for even having this debate, giving up a dream job, a Porsche, and a reasonable chance at financial security for some foolish idea.

Anyway.

So I read Michel Houellebecq's "The Elementary Particles" on the plane ride to Foxwoods and my god, it's about time we all killed ourselves.

The book has to rank among the most depressing things I've ever read. And yet it was a totally worthwhile read.

Basically, one of the more prevalent themes can be summed up as follows: "When we trade love's torment for marriage, we're consigning ourselves to years of sexless, utter boredom as our bodies decay and we become undesirable. And then we die. And in 20 years when they have to dig up our corpses to make room for a new parking lot, all that will be left are a few bones, some scraps of hair and what little remains of the coffin in which we were buried."

I'm getting cremated. Just decided.

Houellebecq is a bit obsessed with sex, and he paints a terribly bleak picture of human existence, but I don't know if either of those things are completely negative.

Man, I kind of wanted to sum up dude's most salient points, but then this would be the most depressing blog ever. I keep trying but I can't.

On the plus side, I'm now reading Paul Theroux, and he's not nearly as depressing.

(I'm at Foxwoods. I'm sharing my hotel with two busloads of drunk college kids from New Hampshire and they're having a keg party. On the plus side, I went out for a walk in a sweater and wasn't cold at all. Spring etc.)

In many ways, I guess the less that's said about my trip to Germany, the better.

I was really looking forward to it, having spent a couple months away from Europe after Prague in December, but for whatever reason I just felt a bit off the whole time and things didn't quite click right.

The trip began and ended with that travel bad-beat, the fattie in the middle seat on the long-haul flight. My overnight from Vancouver to London was reasonable, I suppose, although in my pessimist's need to find something to complain about the oversized man bulging against my arm and leg took up most of my allotted travel misery. If only I'd known...

But it was a decent flight. It left at 8:45 pm and I was pretty well-rested so I stayed up the whole time, or most of it, watching movies and wishing I could be asleep.

I watched Body of Lies, which was fairly good and reinforced my desire to go to the Middle East. I watched The Day the Earth Stood Still out of the same hunger for mindless entertainment that led me to watch House Bunny a few trips ago. It was fairly meh and, indeed, mindless.

And I watched Unforgiven, or half of it, before giving up and trying to fall asleep.

Eventually we landed at Heathrow and I navigated Terminal 5's labyrinthine tunnels before catching my connecting flight to Dusseldorf. Quick flight, nothing to report.

Landed in Dusseldorf at like 5 something in the evening, exhausted as all get out, and caught the train to Dortmund, an hour away. I was arrived and ensconced in the Pullman Hotel, eating a pepperoni pizza, by 9 at night, and I got a fairly good sleep.

The next day I met walked down to the high street area and met Mad for a bit of lunch, some window shopping and then, as the rain started, some glorious bowling.

And by glorious, I mean, I won. All except the game where I spotted Mad 40 points and she beat me outright. We were alone in the bowling alley save for a couple of utter pros, and our repeated gutter balls/failures to convert tricky split shots marked us as rank amateurs in comparison.

But I did manage to break 450 (over four games) and take Mad for five euros, so all in all it was a successful trip.

The rain still battering the city, we retreated to the NH hotel to stalk Benjo, who'd just arrived from France to babysit his stable of highly-trained poker professionals.

I'd stayed at the NH the year before and liked it; the hotel is about a block from the hauptbahnhof (train station) and is more of a suite than a room - when I got back to Canada I decided that I wanted to furnish my as-yet-unpurchased apartment with the chairs and couches from the joint.

The Pullman, meanwhile, is a bit more baller in terms of fit and finish but smaller and more out of the way. Plus my shower had anemic flow, which is one of the cardinal sins in my book.

Anyway, hotel envy firmly established we went out for dinner at a reasonably swanky restaurant whose other patrons were no doubt delighted to be subjected to my rather pervasive hiccups for the first 20 minutes or so of our meal.

I had the I can't remember, but I think it was stroganoff, Mad and Vincent had the buffet and from what I can recall, Benjo ordered one of everything on the menu as a means of rubbing it in his faces that he'd recently got a raise.

We ate, we left, and my hiccups delightfully returned.

I got back to the Pullman just in time to check Wee Man in and we had a couple beers at the hotel bar before jet lag got the best of me and his own rampant degeneracy the best of him and we called it a night.

Wee Man, I should note, had been awake until roughly 8 that morning, and when I found him on Skype at about that hour he was still drunk, probably high and no doubt engaged in playing losing poker while thinking up ways to insult our friend Derbyshire. He was thus a bit mixed-up, body-clock wise, and our mutual exhaustion would be a recurrent theme.

Work began in earnest the next day. We caught a cab out to the casino, conveniently located in the middle of the Black Forest and miles from civilization, just in time to see an entire American football team and accompanying cheerleaders attempt to storm the casino bar, new for 2009 and named the Titty Twister.




Last year's trip to Dortmund had been one characterized by starvation and massive sugar overload predicated on the fact that the casino kept the media stuffed with Corny Big chocolate bars but very little in the way of actual sustenance.

This year, the Corny Bigs were gone, replaced by child-sized Snickers bars and four or five actual cakes per day, and in the middle of the evening by a selection of three entrees for dinner. So, that was an improvement.

Also, there were dancing girls. Showgirls, mainly, plus a bizarre singer who did ABBA covers and whose performance pushed the day's start time back to roughly 3:45 pm from its scheduled 2.

Given that jet-lag was waking me up at 8am every morning, this was a bad thing. Both Wee Man and I would work until roughly 10 at night before exhaustion caught up with us, whereupon Wee would take a brief nap and I would ruthlessly mock him. We'd then soldier on until the day ended at one in the evening or so, and then catch a cab driven by Michael Schumacher's other talentless brother, get back to the hotel and pass out.

Thus became the ritual, although the dancing girls left after the second day.

Typically, these European events tend to be pretty party-centric, but our exhaustion combined with the fact that everyone was staying at different hotels 25 miles from the casino meant we more or less went our separate ways after the day was done, although I understand the Scandie players did some entertaining in the Hilton on a fairly regular basis.

Let's see, so, shit continued throughout the week and though it was fun to shoot the shit in the media room, not much happened outside of it. By the end, I was exhausted and some German girl had won a million euro and that was that.

Oh, and there was a party on the last night. We snuck into the casino/tournament staff party, which came replete with underwear-clad snake charmer, glam-metal cover band and a weird dude dressed like Darth Vader who acted as a mobile change room for the lingerie-clad fire eater.

There were also drink tickets, and basically everyone I ever knew was there. So I obviously got drunk off of two beers, had a sip of a bad mojito and nearly threw up, glad-handed my German doppelganger and managed to stave off exhaustion enough to make small talk or, in the absence of that, to loom in the background awkwardly while other people had actual conversations.

The Scandies were buying Red Bull and vodkas for the masses and the band was still going strong, but Wee Man and I managed to extricate ourselves from the situation around 3 am and head back to the hotel, where I grabbed a few hours' sleep, woke up at 8 to see Wee Man back to England, and by 8:30 was sitting in my own taxi headed back to the train station.

Bought a ticket back to Dusseldorf and while waiting on the platform had one of those rare moments where the music on my iPod coincided perfectly with what I would choose as the soundtrack to the moment.

It was bizarre, embarrassingly geeky World of Warcraft power rock (Theater of Tragedy's Poppea) that I found on Jennicide's MySpace back when both Jennicide and MySpace were, well, relevant, but it fit the whole, "Waiting on the station platform for a train in some shitty German city under threatening skies on four hours of sleep" motif, ie I was sufficiently uncoupled to block out the melodramatic lyrics and concentrate on the power chords.

Train came, got on the train and sat down, only to see every last person in my car get up and move to the vestibule. I hung around and nothing bad happened to me, so I dunno what that was about.

Anyway, showed up at the airport with time to spare, watched an episode of Grey's Anatomy (and what a terrible episode - poorly written, acted, and if I could spot poor direction probably that too), made it through customs and flew to London.

In London, I was marooned in Terminal 5B for four hours, but not before experiencing yet another headache thanks to the dumbass security machines at Heathrow.

Someone's fascination with all things progress had meant that all the baggage security scanners in Terminal 5 have these self-moving trays where you put all your carry-ons, laptops, change, etc before going through the metal detector. I've never really had a problem moving my tray myself, but apparently this is a big deal for the majority of the British traveling set.

So I got off my one plane and, as is the custom these days, was immediately sent through security before getting on another plane.

Unfortunately, one of the two baggage scanners was broken, because someone had forgotten to fasten the newfangled baggage conveyor to the floor and it was backing up these newfangled trays.

So everyone had to switch to the second machine, which promptly stalled out due to what I can only imagine was another ridiculous technological adventure, whereupon everyone switched back to the first broken machine and the army of airport staffers who'd previously been employed in gossiping about each other were forced to carry the used-up trays back to the front of the line.

The whole process took about 20 minutes and was, as you might imagine, a bit frustrating.

Ultimately, though, I survived to tell the tale and found myself in Terminal 5B, which features among little else, two caviar bars, a duty-free shop, a pharmacy and a coffee shop.

It was about noon, however, and the boy wanted lunch. Specifically, lunch. Like, a meal. Instead, he subsisted on a boxed chicken sandwich from the pharmacy, which didn't take euros though it damn well should have.

I complain, I complain, but if you're going to force travelers to wait four hours in your terminal you should maybe have some decent restaurants. Compounding my frustration was the fact that Terminal 5A has plenty of restaurants, but to get to it I'd likely have to navigate security a million more times and I only had four hours.

Terminal 5A also has power supplies for laptops, another thing that 5B was sorely missing. Sure, it had outlets, but none of them worked and thus my computer blacked out halfway through a third episode of Grey's, giving me an hour and a half to kill with no restaurant and no computer. I was forced to read, gasp.

The Benjamin Gallen Book Club had supplied me with Nick Hornby's High Fidelity, which made an unusual companion with Philip Roth's "The Professor of Desire" which I'd just read beforehand, in that both books focused on middle-aged men who have found the perfect relationship but who are tortured by the fact that they can't leave well enough alone and know they'll eventually get bored.

As someone who needs to live a nomadic lifestyle, cannot hold a relationship more than a couple years without getting itchy feet, and generally lives in fear of settling down, I was hoping for some sort of insight into how I might deal, but neither book provided any help whatsoever. They both end with the depressing prospect that the men will surely grenade their love lives and become alone and unhappy once more, perhaps continuing the cycle to eternity. And that is depressing to contemplate.

Irregardless, as the kids say, I finished the Hornby book while my British Airways 747 sat on the tarmac at Heathrow, 90 mins behind schedule because someone was digging through the baggage hold looking for a truant passenger's not so truant luggage.

Meanwhile, the fattie in the middle seat problem had reared its ugly head again, this time far more terribly.

The man was easily a customer of size, which is the euphemism airlines use to denote someone who needs to buy two seats. He bought one and it happened to be the one beside mine.

I crammed myself into the window seat as he stepped on my toes, elbowed my elbow and generally made life miserable for all around. He grabbed onto the seat in front of him and shook it a number of times, while the poor old lady in front of him probably dreamed that her plane was crashing.

Ultimately, he was a lout and a jerk and I'm mildly ashamed at myself for not saying anything to him. His most egregious act was to force the lady's seat back up whenever she should dare to recline, which she did three or four times. He did this without compunction and had he not been drinking, and huge, and my seatmate for a nine-hour flight, I would like to think I would have spoken up.

Anyway, I watched the end of Unforgiven and tried to sleep, which I managed with some success.

I woke up halfway through the flight though to dude elbowing me in the ribs, his bulbous shoulder clearly across the armrest and squarely in my territory.

"I'm the most uncomfortable I've ever been," he told the comely young woman in the aisle seat. "This guy [me] is cuddling up to my shoulder and I don't even know his name."

Again, oh, I wanted to say something, but I had four hours left in the flight and didn't really want to get into the fact that if he wasn't such a fattie and his shoulder wasn't in my damn personal bubble, I wouldn't be touching it. Besides, I was spending my time devising ways not to rub against his flab, but it was all in vain.

Anyway, I fell back asleep, tried to avoid his jabbing elbows, and after we landed steadfastly avoided his gaze both as we packed up our belongings and later, when we crossed paths in the terminal washroom.

We landed about an hour late in Vancouver at like 9:30 at night, and cleared customs probably a half hour later. I was home by 11, my cabbie having asked me which route I wanted to take and then deciding on his own to ignore my preference and take a roundabout way that made no sense whatsoever. I still tipped him, because I am a fool.

And thus I did go to, and return from, Germany.

I'm now in Vancouver, recovering from the jet-lag that I've incurred after warming to the European schedule in just enough time to go back to North America. I've worked a couple days this week and spent the rest of the time shopping, because I have become so pathetic and despicable a Westerner that I can only salve the emptiness in my soul by buying into the consumer lifestyle. Consequently, I have a new watch and a ton of new clothes.

And oh, but my soul is empty.

I'm in Germany at the moment, but I'm behind and I want to write about my trip to Mexico, if only so I can remember it all. Besides, it was fun.

You can follow along in my photo albums here, if that's your thing:

Mexico City, mainly.

Acapulco, mainly.

So me and Yummy Udon booked a trip to Mexico City and Acapulco over her spring break and immediately the hysterics began. My mom was convinced I was going to get killed. So was Showell, for that matter. And I started to get a bit leery myself.

I mean you hear about Mexico being a war zone and all - I'd read an article about the Mexico/US border that talked about like 700 people being killed in six months, and immediately upon my return from the country did I read the US State Department's alert advising people not to go.

Well, whatever. For all of the hype and hysterics, I felt pretty safe. And we didn't exactly linger in tourist-friendly areas, either. Anyway, over the week or so that I was in Mexico fully eleven people were shot in Vancouver. Gang wars and such. So it was probably a safer choice to leave.

Right, so having spent my recovery time post-Australia/post-Tunica playing online poker and getting no sleep, I slept from 8pm to 1 am the night before my flight and then drove to the airport at about 3 in the morning.

Caught an Alaska Airlines flight to LA, ate Burger King for breakfast (ugh) and caught another Alaska flight to Mexico City.

Incidentally, I cashed out 35k in Alaska Airmiles for the trip, which was sweet, and despite having a somewhat hellacious return itinerary (MEX-Atlanta-Seattle-Vancouver), I got window seats the whole way and was treated like a normal passenger, as opposed to someone riding for free. And 35k miles is really not that much for a return flight from Vancouver to Mexico City. So bravo, Alaska!

Anyway, landed in Mexico City, cleared customs, and YU was nowhere to be found. She was supposed to meet me after arriving from Toronto a couple hours earlier, but she wasn't at the arrivals area.

Compounding the matter, she'd messaged me beforehand to tell me she wasn't bringing her cell phone and that I should contact her via email if things didn't work out. Except I didn't bring my computer.

Panic. Not really; she was waiting a few hundred feet down the way at another arrivals lounge, having panicked herself all afternoon. But we found each other and the panic subsided and thus set about trying to get to our accommodations.

It should be noted that my Spanish is so minimal as to be non-existent and I was planning to follow the boorish North American travel strategy of shrugging, smiling, and speaking slowly in my native tongue until someone came along who could understand me. Also there would be hand gestures.

It quickly became apparent, as soon as we jumped in the cab, that this would not fly. The taxi driver spoke no English. Neither did most of the people we would encounter. Thankfully, YU speaks passable Spanish and we were able to get to the general vicinity of our BnB before the cab driver had to stop for a second time to ask for directions.

Eventually we found the place, an apartment called "Chillout Flats" just a couple blocks from the Zocalo (like the major square w/National Palace, cathedral, touristy stuff and museums etc) and a block from the subway.

The place was great and fit the name. Cost like $60 a night for a king bed, private bath, breakfast in the morning, internet, balcony, etc etc and the location was unbeatable. There were bocoo mosquitos, but I think that was pretty common all over Mexico City.

So we kind of explored the city on our first night, wandering around these night markets as I got used to saying "no, gracias" and being stared at, because there were tons of people hawking tons of shit and not many touristy-looking folk. But that was kind of cool.

We had Mexican food for dinner (lawl) and wandered around the downtown area a bit more before calling it a night.

It must be said that Yummy Udon and I are kind of different people as far as traveling goes. For one, I'm a spoiled brat who travels mainly for business and thus expects working showers, comfy beds, solicitous staff and basically everything to go my way.

YU has been to India, Cuba and Southeast Asia and is a lot more attuned to the hostel existence. She brought a hiker's backpack to Mexico. I brought a suitcase with rollers.

Also, when I have a day off I'll usually sleep until 10 (at the earliest) leave the hotel by noon and maybe wander around for a few hours before coming back by nightfall, watching a movie and eating room service.

She is like the female Ryan Lucchesi. We were up at like 8ish every morning (even though I tried to tell her that meant 6am my time and 9am her time, and for some reason, my sleep pattern was effed - sleep at 10 pm, wake up at 2am, toss, turn, go back to sleep at 5am, wake up groggy as hell at 8) raring to go.

Which as it turned out, was a good thing, since we were on vacation and actually there to see stuff. And see stuff we did. After a nice home-cooked breakfast we hopped on the subway (crowded, hot, filled with ppl selling CDs, Mentos, etc - but cost $0.20 per trip!) and high-tailed it across town to Frida Kahlo's house.

The place was in a beautiful neighborhood filled with pastel-colored houses, plenty of trees and, like the rest of the city, a ton of Volkswagen bugs. It was hot and sunny and wonderful.

The museum was pretty cool as well. It was the house in which Kahlo and Diego Riviera lived and was obviously filled with all sorts of artwork and artifacts and stuff. It was a beautiful rambling blue house with a wonderful courtyard/garden and was a pretty relaxing way to start the day.

Trotsky's house was nearby, so we ambled back out through the neighborhood until we came to a gigantic wall with a grafitti'd Trotsky face on it. This was the place. I didn't know much about the man, but thankfully YU did and was able to fill me in before we wandered his grounds, which were only a few blocks from Frida's but light-years away as far as atmosphere.

The place had been converted from a house into a fortress, with most of the windows boarded up, the walls reinforced and machine gun turrets installed. Plus like bomb-proof doors and the like. Bullet holes in the bedroom - and Trotsky's grave outside, testament to the fact that for all of the effort, an assassin was still able to get in at the end.

So we saw what there was to see and then hopped back on the subway (after YU stopped for a bit of fresh pineapple from a streetside vendor) and headed back up to the Zocalo, its vast square teeming with throngs of people, the air hazy and hot and smoggy and reverberating with the feverish drumming from a group of native dancers who despite the heat seemed to never once stop moving from dawn until dusk.

This is what I had envisioned when I thought about Mexico - massive old buildings, crowds of people, the smoggy air and those frenetic drums, pounding the near chaotic atmosphere of the Zocalo into your skull as you navigate the grimy sidewalks. It was like nothing I'd ever seen and presents a pretty vivid, vibrant memory.

The Zocalo is basically the tourist mecca and filled with the stuff you *have* to see in Mexico, so we did it, checking out the cathedral and some incredible street performers before wandering for about an hour and a half in search of food, of which there was a remarkably limited supply.

But we found some and then checked out the National Palace, just barely getting inside after showing IDs barely more legitimate than Costco membership cards.

The National Palace is the seat of the government and everything that entails, and is thus a massive, overwhelming and architecturally significant compound that nonetheless features a collection of massive, subversive Diego Rivera murals depicting Mexican history and holding little back in dealing with the subjugation of the country's aboriginal groups.

We wandered around the National Palace for a bit more and then headed over to the ancient temple, which was uncovered just a few hundred feet from the cathedral and sits partially uncovered and attached to a museum.

So we checked it out, taking note at the altar for human sacrifice, the collection of carved skulls and the painted living quarters before ducking into the museum for some air conditioning and a few static displays before it all shut down at 5pm.

After the museum closed we headed back down to the apartment, where the sun was beginning to set and we took a bit of a siesta as the light waned and the noise of the city began to dissipate.

Then at dusk we were up and out again, wandering the streets in search of dinner and deciding on a sort of Mexican Denny's, where our waitress didn't really understand YU's Spanish and had to bring along another woman to help out. Anyways the food was decent, even if the atmosphere was a bit plastic.

So we went back to the apartment and had an early night.

Woke up early the next morning and caught the subway to the northern bus station, which was probably the largest bus station I've ever seen and featured about a hundred bus companies going to a hundred locales.

We were headed to Teotihuacan, the pyramids about an hour outside of town. Before we could get on the bus, though, breakfast was sitting a bit rough in our stomachs and thus was I subjected to a perfect example of why I generally prefer five-star travel: the bus station washroom.

I've never paid for the privilege of using the washroom before, but scrounged 3 pesos and paid the toll. For whatever reason you have to select your toilet paper before you go into the bathroom, so got that done too.

Anyways in the bathroom were like five doors, none of which locked and all of which were filled with Mexican men reading paperback novels. I waited for one to get a break in the action and vacate his stall and then entered.

The toilet water was a foul green color. There was no seat on the device. And the most stressful part (for me at least) of all Mexican toilets - you don't flush your toilet paper, you throw it (haphazardly, apparently) into a trash bin beside the cistern.

So with Montezuma's Revenge looming large in my rearview mirror I made do with the situation and high-tailed it out of there, feeling dirty as I joined YU on the bus and we headed out into the countryside.

The pyramids sit amongst sun-scorched grass in an awe-inspiring complex of stone ruins and people trying to sell you whistles that make monster noises. I worked on my "No, gracias" as we navigated the grounds, clambering over the ruins on the Street of the Dead and trying to envision the people who'd preceded us hundreds of years beforehand.

The Pyramid of the Sun, which we chose to climb, is the third-highest pyramid in the world, and I dunno if it's because of the heat, the altitude, the smoggy air or the fact that I'm a fat bastard, but I nearly embarrassed myself on the climb up.

I mean it was steep and HOT but still. Maybe I need to get in better shape. Anyways, we climbed to the top, which was an achievement and surveyed the landscape before deciding that we really didn't need to climb the nearby Pyramid of the Moon as well.

So we headed back along the Street of the Dead, bought a cool drink and caught the bus back into the city, just in time for lunch.

YU, with help from her Lonely Planet photocopies, directed us to a lovely district that I would never be able to find again in my life. I think it's the gay district. Anyways it was great - cool, tree-lined, filled with interesting-looking bars, restaurants, and Starbucks franchises.

We walked for a bit before grabbing lunch at a nice little restaurant, with YU ordering, I think, one rather small cheese quesadilla and me ordering, um, five pieces of barbecued chicken. Spanish still needed a bit of work.

I labored through the chicken as best I could and then we set off again, wandering through the neighborhood (which turned into a Little Korea) before arriving at a famous park that closed, apparently, at 5pm. It was 4:55. So we hurried through the park, through another market, into another artsy neighborhood.

It was fun. My cynicism comes across a lot better than my earnest enjoyment of the experiences, but I did enjoy them. The evening air was calm, the neighborhoods were beautiful, and these were places the likes of which I'd never experienced before and would generally never look to experience.

Eventually we got back on the subway and headed back to the apartment, where after a bit of a break we headed out into the streets once more and experienced the pandemonium that is Valentine's Day in Mexico City.

All we wanted was a bit of ice cream, but the streets were jam-packed with people as we headed out and so, after we found our dessert, we wandered around to see what all the fuss was about.

They'd set up a concert stage in the middle of the Zocalo and though we were still three or four city blocks away, the streets were all closed and the crowds were huge. Throngs of people clutching octopus balloons, stuffed animals and ice cream cones, selling quesadillas and tacos and beer. The singer in the distance on a massive screen, an old man singing "Besame Mucho", which would become the unofficial anthem for the trip.

We pushed through the crush for a while, trying to get close to the stage, before deciding better of it and heading back in search of a Valentine's Day souvenir for YU. But we couldn't find anything, anywhere, and eventually the streets began to empty and we were forced back to the apartment (conveniently located in the middle of the madness) in defeat. But we did get a couple of Valentine's Day candy lollipops that I don't suppose we'll ever eat.

***

Thus ended the Mexico City part of the adventure. The next day, we woke up, packed, checked out of the apartment and hopped the subway en route to the southern bus station, which was barely smaller than the northern alternative.

We haggled over bus prices for a bit before buying tickets to Acapulco (about fifteen companies leave every fifteen-twenty minutes or so), grabbing a bite to eat, negotiating the washroom experience once more and then hopping on the bus to the coast, about five hours to the southwest.

The bus itself was marvelous. They give you a free drink when you board and the seats are quite comfortable. And they play movies, although unlike on Greyhound the sound is just piped in so the whole bus can hear.

Anyway, as the couple beside us made slow, passionate love for the duration of the trip, we settled in and with Transformers, Garfield and some Richard Gere/Terrence Howard movie playing over the top, watched the scenery transform.

Embarrassing note: until about the second day in Acapulco I thought it was on the Atlantic side of the country. So I figured we were going east the whole time. We weren't.

We arrived into Acapulco in the mid-afternoon and caught a cab to our hotel, the Hotel Caleta in Acapulco, which was pretty well the best-case scenario.

Acapulco, we soon discovered, has a pretty raunchy tourist strip along the main drag, featuring among other things, Hooters, Hagen-Daz and the Hard-Rock Cafe, as well as plenty of all-inclusive pleasure palaces seemingly built to exploit lazy young Americans looking to get drunk and screw.

We were, literally and figuratively, almost the farthest you could possibly get from that scene. Our hotel was out on a peninsula about 20 mins from bacchanalia, surrounded on 3 sides by water and more or less ignored by anyone who didn't speak Spanish as a first language.

It was a massive edifice, tall and white and jutting proudly out over the ocean, an impressive site - and yet, cheap and nearly empty. We paid, I think, $120 for three nights, for a double bedroom with an amazing view from the balcony, two pools and a private beach.

The hotel gave off the impression of being a grand old dame from the 60s, a hotel that had thrived in a bygone era and was now in the midst of a slow decline into respectable shabbiness. There was a stairwell just outside our door that was literally filled with sand, and the remains of a former disco and an erstwhile hair salons elsewhere in the building.

But oh, was it wonderful. Within minutes of our arrival, we were descending the stairway to the private beach and basking in the wonderful warm Pacific water, counting our blessings and feeling like the luckiest people in the world.

We had a couple of Coronas by the pool and then headed down into the village, where we had an excellent meal at a beachside restaurant and then sat on the inner beach watching children play in the sand as the darkness settled in and just off the shore, an armada of tourist boats bobbed silently at anchor. Paradise.

The next day we woke up, had a wonderful breakfast at the same restaurant and caught one of the tourist boats for a trip over to an island which apparently featured a couple of nice beaches. It was a glass-bottomed boat, and on the way over we got a tour of an underwater Virgin Mary, which was interesting but nothing compared to what we hoped to find on the island, namely an empty beach with big waves.

We wandered the island trails, finding the beach recommended by the Lonely Planet to be roughly the size of a New York City apartment, and rocky and crowded (two other people) besides. So we headed back to the main beach, which featured no waves and a few jellyfish but also cheap snorkling and rather weak Pina Coladas.

The snorkling, though, was amazing - we spent a good hour or so being battered by the surf just off the beach, watching the underwater ecosystem in action all around us. It was fairly spectacular and $10/per well spent.

Spent a couple hours relaxing on the beach and then caught the tourist boat back to the hotel, where we jumped in the freshwater pool for a bit more relaxation and then got ready for dinner.

Dinner was at this place overlooking these cliffs where these people were jumping. It's apparently famous.

Alright, it's deservedly famous and I just can't remember the details, but suffice it to say for $13 and a guaranteed $25 bar tab we were able to watch a collection of young Mexican men scale an incredible cliff and then do crazy dives off of it once an hour.

Plus we got tipsy on margaritas. Honestly it was pretty spectacular, even though the food was more or less abominable. We watched two of these cliff-diving shows, the second one with fire! and then called it a night - with brief pause for a battle with a cabbie who was trying to overcharge us.

The next day we caught a crazy cheap bus to the zocalo, where we kind of walked around the historic architecture for a bit and then caught breakfast in an outdoor cafe - these outdoor breakfasts were among the highlights of the trip.

These buses were also a highlight. Basically schoolbuses, they were gaily painted, often with like Christian imagery - and hella cheap and blaring music and stopped wherever you needed them to stop. So we rode another of these crazy buses down the strip to the opposite end of the shore and after some looking, found a stretch of beach we liked.

It was another great day. We rented a deck chair and an umbrella and just hung out on the sand all day, swimming, not swimming, reading, sleeping, eating, drinking and, in Yummy Udon's case, caving to the pressure and getting a ten-minute body massage from a very persistent itinerant masseuse.

I also got very burnt. This is because I was dumb, and didn't re-apply sunscreen and then sat half in the sun for the entire day, meaning my right side was burnt as hell and my left side cool as a cucumber. Tough life.

We packed it in as the sun set and went looking for a place to eat, and we wandered about halfway down the strip before we found a nice-looking place with vegetarian food for YU.

It was overlooking the beach and the sunset and the view was amazing. Equally amazing was the old mariachi who came up and gave us his best "Besame Mucho" as we ate. Also, YU bought a kite from a vendor on the beach. It was a good meal.

We ate Hagen Daz afterwards, then caught the bus back to the spot and hit the sack. You know how we do.

Anyways the next day was another travel day. We caught a cramped VW bug taxi to the bus station, which turned out to be the wrong bus station in another of those charming failures to communicate that seem utterly infuriating at the time.

We got to the right bus station and they didn't take credit cards, which was downright annoying, but there was a cash machine nearby so eventually it all sorted itself out and we were on the bus back up to Mexico City.

The ride seemed quicker, there were no couples copulating beside us, although there was a carfire on the side of the road that stopped our progress for about ten minutes.

Eventually we got back to MC (no word on whether the car was extinguished or not), rode the subway back to the Chillout Flat, got re-situated and had a decent dinner - I lived on enchiladas, quesadillas and tacos all week - and then headed back to hit the sack for the final time in Mexico.

The next morning was something of a lesson in logistics. We were headed to the airport and decided to take the subway, which turned out to be a pretty involved process that saw us on four different subway lines before we arrived at the station, which featured very little in the way of signs to point us where to go.

So we wandered around for a bit, having given ourselves far less time than would have been optimal, and eventually made it to the terminal with about two hours to go before my flight was due to take off - YU's was set for later in the day.

K, two hours is probably ample time, but for international flights there's a cut-off and given that I had to be at work in LA the next day I really didn't want to mess about.

Turned out it was the wrong terminal. And the monorail was broken. So we dashed through the terminal and caught the bus to the right building, which was fifteen miles away on a donkey path that our driver dared not take at more than 5 kph.

Eventually we made it, my blood pressure boiling. Got to the Delta counter and there were still plenty of people hanging around. We had like an hour and a half, the terminal was cool and spacious and after we got checked in, security was a breeze.

For whatever reason though, the flight was boarding an hour early so after picking up a prepackaged meal and a Gatorade (that was promptly confiscated by the post-boarding security), I said goodbye to YU and got onboard my flight while she waited out the 1.5 hrs before her flight back up to Toronto.

My itinerary took me to Vancouver via Atlanta and Seattle, and though I liked the Atlanta airport more this time than before, I was still pretty pissed at it b/c due to the ridiculousness of Terminal T, I had to go through security two more times, thus effing with my layover window and preventing me from having a decent meal. Plus I almost had to buy a James Patterson novel but escaped with Cormac McCarthy instead.

Anyway the flights were relatively uneventful. I had that decent meal in Seattle instead of Atlanta and the waitress chatted me up about my job, which was fairly humanizing on a long travel day. And I was exhausted.

My final flight left Seattle at like 11 and I got into Vancouver at midnight-ish on my birthday, clearing Customs at like 12:05 in my first official act as a 26-year-old.

I got my car out of valet, gassed her up outside the airport and bombed it back to Coquitlam, where I dumped luggage, slept for seven hours and got up and went back to the airport again to fly down to LA, where I spent my birthday in a hotel room in Commerce, cold and *sob* alone.

Anyway that's the story. If you've made it this far, I fear for you.

But Mexico was pretty incredible. I kind of enjoyed being out of my comfort zone and I certainly enjoyed spending the time with YU. Plus the beach time was spectacular, so it was a pretty good birthday/spring break present.

At the moment, I've just returned from Germany, so I'll write about that in a few days and it will be both shorter and more interesting than this travelogue, which I think serves mainly as a memory-catcher for me.

Besame Mucho!

I'm usually pretty reflective (read: depressed) on my birthday. This year, not so much, even as I'm sitting in Commerce, California, having gorged on room service and with Don Henley and Bruce Hornsby's "The End of the Innocence" on my iTunes.

Truthfully, 26 isn't a huge milestone. I mean I guess I'm nearly in my late 20s and I still don't feel anything like a bona fide adult, but I had about a million people wish me happy birthday on Facebook or Skype or whatever so I think I can live without forcing myself to become depressed and feeling obligated to feel reflective.

Besides, I've had a pretty humdrum day by my standards. My first act as a 26-year-old was to clear Canadian customs at midnight on the tail end of my trifecta of flights from Mexico City to Vancouver.

I picked up my car, stopped for gas, drove out to Coquitlam and went to sleep for six hours, woke up, unpacked, repacked, called a cab and headed back to the airport. Cleared American customs, cleared security, checked my myriad email accounts for the first time in eight days (always interesting) ate Burger King and hopped a plane for LA. Total time in Vancouver: 12 hours.

Flew to LA alongside a middle-aged couple who leaned over me to look out the window and wonder aloud where Alcatraz and Silicon Valley as we were on final approach to LAX. They were nice though. Fascinated by my job, though the guy found it unbelievable that they only use one deck at a time in tournament poker, as opposed to the five or six at a time he was expecting, blackjack style.

Anyways, so the flight came in from the East and it was clear enough that from my window seat I could see the Hollywood sign in the distance and I got to dreaming about what it would be like to live beneath it. Basically to work in the movie business.

And I realized that today, on my 26th birthday, I'm kind of in the interesting position of being able to dream about something without having to actually feel obligated to work for it. I'm not saying it's a good thing.

Most of the time, if I were to dream about being in the movie business I'd immediately feel guilty about not doing enough to get my foot in the door or whatever, but at the moment I have a number of lines cast out and even if none of them bear any, um, fish, until they come up empty I can feel good about my prospects. So I can dream away without actually having to wake up and do anything.

That said, I feel increasingly motivated to actually get out and work towards the fulfillment of my dreams. I mean I feel pretty useless whenever I spend my free time doing something less than productive, or even marginally productive like, say, reading (and don't kid yourself; I think if you want to be a writer you have to do a lot of reading).

I think this is interesting (and kind of a good thing) because, when it comes down to it, I'm gainfully employed. I have a good, fun, interesting job and really there should be no pressure to do anything else but punch the proverbial time card, bust my ass for 10-15 hours and punch out again. But if I just do that I wind up feeling like I'm selling myself short.

So hopefully that translates into my getting off my ass and writing. At the very least it's translated into my not being entirely satisfied in a good, fun, interesting job and my being willing to walk away from it, from a steady paycheque, from a great group of friends and a lifetime of priceless experiences in the hope that by some combination of serendipity and blind luck I'll be able to make a living doing what I want to make a living doing.

Anyways I guess when I start hauling in the metaphorical lines this spring we'll see just how much cause I have to dream. And maybe in six months I'll feel a lot less happy walking away from that job, that paycheque, and that group of friends.

***

Random cultural thoughts:

Young Jeezy. Dude has put out three solid rap albums, probably shipped some major numbers, and yet as far as I can tell Soulja Boy gets more publicity than dude. Jeezy is like the most anonymous successful rapper in the world. TI, Weezy and Ludacris all get plenty of ink but damned if I could tell you the first thing about what Jeezy does when he's not ad-libbing cocaine-related metaphors.

Cormac McCarthy. Holy fuck. I ran out of books on the flight home from Mexico and very nearly found myself buying a James Patterson novel. Instead I picked up No Country for Old Men, even though I'd seen the movie. I thought dude's spare style worked in The Road because it matched the post-apocalyptic wasteland he was writing about, but it worked even better in lawless 1980 Texas. My God. And the dialogue.

I think the mark of really good writing is when you feel like you have to read something over and over again, sentence by sentence and paragraph by paragraph, because you're afraid of missing some little hidden bit of genius. I feel like that when I read Raymond Chandler, Michael Chabon and yeah, Cormac McCarthy. The man just gives you the bare bones and assumes you'll be smart enough to follow along and the result is breathtaking. Hot damn.

I also read:

Into the Wild, which was interesting in that I felt it portrayed someone who was kind of like me. The kid couldn't stop moving, would never have been satisfied with a 'normal' life - and was so arrogant as to think he could go out into nature ill-prepared and survive. Uh, sounds like me, right down to the false perception of invincibility.

Boys Will Be Boys, which could have been called "Orgies of the Dallas Cowboys, 1989-1996". Basically a tell-all about the Dallas Cowboys during the 1990s when they were basically fighting, fucking, snorting, drinking and injecting everyone and everything they came across while simultaneously winning bocoo football games and earning major figures for doing it.

I mean it was kind of titillating male wish-fulfillment and kind of sensationalist pap, but even though the author was seemingly too concerned with coming off as street or cool with his metaphors he still did a decent job portraying a bunch of rich young men behaving badly. And hell, I read it on the beach. It was a good beach book.

I also finished The Kite Runner and yeah, lynch me, but dude kind of fell off in the later chapters. I mean it was obvious he was a first-time novelist. I loved the book and I thought it was a great piece of fiction, but [SPOILER] you can't have two references to children committing suicide, including a ten-year-old or whatever slitting his wrists, at the end of a story in which everything that can possibly wrong goes wrong.

And [FURTHER SPOILER] Assef coming back to represent the most evil of evil was just a little pat for my liking.

But I loved the book. Hassan's character was heartbreaking and the man portrayed Afghan culture as being so rich and so accessible. Definitely worth the read, but I'm saying though. If dude had been writing about white people in New York or something I would have probably found the book a little tiresome. I guess that's racist.

Okay I'm going to bed. I'm no longer the birthday boy but it was a pretty good day.

O

So the other day I was bored and looking at photos on Facebook and randomly stumbled across an album by my first-ever girlfriend featuring pictures of her brand-new baby. It pretty well stopped me in my tracks.

I'm wondering if it's weird to find it weird that your exes are having babies. The first time it happened it came accompanied by a press release and pretty much everyone who I work with knew about it, knew the girl, knew the baby daddy and knew the situation, which was a little awkward and definitely weird.

This time it was weird because...I dunno. I can't really come up with a reason beyond the fact that we spoke at Thanksgiving and she never brought it up. And she's always been better than me at keeping in contact. But there was no press release, there's certainly no drama, and we dated like ten years ago, so it really shouldn't be a big deal.

It's not a big deal, but it's not a small deal either. My exes are having kids. I guess that means I'm going to have to start having kids soon (not a chance).

***

I realized since the last time I wrote that last year I actually spent my birthday at a hockey game with nine of my closest friends in Vancouver, including Chuck, who's not a hockey fan and who'd skipped work that day - and who spent the game hiding from his bosses, who happened to be seated in the same section, a few rows ahead of us. And the next day I had a date.

So I wasn't in California on my birthday. But I was two days later, so that still counts imo.

***

Anyways, I'm in Tunica, Mississippi and I'm headed back to Coquitlam tomorrow. I've been here since Sunday and the whole time I've been trying to fight this godawful jet lag.

Basically I've dealt with my Australia jet lag in the most irresponsible way possible. I got back to Canada on Monday and did nothing to change my schedule until Thursday night, when I pulled an all-nighter and then went to the office the next day.

I nearly passed out all day and then got home and went to sleep at 8 p.m., thinking ha, I'll wake up at 8 a.m. and be back on Canadian time. No.

I woke up at 4 p.m. having slept 20 hours and was pretty well effed again. Should have done errands but didn't and that night pulled another all-nighter before catching the plane to Tunica via Chicago.

Somehow, despite my traveling 100k miles on Star Alliance last year, I was in a "B" or middle seat for the first leg of the flight and my hatred of humanity was all-encompassing. Then the woman who had the window seat came and asked me if I wouldn't mind switching so she could sit with her husband and I loved everyone again.

Slept to Chicago and then woke up feeling as though I'd been hit by a bus just in time to wander like a zombie through O'Hare.

When Matt and I started this gig 2.5 yrs ago wandering like a zombie through O'Hare was pretty standard because a) seemingly all of our flights were routed through O'Hare and b) our travel agent booked all of our flights to leave at like 7am, requiring 4am wakeup calls and hellacious travel days. So in that respect it was a bit of nostalgia. Nostalgia tinged with hell.

Ate McDonalds, checked my email and got on the flight to Memphis. Slept the entire way. Woke up and wandered like a zombie through the Memphis airport, then caught a cab the 45 minutes to Tunica, feeling half-dead the entire time.

Checked-in, wrote an article, watched the Super Bowl (awesome) and slept like 12 hours, only to wake up feeling like a zombie once more. Iunno.

Since then I've worked 14 hours, slept eight, worked four hours and should have gone to sleep early but instead played poker for a good seven hours instead. And made a profit, which meant I wasted another hour tossing and turning thinking about how I'm going to become a pro poker player, which always happens whenever I finish up even a penny online.

W/e, today I worked some more and then didn't work. My one regret from my time in Tunica is that I didn't eat at the buffet, which seems to me to be the only reason to come to Tunica.

Instead, I had room service one night and the next wandered over to the casino at 3 a.m. after I'd finished playing poker. The only place that was open was this random greasy take-out cafe with like fifteen thuggish dudes crowding the one employee and flirting hardcore with her while I waited to order.

Eventually I ordered the only thing they had left at that hour (a cheeseburger) and ate it at a table while in the background the TV blared - I shit you not (no pun intended) - an infomercial for commercial-grade colon cleaning, replete with graphic description of the toxic fecal tar that builds up in your intestines. Perfect cheeseburger accompaniment.

Utterly grossed-out, I went back to my hotel and fantasized about my new life as a pro poker player.

***

Actually, I profited a little better than a penny online that night. I played a bunch of Stars MTTs, including a $55 (cashed out for $100) and some $4 SNGs that I more or less broke even on.

But I went deep in a $33 on Stars, largely because I ran like God. To wit:

- picked up aces literally on the money bubble and had a guy with about 4/5ths my stack pick up kings. Aces held, he's busto, I'm chipleader.

- picked up aces a few hands later, raise pf and get two callers. Flop comes 7-6-5 all clubs (I have the ace of clubs). I bet, raise, all-in, I'm all-in and the raiser gets all-in too. AA v. JJ (no clubs) v. KQ of clubs. Deuce of clubs on the turn and I bust them both.

- raise with 88 in mid-position and get two callers. Flop 9-8-8. Somehow I manage to keep both players in the pot until the river with betting on every street. River's an ace, meaning the guy with A-K is willing to pay me off and the guy with 9-9 is moving all-in. So I bust 99 and take most of A-K's stack.

I also made a couple plays I was pretty proud of, including snapping off some guy's bluff with 44 on a 10-10-9 board after flatting his raise out of the BB. I check, he ships, I think then call and he turns up A-K.

Another one I took a large chunk of a guy's stack calling him down with 88 on a queen-high board after he limp-called my raise from UTG.

So at one point I outchip the rest of my table combined. Eventually we're down to two tables and I'm back to fourth in chips or so. The guy on my left is probably 6th in chips and has 75% of my stack. But he's a bastard.

Seems like every time I raise he ships over the top, and I'm mainly raising to steal so he's massively over-betting like once a round. So whatever, I figure I'll wait him out and bust him eventually.

So w/ten people left I'm in the sb with about 600k, villain in bb and the button limps. I have AK in the sb and I raise. BB instantly moves all-in for 550k over the top. Button folds, I snap-call and turn up A-K.

BB is toast with K-Q and I'm feeling it. Flop comes A-Q-x and I'm now 90% to win the hand, take a massive chip lead to the final table and probably bank a decent four-figure score (first was like $8k). Turn's a brick but the river's a queen, giving dude the massive pot and crippling me.

I bust a few hands later on the final table bubble and wind up with $400 for my time. So sick. I guess I'm not so so mad b/c I did run like God (once busted a guy A-Q v QQ when the flop brought two aces), and besides I've cashed $1k in a week and am running a 155% ROI in 2009 (unsustainable, obv), but to lose such a golden opportunity when my best-laid plan lost to an 8% suckout is kind of annoying.

The other problem is I'm now going to focus on playing online poker far too much in the next while. Good thing I'm not bringing my laptop to Mexico.

***

In other news, I'm reading the Kite Runner and it's really good thus far. I was kind of dreading it because I mean, I've read Rohinton Mistry and M.G. Vassanji and kind of thought, meh. I mean, they were good books, but I tend to hone in on stuff written by disenfranchised white men about disenfranchised white men and so I was always having to force myself to pick them up and keep reading. But let me say that Khaled Hosseini makes Afghanistan seem incredible, culturally and geographically, and besides that, I'm ashamed to say I feel like I identify with Amir, the protagonist, in most of the ways I'd rather not identify with him.

And Bangkok Dangerous was a bad movie. [Spoiler] You really can't end a movie with the protagonist blowing his own brains out unless you've really, REALLY earned it. It's like writing about cancer. You're really treading a fine line between cliche and melodrama. Bangkok Dangerous did not earn the overwrought suicide scene. So, fail.

***

Right, I guess I'd better get some sleep. I've just had a two-hour Skype meeting with Donkeyshire about news writing and though I'm not exactly discouraged (the opposite, in fact), I foresee some challenges ahead.

O

"Every time you look at someone new," Donkeyshire said as we watched girls walk into the Crown Casino in Melbourne, "you decide whether they're someone you'd want to sleep with. The trick is to realize that they're doing the same thing and to capitalize on it."

He then proceeded to illustrate his point by recounting a story of how as a social experiment he'd finished one night in Toronto's club district approaching women and telling them they were beautiful. Within the span of three women he'd apparently found a receptive audience and by the end of the night had what turned into a long-term relationship.

I forget what we were talking about that kick-started the conversation, but it had to do with sex and in specific, one-night stands. Apparently people sleep with each other based simply on mutual physical attraction. Moonlanding, I know, but seriously this is something that sort of mystifies me.

Donkeyshire's eventual point (after he'd described in no uncertain terms how he'd seduced this apparent clubland princess and made her his own for a period no less than three months) was that in his opinion there's no reason that sex should require any sort of emotional connectedness. I guess that's the definition of lust.

He asked me why I thought otherwise and I couldn't really give him an answer. I still can't, but I'm not running around having one-night stands, either. That's just how it is, and obviously I sometimes wish I could be different, but whatever.

My eventual point, I guess, is that either I'm screwed up emotionally or there are people who can't just fuck on lust alone. One is more comforting than the other.

***

Anyways for all the trouble I had getting to Mississippi and getting my luggage to Australia you would think that getting back to Vancouver from Melbourne would have been no simpler than circumnavigating the globe, Magellan style.

In actuality, it was a trip that ranks among the best international travel days of my experience, even moreso because I spent the week in Melbourne dreading the 14-hour flight to LAX, the US customs gauntlet, the five-hour layover and the three hours to YVR. Everything worked out swimmingly.

So my luggage arrived after about 48 hours missing, which lets me claim the clothing I had to buy from Quantas, although I don't know if I'll go through with that or not. In addition, the hotel charged me $3 for a disposable toothbrush and mini tube of toothpaste, which is retarded since it was a baller hotel but there was nothing I could do.

Marty and I managed to get some work done over the course of the week and capped it with a day off in Melbourne and some tickets to watch some tennis at the Australian Open, courtesy the big homey Jonno at the Crown Casino.

So we hit up the tennis and caught some decent quarter-final matches between people I'd never heard of, joined by the main CardPlayer geezer Ryan Lucchesi before bouncing to explore the grounds, eat some curry and try to get some Williams sisters action in the free doubles matches, which were packed to the gunnels and totally unaccessible.

Back into the paid seats then for a match between Andy Roddick and his personal whipping boy. The match lasted all of an hour and a half and saw Roddick dust the poor sap in straight sets while busting out his 220 kph serve. Pretty sick to watch.

We were out by six or so and I spent the night watching Con Air and devouring some room service.

Anyways on to the flight. Noon out of Melbourne so we were out of the hotel by 9:30, got to the airport with time to spare for Donkeyshire to dig himself from the dog house by buying his girl some Uggs and then doing the check-in, passport control and securidad thing, all of which was a breeze.

So we had time to kill, which involved our eating, trying on sunglasses and Derbyshire looking for a nice children's book without too many big words for the flight home. Eventually we made it to the gate and found our plane, which turned out to be a two-week old Quantas Airbus A380, aka the big homey of the skies.

It's a double-decker beast of a plane, the biggest and newest of them all, and as a bit of a transportation geek I was, well, geeked out to be aboard it. Situation improved even more when it became apparent that the plane was about half full and that the people beside me were the kind of upwardly mobile sort who wanted their own row of seats. Bingo.

So I had three seats to myself for those 14 hours across the Pacific, and in other news a) Quantas hands out popsicles and b)the in-flight entertainment had the Best Picture Oscar winners for the last 38 years loaded into the system. So I watched the Godfather II and The Departed, crashed for four hours and then breezed through Jose Canseco's Juiced before watching the landing on my movie screen, which was tapped into a video camera on the tail of the plane. Amazing!

Right, so the first and most daunting part of the trip was over, but US Customs lines are typically a bitch, particularly when you're getting off the world's biggest plane in the mess that is LAX and you're Canadian, meaning even though you get smooth entry into the States you still have to stand with the rest of the rabble, all of whom get their foreign asses booked, fingerprinted and photographed like jail house floozies before being set loose on the In-N-Out Burgers and Hertz Rent-A-Cars.

Win #2 occurred, however, as Donkeyshire and I were shucking and jiving through the mass of slow-moving mouth-breathers headed to the Visitors customs line. Someone (Jesus in disguise) gestured in our direction and pointed us down the hall to a bank of newly-opened customs booths, each with about three people in line. So we booked it down there and within minutes were in the United States proper, ahead even of the main CardPlayer geezer (and confirmed American) Ryan.

Luggage came out within seconds of our approaching the conveyor and within minutes we were out into a sunny Los Angeles morning, each a little giddy about our success and probably squirrely from being cooped up in that plane for so long.

Walked to the next terminal, checked in on Alaska, beat the security line-up when another Jesus in disguise pointed us to an underused line-up in the bowels of Terminal 3 and within moments were indulging in the free wireless and a couple of morning Whoppers as we awaited our flight.

Donkeyshire alternated cybersexxing with Tim Vance and assuring his lady he'd got the Uggs and I played online scrabble and suddenly three hours were up and we were laughing at the pilots as we got on board our flight to YVR. I passed out, woke up as we touched down in Vancouver, cleared customs and got my luggage without a problem. Caught a cab back to Coquitlam and was home free.

So, a pretty sick trip home, although I remain afflicted with the terror that is jet-lag. I've spent the week sloughing off all responsibility, including school paperwork, actual work and anything resembling getting my body back on a North American time schedule.

I spent Wednesday night playing $4 180-man SNGs on Stars and took down two back to back for a $400 payday, went to bed at 7am and woke up at 4pm, bummed around all day and then did the same thing the next night, except I cleared only $150 and had to go to work the next morning.

Which I did, sans sleep, and managed to last out a day of meetings and paperwork while simultaneously Erica was being looked over by a bunch of $110-an-hour wratchet monkeys. When I went to pick her up after work the diagnosis was grim, and I'm not even going to get into it because I'm waiting for the entire situation to sort itself out before I unload with a massive, angry post (there will be tears) and possibly a movie deal.

Cliffs Notes: In August I wanted new wheels and tires for my car. Since then (and it is now February in spirit if not in reality) I have lost all faith in humanity (particularly in the world of cars and their parts) and spent $XX,XXX trying to make new wheels a reality. It depresses me just to think about the Breitling I could have bought with that money.

Anyways tomorrow I go to Memphis (Tunica) for five days or so and then am back for a weekend before I head to Mexico City with Yummy Udon where, if I believe everyone who I've told about the trip, I will be murdered thirteen times before I reach the hotel. We're spending three nights there and three in Acupulco and I paid for the trip with Alaska air miles so even if I die, I will not leave much credit card debt behind.

After that I go to the City of Commerce, California (sigh), for my birthday and two weeks following it. It's the third year in a row I'll spend my birthday in Cali and the second in Commerce (an industrial slum outside of Los Angeles) and every year I swear I won't do it again. On the plus side, there's plenty of Europe in my future.

That's what's up.

***

So as I said, I read "Juiced" on the plane ride home and apart from the requisite chapters about the steroids Canseco had done, the fast cars he'd driven and the fast women he'd slept with, there was a chapter on the media. Long story short, all media writers are jock-sniffing wannabes who are a) racist and b) out to get every player because they're racist jock-sniffing wannabes.

It basically summed up why I'd never want to be a sports reporter and why even my current occupation sometimes seems stale. Like, I love hockey but I'd hate to work a hockey beat for the Vancouver Province or whatever. I played hockey. I aspired to be a professional hockey player as a kid. I still harbour illusions that I could have been one had I not quit playing rep hockey at age 14 because I didn't like the stress.

Becoming a hockey writer would be buying-in to the idolization of the people I wanted to be and reminding myself of how much of a failure I'd turned out to be in that regard, even if I don't regard myself as a failure on the whole.

I think in some ways it's selfishness or narcissism or whatever. I want the story to be about me. I want to be the one idolized, not the one sucking-up to Taylor Pyatt for a quote in the locker room. I certainly don't want to be seen as a sniveling wannabe by people who I would actually want to be as I'm trying to do my job.

And that's why I will not be a sports reporter.

***

In cultural consumption news, I saw Revolutionary Road with The Orifice the other day and was struck by a few things: a) Loved the movie but the book was better. Much better. b) Kate Winslet is an amazing actress. She's also damn beautiful. c) The movie was lost on the teenaged date crew that filled the theatre, all of whom filed out after the movie was over complaining that it sucked. Wha?

Basically, Revolutionary Road sums up my point of view on life, which is to say, settling down in the suburbs = death, and to get comfortable = to be mediocre. Also, move to Paris for the love of God.

I also watched Eagle Eye and I'm fixing to watch Bangkok Dangerous as soon as this post is done. Eagle Eye was much better than I thought it would be and was a pretty great action movie, even if it made no sense how the computer would have such omnipotence over some aspects of the people's lives and yet let Shia TheBeef and Michelle Monaghan (playing 29 pretty well, imo), to say nothing of Billy Bob Thornton wander around and get close enough to actually destroy her. W/e, pretty explosions.

Also and finally, how come nobody ever told me "Gimme Shelter" by the Rolling Stones is so great? There's an amazing montage in The Departed that feeds off this song and upon further reflection, the song stands up pretty well on its own.

That's all. If anyone has any suggestions for baller wheels for my car, please submit. Also, if anyone knows who has my Undeclared box set, ship it.

O

I travel for a living. It's a pretty rewarding existence and there are tons of things about it that I'll inevitably miss. It's a way of life that has the constant potential to become incredibly frustrating. Lines. Security checks. Crying babies. Internet problems. Deep vein thrombosis. Not particularly fun. All constant threats.

Generally, though, I deal with the little audibles pretty well. Shit happens and most of the time it doesn't happen. Lately, though, I've started to feel a little snakebit.

Since November, the following travel bad beats have occurred:

1. I was sent to Las Vegas. Brutal beat.

2. Trip home from Warsaw delayed 32 hours after I miss connection in Amsterdam, wait five hours in line only to be sworn at by KLM agent. Spend night in Amsterdam hotel, which is not nearly as fun as everyone assumes it would be.

3. Finally get home from Warsaw/Amsterdam only to discover luggage that I offloaded in Toronto and reloaded after customs has failed to make the trip to Vancouver. Plus I lost my baggage receipt.

4. Fly to Mexico in December. Tournament canceled due to Federales. Alright that's not a bad beat, but it's certainly out of the ordinary.

5. Spent less than 48 hours in Atlantic City after scheduling mishap.

6. On expensive cross-country train ride over New Years, brutal winter weather freezes 75% of toilets on the train.

7. On first work trip of 2009, someone leaves the airplane lights on all night and the battery dies. Delayed five hours in YVR, miss connection in Houston, re-route to New Orleans and forced to take a late-night car service the 100 or so miles to my hotel. Sans baggage, which doesn't come for two days.

I guess none of these things are sooo out of the ordinary, but to have them happen in rapid succession left me wondering just what was waiting in store for me on my flights from Mississippi to Melbourne, Australia over the last few days, particularly since my ticket reservation for the trans-Pacific flight promised that my seat would be assigned at check-in. Meaning there was a strong possibility I would be riding bitch for a fifteen-hour clip.

***

Anyways, before all of that transpired, I was in Vancouver with Ariane just after New Years. We spent a couple days exploring the West End and Chinatown and then hopped a bus to Victoria. We took the new BC Ferry, which was pretty cool and everyone else on the boat seemd to think so too. I walked past a woman who was on the phone gushing about the "minty and blue linoleum" in the bathrom.

Right, ate terrible greasy ferry food and then rode the bus into Victoria, where it was raining like a champ and where Ariane met her friend, who took her off to do her own thing while I caught a cab to my grandmother's apartment.

Spent the next two days visiting my grandmother, wandering around Victoria in the rain, buying armloads of books (it's an addiction) and hanging out with my uncle and his rambunctious year-old black lab, who is being trained to be a guide-dog but who had the attention span of a child OD'd on Reese's Puffs. Last time I saw that dog was last February and he was a few months old and the size of a house cat; now he's fully grown and looks like he eats house cats. Lovable dog but I had to keep reminding myself not to fawn all over him.

Anyways my grandmother is going to Hawaii and somehow Andrew has wrangled an invite alongside so spent a bit of time helping her prepare for that, and for him. But mostly just kind of hung out and did nothing. Tried to get grad school apps ready.

After a couple days I met up with Ariane again and we took the bus/ferry/bus back over to Vancouver. Spent the night in the Howard Johnson on Granville Street, which was pretty sketch and didn't even have curtains that covered the entirety of the windows. Bizarre. Anyways we ate dinner at a Thai place on Robson and watched Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist, which was better than the critics made it out to be, which is to say, about as good as I thought it would be after watching the trailer.

Side note: I really, REALLY want to see Revolutionary Road and I'm afraid I know no one who will see it with me. The preview makes it look as boring as dirt, but the book was amazing and Kate Winslet won a Golden Globe for it so I think it must be good, but I'm afraid that by the time I can convince someone to watch it with me it will all be too late and the film will be out of theaters. Save me!

Right, so the next day we looked around for a breakfast place and settled on the Cafe S'Il Vous Plait on Robson and like Richards. It was alright but nothing really special. Small portions. Then caught a bus in the pouring rain out to the airport and got Ariane on her plane back out to Toronto. I made the executive decision to rent a car for the next few days and got saddled with a Nissan Versa, which was wholly uninspiring but I guess a decent ride.

Spent the next couple of days doing not much but watching football and running errands. Happy to see the Cardinals go as far as they have. Got a haircut. Then the Orifice came over and we watched a couple movies, namely The Strangers, which was terrifying (and one of the best thrillers I've ever seen) and Tropic Thunder, which was just as amazing on a big screen with surround sound as it was on an airplane with screaming babies.

Then the next morning I woke up at 4:30 am, drove out to the airport and proceeded to sit on my ass at YVR for hours on end until a new battery for the (Continental Airlines) plane could be trucked in from Seattle.

Eventually the plane took off and flew me to Houston, where I had an unappealing meal in the airport restaurant before flying to New Orleans. Driver met me in New Orleans but luggage didn't and I pretended to sleep over the next hour and a half it took to get to Biloxi, Mississippi, just so I could avoid having to talk.

My luggage didn't show up until around midnight the following evening, despite it arriving in Biloxi at nine a.m. So I spent the day in the same clothes I'd worn the day before (plus souvenir hoodie), yelling at various Continental Airlines agents before feeling bad about it because they were all competent and helpful.

Spent the next four days or so in Mississippi, watching a rather uninspiring and at times comical performance and hanging out with my American friends, most of whom I hadn't seen since October and before my eye surgery. We ate terrible buffet food, terrible barbecue food and then on the last night, Waffle House, which was incredible.

Before Saturday, all I knew of the Waffle House was a Jay-Z verse about "4 a.m. we at the Waffle House" or something and then at 6:15 a.m. he's got his knob polished and she out the door. You know how it is. Anyways the Waffle House was totally worth prolonging oral sex for. For $6.99 you get a waffle, two eggs, two dried-out and uninspiring sausage patties, toast and the famous hash browns, whose fame is justified. And further you can be rasped at by an elderly waitress who calls you "Hon" and who tries to cajole you into just one more glass of Hi-C. Truly incredible. Loved it.

Right, got a few hours of sleep after the waffle epiphany and then Kaelaine drove me to the Biloxi airport, where I ate Arby's and waited four hours for a flight to Memphis. Got to Memphis, connected to Los Angeles without much sweat, walked to the Tom Bradley Terminal, ate dinner and hopped a Quantas 747 for the 14.5 hour flight down to Melbourne.

The flight wasn't bad. I was in seat 71A, which was at the very back of the plane where the fuselage starts to taper. So there was a gap between my seat and the window which meant I couldn't lean against the fuselage but I could stretch my feet out. The food was good, my seatmate wasn't annoying and after watching Death Race (atrocious), I passed out for a good ten hours before waking up just in time to decline the breakfast option.

Landed in Melbourne at about 9:30am local time, hooked up with Dani and Ray, our video guys, cleared customs and under the eyes of a watchful security beagle settled in to wait for our luggage. Ray's came pretty quickly, but neither mine nor Dani's showed up. After waiting a half hour we retreated to the Quantas desk where they told us yes, our baggage would be here...tomorrow. Obviously no compensation unless the bags failed to show within 24 hours.

Honestly, I didn't really care. Or more accurately, I've grown to accept it. The Quantas lady was nice and no arguing was going to get my bag from LA to Oz any quicker so I took the claim number and headed out into the Melbourne morning, where it was incredibly hot and forecast to get hotter.

The high today was 33 degrees or something. My travel attire was jeans, a long-sleeved tee-shirt and a hoodie. That didn't work. Anyways we checked into our reasonably baller hotel and set out to the outlet mall to buy a new wardrobe. I hooked up with flip flops, shorts, a ridiculous tee-shirt (everyone in the mall was wearing these smarmy "cool" tee-shirts that made them look like coked-out beach bum frat boys; my tee-shirt is more absurd than cool, pics to follow) and a Lacoste polo that was on sale. Because I guess I'm a brand whore. Then I had an awful Slurpee and came back to the hotel where I remain at 6pm, getting ready to eat dinner and enjoying the Melbourne skyline outside, where the sun hasn't even thought about setting.

Melbourne is a pretty great city. I haven't been able to find anything too notable about it in the few days I've had to walk around, but it's clean, it's modern and the casino is on the banks of a river with a small park on the opposite bank. There are plenty of happy people wandering around enjoying the summer and everyone seems pleasant enough. I'm going to be at work for the next four days but I'll have a day off on Sunday before flying home on Monday. And seeing Revolutionary Road, damn it.

***

I'm finishing Annie Proulx's "Close Range" collection of short stories right now. She's a magnificent writer and her stories are incredible. I'm kind of on Wyoming overload now after having chewed up five or six on the flights down here, but the woman can certainly evoke not only a sense of place, but the sense of desperation that is inherent in the characters who inhabit that place. Thanks Mad for the recommendation.

Next on the docket is Jose Canseco's "Juiced". I've decided to mix fluff with substance here, since I've got some silly books I'm dying to read along with the serious stuff. Juiced is among the former, as is Jeff Perlman's "Boys Will Be Boys" about the 1990s Dallas Cowboys and, if I can get a hold of them for cheap, biographies of Slash and Motley Crue. And another Raymond Chandler novel. In the serious section are The Kite Runner and its sequel, Atonement, Carol Shields' Unless and biographies of Charles Schultz and Andrew Carnagie.

***

Because I feel obliged to write something about 2008, here are some random New Year notes that will be the last things I write about last year. Yeah, these are things I discovered last year, not necessarily that came out last year:

Best Movies: Slumdog Millionaire, The Strangers, Milk, Quantum of Solace
Biggest Letdowns: Zack and Miri Make A Porno; Passchendaele
Best Books: Jay McInerney's Bright Lights Big City, Jay McInerney's The Good Life, Raymond Chandler's Trouble Is My Business, Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policeman's Union, Bret Easton Ellis' Lunar Park, Annie Proulx's Close Range
Best Albums: Springsteen's Magic, Cut Copy's In Ghost Colours, Robyn, Young Jeezy's The Inspiration
Best Sax Solo: Cut Copy - Hearts on Fire
Best Artists Whose Music Sounds Like It Should Be In the Boss Levels of Some Japanese Sega Genesis Side-Scroller: Bag Raiders (especially Fun Punch)
Best Love Song: Leona Lewis - Bleeding Love
Best Rap Song: Young Jeezy - Put On
Best Dance Song: Britney Spears - Break The Ice
Best Rap Artist Who Arguably Sounds Better Hollering Over The Beat Than Actually Rapping: Kardinal Offishall
Music To Drive Home To: Chuck Dollarsign
Guilty Pleasure Dance Song: Bob Sinclair - World Hold On
Guiltier Pleasure: Nickelback, dammit
"Best" Lyric: "I'ma tell you like George Bush told me: fuck you n****s I'm out of here."

Favorite Places: Active Pass, Maple Leaf Lounges, Prague, the dome car, Argyle Shores, Welland Vale, Punta del Este, Barcelona, Ogden Point, Clinton Street, Red Rock Canyon, Peppermill

Moments: Standing in the airport in Melbourne realizing I'd be in Germany after a week in Vancouver; Marty calling the cab driver a Eurodonk in Dortmund; Flying over the Canadian Arctic without a cloud in the sky; the Cactus Club in February; Springsteen opening with "Atlantic City" and converting me into a fan; Celebrities for Kara's birthday; enduring the Greyhound to Calgary; writing in Dublin; "helping" Neil Channing celebrate his win; Erica Schoenberg telling me how much she liked my writing in Vegas; chopping the Sahara tournament; drinking with the team on the first night in Vegas; Red Rock Canyon with Andrew and Mike; Walking the beach in PEI with my parents; Stealing the Siktilt car in Uruguay with Mad; driving into the Thompson River canyon with the Orifice; Driving back from Toronto listening to The Refreshments with Aaron; Watching Aaron and Mellissa get married; Spending the evening in Kingston with Yummy Udon; Discovering Barcelona; burnt ends at the barbecue joint in SoHo; sleeping after the WSOPE final table; Thanksgiving with the family at Wolfgang Puck; getting Lasik; Obama; skating at Harbourfront; the beach in Mexico; TGIFridays in Prague; Driving home for Xmas with A and T; Christmas morning in St. Catharines; Snow dusting the train leaving Toronto; New Year's Eve in Northern Ontario.

Did I forget anything?

New Years Resolutions: Start running, start writing

I'm out!

O

I thought about writing a New Years post or some sort of wrap-up but in the end I couldn't be bothered. Plus I was on a train from the 30th to January 3rd so I kind of missed my chance. Anyways, I hope everyone had a happy holiday and didn't choke to death on their own vomit hours into 2009. The real pros wait until January 2nd for that stuff.

So I spent a nice Christmas in St. Catharines with the family. Got there on the 17th and Yummy Udon came into town for a visit on the 18th, which was nice, although for the life of me I can't remember much of what we did besides getting my mom's Prius stuck in the crazy snowstorms and roaming the malls dodging tweens.

The tweens in St. Cats weren't nearly enough for us, though, so we went to Toronto on the 21st and hit up Yorkdale Mall for even more of the aforementioned, being joined in the act by my textual predator brother Andrew and nearly managing to work through our Christmas lists - while simultaneously working through a style overhaul courtesy Andrew and Banana Republic - before succumbing to exhaustion and escaping to the snowbound streets.

Spent the night in Toronto at Casa del Udon, eating good cheap Mexican food on Bloor and then braving the terrors of winter to hit up the Ice Lounge on the Danforth, where Yummy Udon's friend's boyfriend was celebrating his birthday by pouring Grey Goose and spraying champagne while the DJ bumped Lady Gaga in a private lounge. We lasted a couple hours and then went home.

The next day I picked up Terry and caught up with Andrew and the three of us headed back down the QEW to St. Cats, making a quick stop for Wendy's/Dairy Queen and a long stop for traffic. Got the kids home and we spent the next few days getting ready for Christmas by wandering the malls again, watching terrible TV and loading up on booze.

Anyways we celebrated my mom's birthday with Chinese food and then my dad came home and eventually it was Christmas and everything was suitably wonderful. Everyone loved their presents and we ate well and were lazy all day and yeah, sugarplums danced etc. It was good.

After Christmas Andrew fled for the big city and then my dad tried (and almost failed) to make his getaway back to the small city, only to be foiled by terrible weather and stalled in Montreal. Terry and I spent a few days with my mom and the cats, watching the World Juniors, eating McDonald's and playing online poker before we, too, fled back to Toronto.

Spent a day in Toronto searching for ear muffs (long story) before hooking up with YU at her domicile and playing Rock Band with her family all night. We also watched the world's worst movie, entitled "Dark Rising" and starring one of her friends - I bought it for $5 at Walmart. On the plus side, it had monsters, lesbians and a heroine in a leather bikini. All it needed was heavy machinery and it was a 12-year-old's wet dream.

The next day was spent getting ready for our train ride across the country. I take the train more often than I change my underwear (not really but), but this ride would be special b/c we were riding first class over New Years and thus it would be incredible or something.

Train left Toronto at 10ish in the evening and we spent the day packing and procrastinating, only to find ourselves rushing to the station and furiously repacking outside the boarding area. Eventually we got on board, found our berths and settled in for four days of glamour, romance and toilets backed up by the frozen, -40 degree weather outside.

It was fun, though. We left Toronto beneath the city lights and a light snowfall and after some champagne fell asleep somewhere in the Muskokas. Woke up in Sudbury and then for good a few miles down the line and spent the day comfortably half-asleep in Northern Ontario, which was snowy and monotonous and beautiful.

That night was New Years Eve and we ate an incredible five-course meal with a retired schoolteacher from Kelowna before spending the last hours of 2008 up in the dome car somewhere in the middle of nowhere, sipping champagne and cocktails while sugar-crazed youngsters ran up and down the aisles passing out party hats and beads like prepubescent Spring Break frat boys.

Anyways then it was 2009. I have to say it was a nice way to spend the evening - no unrealistic expectations, no bars, no line outside the bars, no vomit, no Times Square. Just a comfortable, low-key night that still makes a better story than, "I spent the night watching Mr. Bean specials at my mom's house."

Woke up on January 1st, 2009 in Winnipeg, where the train was stopped for four hours and the weather was around -25. Woke up late and caught up with YU in a convenience store somewhere in downtown Winnipeg. We wandered the deserted streets for an hour or so, checking out the Parliament Buildings, the art gallery and a bar called "High and Lonesome" that made an audacious claim the specifics of which I can't remember. This, too, was a nice way to spend the first day of 2009. The snow was fine and powdery and glittered like diamonds and the air was bracingly cold. The streets were quiet and it felt like we had the city to ourselves. Then we got cold, really cold, and headed to the Forks to look at Hello Kitty merchandise and fake Asian accessories.

After coffee at the Forks we got back on the train and headed back out into the Prairies, which were vast and stark and monotonous. To amuse ourselves we read, played chess (I lost, repeatedly) and ate (the food was amazing) and somewhere along the line we watched Devil's Advocate although I think that was the night before.

Just after Winnipeg an amusing sub-plot to our trip emerged, in that it was so cold outside the toilet lines on half the train froze. In our first sleeping car our bathroom refused to function, which was an inconvenience to us and a major issue for those with bedrooms, who have to ride with their toilet sitting right beside their beds throughout the trip.

We got moved to a different car and thankfully, the toilets remained functional as the rest of the train saw their lines gradually freeze. By the time we got to Vancouver, fully three of the four economy class toilets were out and the conductor spent most of his time ushering the 125 coach class riders back to sample our cisterns.

More great dinner, this time with a rather taciturn couple from Tumbler Ridge, BC, a quick stop in Melville, Saskatchewan, where it was like -40, and then back on the train and asleep once more, this time accompanied not only by the rattle and crash of the train speeding across the plains but by the dulcet tones of the woman across the aisle, who'd loudly hush anyone and everyone who dared speak as they passed her berth.

Woke up somewhere after Edmonton and watched the sun rise over rural Alberta, waiting for the Rockies to arrive. They did. Somehow we managed to finagle seats in the dome car and spent the day in awe of the wonders of the natural world and of the lives of the talkers with whom we shared the lounge.

Jasper was suitably cold and suitably beautiful. We wandered a bit and then sought refuge in the station, jealously watching the other passengers devour their greasy food as we awaited reboarding and our dinner reservation.

Anyways, we got seats in the dome once more and rode out the day watching the sun set between the mountains and watching the other passengers go crazy over photo ops while recovering from our mutual shock that the digestive cookies contained beef.

One last wonderful dinner, this time with a couple of artists from Victoria and then I lost at chess once more before we went to bed. Woke up to snow and thought the train was crazy late, but instead the snowpocalypse had descended on Vancouver and when we arrived that morning the city was under snowbound seige.

I hadn't bothered to insure Erica for December or January (and besides it was snowing!) so transportation was a bit of an issue. I rented a Toyota Matrix and drove it out to Coquitlam, where after a bit of recuperation we headed out to find what I'm told is the only jinjabang in Canada.

A jinjabang is I guess like a bathhouse, but more spiritual, and YU wanted to pay it a visit, so we did. We searched it out and eventually found it behind a women's fitness center and I proceeded to spend the next hour surrounded by naked Russian men, alternating between the hot tub, the sauna, the shower and the "Salt Room." It was more relaxing than I'm letting on and even though there were showers on the train, it felt good to wash the grime off and relax a bit.

The next day we spent two terrible hours digging out the rental car, which had somehow become lodged on a snowbank on the side of the road, and with the help of my landlady we got it going just in time to head downtown and grab lunch at Granville Island. Lunch and pie - A La Mode in the public market was a tradition of ours years ago and was just as good as we remembered it.

Afterwards we checked into a hotel in the West End (Oceanside - good, cheap, a block from Denman and the ocean) and that night we braved yet another terrible snowfall and fifteen stalled buses on the Granville Street bridge to hit up Me and Julios on Commercial Drive. Due to the snow the restaurant was nearly deserted so, for once, finding a table was no problem. The tacos were as great as ever.

Spent the next day at work and then wandered out into Stanley Park, from which the view of the Vancouver lights in the mist at dusk were almost Dickensian. Once the sun had set we watched Canada clinch the World Juniors over Sweden and then headed out for some more wandering, this time to Banana Leaf for Malaysian food and then Death By Chocolate, where the proprietor confronted us with the startling news that he wasn't able to offer us any of their luscious deserts because it was a Monday and, well, the economy. We convinced him otherwise and I tipped him well after we'd enjoyed the eponymous dessert.

Right, the next day we wandered Chinatown in the rain, ate too much Dim Sum and then caught a bus to Victoria. But I think I'll remain about a week behind on this blog and cut things off there. I've written far too much already.

***

Anyways, in the spirit of New Year's lists, here's how I spent 2008:

January:
Woke up January 1st on an Amtrak train outside Seattle and in transit to Vancouver. Spent a couple days in Vancouver before flying to the Bahamas. Worked. Flew from the Bahamas to Melbourne, Australia. Worked. Flew from Australia to Vancouver. Spent a week or so at home.

February:
Flew to Dortmund, Germany. Worked. Flew to Vancouver and immediately drove to Victoria to celebrate my grandmother's birthday. Headed back to Vancouver and quickly caught a 17-hour-bus to Calgary. Spent a week in Red Deer, Alberta, with my friend Phill. Caught another long-ass bus ride home. Flew to Los Angeles. Worked.

March:
Flew back to Vancouver for a few days, then flew to Poland. Worked in Warsaw. Flew to Dublin. Spent three days writing in Dublin and then five days working. Flew back to Vancouver. Saw Bruce Springsteen in concert.

April:
Flew to Rhode Island. Worked at Foxwoods. Flew to Louisville. Worked at Caesars Indiana. Flew back to Vancouver. Spent a few days at home, then flew to Las Vegas. Worked at Bellagio, took a day off and then worked at Caesars Palace.

May:
Flew back to Vancouver. Spent a couple weeks at home. Flew to Costa Rica. Worked. Flew back to Vancouver. Spent a day in Vancouver, then flew to Las Vegas.

June:
Worked in Las Vegas.

July:
Worked in Las Vegas. Then flew back to Vancouver. Spent a few days in Vancouver and then flew to PEI for a much-needed vacation on the beach.

August:
Flew back to Vancouver. Spent a few days in Vancouver and then flew epically to Uruguay. Worked in Uruguay and then flew epically home. From here I believe I went to Victoria for a weekend and then flew to Ontario. Visited my mom and watched three Jays games with Jesse before heading up to Gananoque for the DoJo wedding. Spent a week celebrating.

September:
Flew back from Toronto and spent a few days in Vancouver before flying to Barcelona. Worked. Took an overnight train to Paris and the Eurostar to London. Worked (including a 26-hour-day). Switched hotels. Worked.

October:
Worked in London. Flew to Toronto. Spent a few days with my mom. Moved to the Hilton in Niagara Falls. Worked. Moved back to St. Cats and visited with my mom some more. Spent a day in Toronto and then flew back to Vancouver, where I spent a few more days. Then flew to Chicago.

November:
Worked in Hammond, Indiana. Flew home. Watched Obama make history. Flew to Las Vegas. Worked for a few days. Watched Peter Eastgate make his own kind of history. Flew back to Vancouver, spent 30 hours at home before flying to Poland. Worked in Warsaw. Was delayed in Amsterdam. Finally got back to Vancouver and spent 16 hours on home turf before catching a train to Toronto. Arrived in Toronto. Spent a week with Yummy Udon.

December:
Flew to Mexico. Relaxed. Worked a bit. Relaxed some more. Flew to Prague. Worked some. Flew to Philadelphia. Worked in Atlantic City. Took a train to Buffalo and a cab to St. Cats. Visited my mom. Spent the night in Toronto. Celebrated Christmas with my family. Spent another night in Toronto. Got on a train. Spent New Years on a train in transit to Vancouver.

It was a wild year. Here's hoping this year will be just as wild, if a little more productive.

O

First things first, Merry Christmas, obviously. I used to be kind of a Christmas fanatic - I used to torture my family by demanding that our Christmases conform to the sort of soft-focus ideal that exists only in made-for-TV holiday specials and on adult contemporary radio after Halloween.

Those days are behind me, although I'm sure my family still lives in terror that I'll decide our holiday celebrations don't live up to the ideal and force everyone to watch "I'll Be Home For Christmas" and indulge in long, forced family-bonding sessions that are enjoyed by no one, not even myself.

Anyways I've calmed down about Christmas. I don't know if I enjoy the season more or less but the live and let live philosophy sure makes for a less stressful season. And we had a good one this year. Abbreviated, sure - my dad worked in Prince Edward Island until the 23rd, my mom had to work Christmas Eve day and Andrew headed back to Toronto on Boxing Day - but fun nonetheless.

It's rare that my family spends any amount of time together (I daresay we're approaching the age where my brothers and I should be thinking about starting our own families and having our own Christmas celebrations; trips back home for Christmas always result in our acting not like men in our twenties but like teenagers) and though in some ways it's always kind of challenging to be reminded of the particular foibles of my family members it's still always a wonderful, valuable experience getting to catch up with the people I love.

So, Christmas. I left Prague on the 15th of December, flying Air France to Paris and then connecting to Philadelphia. I slept throughout the flight across the Atlantic and woke up as we were doing doughnuts off Atlantic City. The plane was about an hour late landing in Philadelphia and that, coupled with the broken-down baggage belt inside the terminal, sent the Americans in the crowd into paroxysms of rage.

One man started yelling random things at the top of his lungs while his wife watched proudly beside him. "Eagles game starts in an hour," he yelled. "Wanna get home!" Then he swore. Repeatedly.

Anyways I got my bag and met my driver in the arrivals area. My driver was a short guy from South Jersey who looked at me like it was my fault the plane was late and who almost immediately started telling me about how the heroin and cocaine trades were ruled by the U.S. government. From there we went to how the Stonemasons are behind the Obama presidency and, digressing a bit, how South Jersey is a nice place to live because the 16-year-old girls dress like tarts in the summer time. It was a long ride to Atlantic Shitty.

I was in AC for a minute or two. Two nights at Harrah's, who should change their name to "For Idiots, By Idiots" except for the woman who took my room service order on the first night, she was great. Otherwise, blech. Need to make a change to your reservation? Can't do it. Call your travel agent. Need to pay with a different credit card on check-out? Sorry, computers are down. Blah blah blah.

Anyways I slept a lot, ate unhealthily and worked one day. Then I couldn't sleep and stayed up all night before checking out at 6am on the 18th and getting a cab ride to the train station for the early morning train to Philadelphia.

I was originally a bit leery about hanging around in the AC train station in the predawn hours and shied away from any human interaction, but eventually got caught in a conversation with a Philadelphia kid who had ground the poker tables at the Borgata all night and was perfectly harmless.

Slept all the way to Philadelphia and arrived at about 8. I had a two hour stopover and, exhausted, wandered around the train station trying to stay conscious. Eventually I realized I'd lost the plastic bag I'd been carrying around with my magazine, book and $400 Bose headphones inside. Win. So I retraced my steps and eventually found my way to the baggage area where some good Samaritan had turned the bag in. The woman grilled me as to the contents of my bag, stopping just short of asking for a plot synopsis of Phillip Roth's "American Pastoral," but handed over the goods and saving Christmas for us all.

Got on the 10:25 train to NYC and, fueled by Mountain Dew and dance music, stayed awake watching scenic New Jersey pass by my window. Arrived at 11:55 and with another two hours or so before my next train, grabbed a bite and then found myself passing out in the Amtrak lounge. I literally could not keep my eyes open and would have missed my train had I not forced myself up and into the streets of Manhattan, where I wandered around wide-eyed with coat undone and let the cold air shock me back to life.

A few minutes later I was boarding the train and watching the Hudson River pass by my window. Then I fell asleep. I woke up in Rochester and promptly fell asleep once more. When I woke up again we were entering Buffalo and stopping at the suburban station, where I watched some drunk guy single-handedly hold up the train by stumbling all over the place in his efforts to get off the train. Eventually he did and we continued on to the downtown Buffalo station, conveniently located beneath a highway overpass and locked up with lights off, arriving at about 9:30.

I could have taken a bus from Buffalo to St. Catharines and arrived at 2:30 am, but I decided to commandeer a cab and after passing through Canadian customs without even showing identification I got to my mom's house a little before midnight. And thus Christmas had arrived.

***

I'm writing this while watching the Canadian massacre of Kazakhstan in the World Junior Hockey Championships, a Christmas tradition around my house and all over Canada, but nowhere else in the world. For as long as I can remember I've spent the downtime between Boxing Day and the return to normal life in January watching a bunch of 19-year-olds from our country playing 19-year-olds from other countries and getting really, really excited about it. Anyways we're currently killing Kazakhstan 10-0 because the tournament rules emphasize the goal differential as a tiebreaker rule and thus there is no motivation but gentlemanliness to be gentlemen. I'm a little chuffed that I won't get to watch the Canada/USA game on New Year's Eve, since it will actually be a competition.

Beyond that, I'm procrastinating, which I've been spending a lot of time doing lately. I should be polishing my writing portfolio and finishing up an essay about Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (and/or packing to head back home) but my M.O. lately has been to wait until about midnight and bang out the bare minimum before moving on to other things. Verily, it does not bode well for my hypothetical career as a graduate student.

I should also be packing, or finding room in my luggage for all of my Christmas loot. I'm headed up to Toronto tomorrow and on Tuesday I'll get on the train to Vancouver. I get back to BC on the 3rd and am in town for ten days before returning to the tournament trail for 2009.

I think I've written enough this time around. I hope everyone's having a good holiday.

Prague, ladies and gentlemen. It is amazing. I love it. I am sad to be leaving. The city is beautiful, especially at Christmas, when the Christmas market with its lights and food and bustle mixes with the chill air, the trams and the architecture to send you back in time to something sepia-toned and nostalgic. It's enough to make you believe the city was put here for Christmas and for Christmas only, and that the rest of the year it's dark and shuttered and deserted, waiting for the holiday season to return. I love this city.

I also love working here. The schedule is easy. The room is large. The people are friendly. The hotel is decent and the casino is on location. A lot of my friends from around the world converge and we spend the week eating, drinking and breaking the proverbial balls. It's a blast. I'm sad to be leaving.

As I write this I am alone in my hotel room about 24 hours after the work stopped. Everyone else has gone home. Benjo, somehow, is in San Remo at work in another casino after getting 90 mins of sleep and then flying to Milan and driving the 300km to his destination. Unbelievable. Wee Man and Full Wrap and the gang are back in England, and one presumes Mad is holed up in the bar in Sitges plotting her next bingo in scrabble. It's like being the last person at boarding school after everyone's gone home for the holidays; you're eager to get home, but you can't help but wander the empty halls, wistful and reflective.

Or something. Point is, I really enjoy Prague. Today quote-unquote "Bex" and I wandered around the Old City for a bit waiting for her plane to leave. Tried to find a place to eat, but she being as indecisive as me, we walked for long-ish before finally settling for TGIFridays, refuge of homesick and indecisive and Westernized travelers the world over.

Whatever. I got my Czech eating in earlier. Ironically it was at an Argentinian steakhouse, but since the city seems to consist only of those and a million McDonald's' it counts as Czech. No Crazy Cow this year, but we did refind the restaurant Art, Full Wrap and I patronized for like four nights running last year and it fit the top billing we gave it when trying to convince Mad and Wee to come along.

Meanwhile, the work happened and afterwards I actually came out of my room for drinks a couple times. Couldn't hold a candle to the rest of the squad, but it worked. And we spent the entirety of the days in the press room eating premade sandwiches, bacon potato chips, melted chocolate bars and hotel mints and laughing more or less non-stop, generally at each other.

On Friday night Mad organized a 20 euro media tournament since we had an early night. Last year I finished third for like 90 euro and this year entered just hoping not to embarrass myself. We had like 40 runners this time and our table had Katja Thater to start, along with last year's champ and a bunch of other people who apparently knew what they were doing.

So I nitted it up for a long while, more or less refusing to play a pot in the Owen Laukkanen style. Eventually the blinds got big and I doubled up a couple times to stay alive. Meanwhile, Wee Man was gone and so were Mad and Full Wrap. Bex got moved to our table and slow-rolled some guy with aces, but the joke was on her; dude rivered Broadway and she was gone, leaving me alone at the final table with a bunch of cameramen, Pierre and Henning, the defending champ.

I continued to nit it up, playing absolutely terrible poker and yet still getting away with it. Eventually we were down to six with five ppl getting paid and I lost all but 3.5 big blinds making a bully move against the short stack from the small blind, only to see him wake up with a reasonable ace and avoid the suckout.

We took a break and I came back utterly crippled, but woke up with pocket tens against Henning's A-K and doubled. Then I busted him with A-K and we were in the money. I continued my ridiculous run-good with four players left when I doubled through Pierre with K-10 to his A-K when the board came A-10-x-10-x and he busted soon after.

What followed was a crapshoot and I eventually lost most of my stack with K-Q to a TV crew guy's A-7 and busted soon after, taking like 3,800 Czech Kroner (about $190 USD) for my time. Unfortunately the damn tournament took all night and by the time I rejoined the gang they were more or less settled in for the night.

Whatever, it was fun and I successfully defended my Third Man status for another year. So that's a plus.

Yesterday was supposed to go quick and we were all going to go out drinking and partying. Instead, it took until 1:30 to wind things down and it was 2:30 before we were all at the hotel bar, bickering with the waiter about the corkage fee on a bottle of wine we'd swiped from the wreckage of a long-forgotten party. We nursed our wounds for a few hours and then went our separate ways, Full Wrap to his hotel, Wee Man to his room, me to go back to work and Bex to a room full of Scandies intent on playing strip dice until dawn. I stayed up until 7:30 and then slept until nearly 2.

Anyways that's the story. Here I am. Flight leaves for Philadelphia via Paris tomorrow at 10 am and from there I'll head down to the Jersey Shore for two nights in Atlantic City before taking Amtrak up to Buffalo and Greyhound to St. Catharines. By some bizarre turn of events my schedule has been altered once again in this crazy trip and I'll only be working one day in AC, which suits me just fine, because then it will really be Christmas.

***

I just played a $10 tournament on PokerStars while I multi-tabled 180-man SNGs. The Sunday $200,000. Had like 25,000 people in it. I finished 469th, but because of some effed up payout structure everyone from the bubble (literally 3,581) to 358th place all got the same damn payout. First prize was around $20k. I walked with $25 after some guy rivered a deuce with A2 against my A10 to knock me down to ten bbs and then I shoved with Kd10d and ran into a guy whose quad jacks trumped my busted flush draw on Fifth Street. Rats. If I'd busted an hour and a half earlier I'd have the same $25 and 90 minutes of my life back...

Anyways I guess it means my love-hate relationship with poker is back to the love side of things.

***

Just because and utterly unsolicited, here are a bunch of amazing rap songs that are amazing and that I've been listening to lately because they are amazing:

Jeezy feat Kanye West - Put On: "H-Ks, A-Ks, I need to join a gun club." Kanye is a genius, obviously. And Jeezy may rap only about drugs and money, but he does it well, and the beat adds a hell of a lot of well-manufactured gravitas to the situation. Bueno. Even Jay-Z's rather labored verse on the remix sounds good over that beat.

Young Jeezy - 3 A.M.: "Parked the 430, came back in a spaceship." From Jeezy's previous album, you could consider "Put On" a response to Timbaland's magic on this track. Top drawer (read: "insane") Timbo beats + a confident, competent rapper (doesn't matter who or what he's rapping about tbh) = gold.

Birdman & Lil Wayne - Stuntin' Like My Daddy: "Pick 'em up? Fuck 'em let him lay." I dunno how I slept on this song for so long, considering both Girl Talk and Chuck Dollarsign have used the Lil Wayne verses to great effect in their mixes. Whatever though; I apologize. Bizarre homoerotic chorus and slightly weak Birdman verse notwithstanding, this song is amazing. That's because Lil Wayne is the best rapper alive and the horns, man, the horns.

M.I.A. - Paper Planes: "So uhhhh, no funny business..." Moonlanding that this song is amazing, but the montage in Slum Dog Millionaire with this in the background should be the damn music video.

Lil Wayne ft T-Pain - Got Money (Chuckmore Remix): "Like some clap on lights in this bitch." The original is alright, but this remix is transformational. Gives the damn song some inertia and after you hear it, the original sounds, well, plodding. And a bit boring.

Other songs that I really like and are awesome, no matter how embarrassing they are, and in the order they appear on my iTunes:

Akon - Right Now; Lauryn Hill - Everything is Everything (just got around to downloading The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, sue me); Kardinal Offishall - Dangerous; Gym Class Heroes - Cookie Jar; Bruce Hornsby - The Way It Is; Don Henley - The Heart of The Matter and The End of The Innocence; Leona Lewis - Bleeding Love (fu haters); T.I. - Whatever You Like; Madonna - La Isla Bonita (during an apparent moment of gender confusion I downloaded her greatest hits and Alanis Morisette's Jagged Little Pill, again, fu haters); Our Lady Peace - Innocent (Live in Montreal); Vitamins For You - Flesh Python; Sarah McLachlan and The Perishers - Pills; Roy Orbison - You Got It; Milow - Ayo Technology; Bob Sinclair - World Hold On; and uh, Gowan - Moonlight Desire (I defy you to tell me you don't like this cheesy-ass song). Let's stop there.

That's all I got.

O

It's a little-known fact that the runways at Amsterdam's Schiphol airport are actually located in Berlin. After landing, aircraft taxi an average of fourteen hours before arriving at the gate, meaning that no matter how "on-time" your landing may have been, you're going to miss your connection.

I didn't actually miss my connection. But it's a hallmark of Schiphol that the arrival sequence involves touching down pretty close to on time, then watching your plane taxi around and around and around for a half-hour or so as your connection window slowly closes before finally docking at the gate and forcing a mad dash past dawdling eurotravelers through passport control and security (pause for the customary fondling) and then past about a million duty free shops to your gate, where your connection is inevitably still somewhere over the horizon, taxiing across the German border.

I've flown through Amsterdam thrice and though the terminal is beautiful and everything's pretty easy to get around (save for the five-hour line at KLM customer service), I've missed a connection once and the other two trips have been in mortal fear that a marooning was imminent. But whatever. It's better than Frankfurt.

***

I always have a weird sense of anticlimax when I wake up after my first sleep post transAtlantic flight. Generally I spend the entire trip, from checking-in at the first airport to retrieving the baggage at the last, fantasizing about the bed in my destination hotel and planning a sixteen-hour sleep of the gods.

And I get there and sleep and all is wonderful. And then I wake up and it's like I have no tomorrow.

It's partially because I'm a fundamentally lazy person (the laziest!), but I also just enjoy sleep. The problem with enjoying sleep though is that while you're sleeping you can't enjoy it. You have to enjoy the part where you're lying in bed just before you drift off (which can be problematic if you can't sleep and less than fulfilling if you can) or hope you get lucky and wake up early in the morning and have a few minutes of blissfully lying in bed knowing you don't have to get up for hours.

I love sleep. I love it to the point that I would rather sleep than explore a foreign city, and it's only after I've exhausted the possibilities of sleep that I force myself out and into the streets. It's always worth getting up for, but it's never my first choice.

Anyways it's 1 am in Prague and I've just slept for ten or eleven hours, an ill-advised decision but one that was largely unavoidable given my utter lack of sleep over the last 24 hours of travel.

I left Puerto Vallarta at 6am on three hours of rest and flew American Airlines to Dallas, cleared customs with ease and had lunch at an Irish pub whose wait staff seemed entirely too eager to foist alcohol on the patrons, despite the fact that it was 11:30 am on a Monday.

Anyways, I had a decent four hour layover in Dallas before getting on board a KLM Airbus (thankfully equipped with seatback entertainment), sitting in the penultimate row and staying there for nine hours as my plane headed for Amsterdam.

The flight was decent. I had nobody sitting beside me, which was a plus, and I watched a bunch of movies. But my window arrangement was bizarre - you never notice it until you're trying to sleep in a window seat, but there are better window arrangements than others for lying your head against. Mine was awful and that, mixed with the loud and enthusiastic conversation from a couple of used-car salesman sat directly behind me, resulted in my not sleeping on board the plane.

We landed in abject darkness and fog in Amsterdam at 7:57 am, bang on time, and then taxied until it was 8:25 and the pilot decided he'd better find a parking spot. My connection was for 9:25, giving me about a half-hour before boarding to get out the plane, navigate the airport and clear customs and security.

Anyways I got it done. It was tough but I did it and got on board a decrepit Czech airlines 737 to Prague. I mean, I feared for my life. The man beside me, his tray table was being held on my aluminum foil. The man in front of me, his seat back would not stay in the upright position no matter what attention he paid to it (which was admittedly very little). Before take off, I watched the pilot get out of the plane and wander around the tarmac, analyzing his aircraft, and given the mid-1980s communist-era dinginess of the aircraft it didn't inspire confidence.

I guess he didn't find anything to complain about and we flew to Prague. I couldn't sleep because the man in front of me had his head in my lap and besides, the flight took an hour, tops. We landed and I took a cab to the Hilton, got there at noon and I was checked-in and asleep by 1. And now I am awake, desperately hoping I'll be able to sleep again before work starts in 11 hours.

***

It's rare that after two-plus years doing what I do that something markedly unusual happens in my line of work but it did in Mexico. The government came in and shut down the tournament, late in the first of my three working days. They suspended the tournament and then, the next day, it was canceled.

It was bizarre. There was probably very little chance of any serious threat to my person, but on the urging of my media compatriots (Pauly, Change100 and Otis), I tucked in my press badge nonetheless and tried to blend in with the mob of confused and angry players as we waited to figure out what was going on.

We spent two confused hours waiting on Friday night before being told to return on Saturday noon for information and so we did, only to return on Saturday noon to be told to return at 5 pm. So off we went to enjoy a beautiful day on the beach, although with the prospect of working all night ahead of us (should the tournament have been restarted, we would have had to eliminate 88 players in roughly 24 hours) it was kind of difficult.

I ate, lounged on the beach and read before trying to take a nap and then returning to a riot scene at 5 pm as the tournament was canceled and the 153 people who'd been eliminated before the cancellation were told they weren't getting their money back.

For the rest of us, though, it was kind of a mixed blessing. An extra day on the beach for a little extra chance at being detained on departure. I spent what should have been final table day reading Philip Roth's American Pastoral in a beach chair and body-surfing amidst the delightfully roiling breakers that had been pounding the shingle all weekend. It was pretty great.

And then I checked out Monday morning and nobody batted an eye as I tried to leave the country. I got out relaxed, refreshed and with a story, although it certainly woke me up to the grim possibilities we face when working in countries less developed than our own. What would I do if, as a journalist, I was imprisoned in a Latin American locale? Is it something I should be planning for?

I think the possibility of incarceration is negligible, wherever I'm working, but it's still something I'll have in the back of my mind for next time...

***

Like everyone else on this earth, I have just finished reading Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Bleak, yeah, and profoundly depressing, but I felt strangely uplifted by the conclusion. If there was the possibility of a happy ending in that narrative, I guess that was it, although I don't really want to justify that statement because it would spoil the conclusion for people who haven't read it. Anyways, good stuff and a great reminder of the effectiveness of being economical with language (something I could clearly use a bit of).

I've moved from McCarthy's economy of language to Roth's boundless indulgence and the change is a bit weird. Roth, in American Pastoral, writes like Richard Ford - the narrative outside takes a back seat to the narrative inside the narrator, meaning everything is given its own ornate description and every table lamp and traffic light sparks a wandering anecdote from the past.

It's not necessarily a bad thing and Roth is obviously an incredible writer. The book has been enjoyable thus far. But I feel like McCarthy's writing was a lot more affecting and effective in its brevity. I used to try to write like McCarthy and now when I write it comes out all overdone and overdescriptive and slooooow, but maybe reading The Road will inspire a change.

In other pop-culture consumption:

Movies:

I watched Pearl Harbor again for some inane reason. I liked it when I watched it last, probably six years ago, but this time the liberties taken with history (um, how anyone thought Jon Voight as polio-stricken FDR STANDING during his "Day of Infamy" speech was a good idea is beyond me) and the careless inaccuracies kind of ruined it. This is irrelevant, I know.

On the plane I watched "Ghost Town", "Blood Diamond" and, out of desperation, "The House Bunny."

"Ghost Town" was pretty great. I read a piece in British GQ that basically awarded it the Best Picture Oscar and claimed Ricky Gervais was a million times better than "American" comedians like Steve Carrell and Seth Rogan, and while it wasn't thaaat good, Gervais was pretty hilarious. In fact, he pretty much made the movie; the rest was pretty meh. But worth seeing for him alone.

"Blood Diamond" was good. I don't know why I didn't see it when it came out, but it was worth the wait. I thought it was a pretty competent, pretty harrowing and worthwhile movie. Hard to look at diamonds the same way again.

And from Blood Diamond to the House Bunny via sleepless delirium. The damn movie cut out right at the climax because we were about to land, so I will now never know just who that fateful 30th pledge was. Anyways it was a decent time-waster and Anna Faris is reasonably funny, as are the girls from Superbad and Nick and Norah's Blah Blah Blah, respectively. It was cotton candy. It was better than "21."

Anyways, speaking of economy of language, goodbye.

O

Well, after finding myself marooned in Amsterdam for 24 hours (and joyously writing an angry email to KLM that would eventually result in a sincere-sounding apology and a $125 travel credit), I returned to the airport the following afternoon for another shot at forward progress.

My flight was at 6 or so and I got there around 3, leaving plenty of time to eat McDonald's and watch Deadliest Catch as I watched the sun set at around 4 pm. It would stay dark in my world for the next 24 hours...

Right, well the first bad beat of the interminable voyage commenced at boarding, as my flight from Amsterdam to Toronto had changed equipment from a 767 to a 747, meaning no seat-back entertainment and Mamma Mia as the in-flight movie. I had a window seat though, and nobody in the middle seat, so I was able to stretch out a bit and watch more Deadliest Catch on my laptop in between bouts of Jay McInerney's "Model Behavior", which to put it kindly was minor McInerney.

I didn't sleep at all over the 8ish hours and was rewarded for my insomnia by some pretty stunning nighttime views of London, Les Iles de la Madeleine and Montreal before we touched down in Toronto. I cleared Customs, found my bag and deposited it on the baggage transfer conveyor before transferring terminals and checking in at Air Canada, spending a half-hour in the lounge and then boarding my 11pm flight to Vancouver.

I used an upgrade certificate for the flight and so was traveling in style, but as soon as my ass hit that first class seat I was pretty well out. I woke up in time for a decent pot roast and an episode of Entourage and then crashed once more. Woke up as we landed at 1:30 am at YVR and met Kara, who somehow convinced herself I was worth staying up all night to pick up from the airport for.

Baggage was lost somewhere between YYZ and YVR. Baggageman couldn't help because I'd misplaced my baggage receipt. So, demoralized, I headed home to Coquitlam with about sixteen hours of Vancouver time ahead of me before I got on the train back to YYZ.

Slept for about four hours before hitting the mall for a hair cut and replacement clothing. Then headed home to pack and Kara, the superfriend, drove me downtown to the train station where we met the first of many weirdos I would encounter on my long-distance train trip.

The first was a pregnant 30-year-old woman who told us her sordid life story within 5 minutes of our meeting. She was headed home to Ontario after an abortive attempt to build a life in Vancouver with some sleazebag who'd ultimately left her for a girl seven years his younger and a job on the Island. We listened to the woman until Kara had to leave and from that point I steadfastly ignored her.

The train ride was as spectacular as they always are. Somehow despite it being a packed house I managed to get two seats to myself for the entire trip and slept off my jet-lag pretty soundly while managing to avoid conversation or eye-contact for most of the trip. I did make one friend, a French-Canadien as into trains as I am, and we geeked out over our respective adventures a few times.

Otherwise, though, my time was spent reading, listening to music and watching the snow-covered countryside drift by while avoiding the weirdos singing Leonard Cohen loudly and off-key in the dome car on the second night, or the weirdo middle-aged couple hashing out their differences in the dome car on the third night, after which he sulked petulantly for the remainder of the trip.

In Winnipeg, Tricia and I had another of our 30-minute visits over pumpkin soup and hot chocolate before it was time to board the train again for the flight across the last of the Prairies and into the Northern Ontario waste.

Woke up on the last day in a winter wonderland and rode it down into Southern Ontario, which up until Toronto was covered in the white stuff (Toronto, meanwhile, was rainy). In Toronto I spent the next week or so doing fun stuff that included visiting the new Art Gallery of Ontario, walking up and down St. Clair Avenue, visiting the Pacific Mall in Markham, skating at Harbourfront, buying me a coat, eating good food and watching tons of movies.

I also hooked up with my parents for a couple nights, including a much-mocked dinner at Casey's and a matinee of Dickens' A Christmas Carol being performed at the Young Centre for the Arts, which was a spectacular family reunion event and birthday event for Andrew and Terry. Dinner, however, was a walk on the weird side at a nice Italian joint on Bloor that culminated in a confrontation with our bitchy waitress over my dad's credit card, said waitress seeing her tip considerably diminished after refusing to cop to any culpability and the embarrassing epilogue that saw the family make our haughty exit before my dad realized he'd forgotten his hat inside. Hat dutifully recovered, he realized he'd forgotten his sweater as well. Anyways.

Afterwards, we bid adieu to the parents and proceeded up Bloor to help Andrew and Terry celebrate their birthdays at the Green Room. I had two beers and was drunk, but not as drunk as my brothers who I am led to believe continued the party long into the night after my rather early departure.

Spent the rest of the time in Toronto doing the aforementioned fun stuff and then at 6am on Tuesday got a taxi to Pearson and boarded a flight to Dallas and then Puerto Vallarta all bundled up for the Toronto chill and looking suitably ridiculous in the 28 degree weather. I'm headed to Prague in a few days though and then Atlantic City and will need the coat more than I need shorts and sandals, so I've packed for priority or something.

Anyways I write this at the end of my day off in an all-inclusive resort, a day spent reading Cormac McCarthy from a beach chair in between dashes into the ocean to frolic in the surf. I write this as my internet has just dropped and I prepare to call up Mexican tech support and berate them for their incompetence and I'm procrastinating because I don't really want the hassle (last time this happened was in Niagara Falls and it took two hours; the next day the hotel shut off the water for two hours just to spite me, which brings me to the showers in this joint - they suck. Trickle of water that rapidly changes from ice cold to too damn hot within seconds and with no rhyme or reason. But there's a beach with warm water outside and it's December so I guess I can't be too upset).

Right, I'm here until the 8th, on the morning of which I'll board a succession of flights that will eventually get me to Prague on the 9th (via Dallas and Amsterdam). I'm there until the 15th and then I'll fly back to Atlantic City for a few days before taking the train up to St. Catharines on the 19th for Christmas, trailing my credit card and overweight luggage bills in my wake.

The movies I've recently watched:

(In Theatre)

Milk (B+) - Sean Penn was good, Josh Brolin was even better. Not the best Gus Van Sant film I watched this week though; I kind of was hoping for something that looked more like Elephant than Good Will Hunting.

Quantum of Solace (A, rated on a totally different scale than Milk) - It was entertaining. Shit blew up. The Bond girl was hot. Daniel Craig had nice clothes.

Slumdog Millionaire (A+) - Absolutely wonderful. Pretty much a must-see.

(In Basement)

Inland Empire (I can't bring myself to rate this) - Arrrrgh. The biggest disappointment of my young life. I love David Lynch and I was with him for the first half of this movie, but then it stretched to three hours in length and near total incoherency and I just lost my faith in dude. You've got to give us SOMEthing, man.

Paranoid Park (A) - The better of the two Gus Van Sant films I watched. The man can film real like nobody else. The ending was kind of disappointing and it was a little short, but otherwise was great - well acted, well directed and compelling.

I guess that's all. I'm now going to get my self-righteous on and get the internet fixed.

I paced my hotel room, took a drink of water. Checked my watch a hundred times, checked the time zone. At three minutes past seven, the phone rang. I picked up. "Hello?" the voice was Sportscentre familiar on the other end of the line. "This is Mats Sundin..."

***

I am presently in Amsterdam, lodged in a cheapish airport hotel a million miles from anywhere, counting down the minutes and watching planes take off and snow fall as I wait for the shuttle bus to take me back to the terminal. I'm in no man's land.

I had a day off in Warsaw on Thursday because it would be cheaper to fly home on Friday. Works fine, except when disaster strikes. From the get-go, the trip home was a gong show. Checking in to my flight from Warsaw was a melee, as 30-40 elderly Polish women struggled to get their wits about them ahead of me in line.

My plane was delayed, first 40 minutes and then 90, leaving me doubtful to make my connection from Amsterdam to Vancouver. My only salvation was the notion that since the delay was due to high winds in Amsterdam, maybe everything would have been pushed back and my flight to YVR would be late as well.

I wasted time in the terminal and finally boarded the flight. Took an aisle seat, emergency exit row. In the middle seat was a gregarious man from Leeds who chatted me and the window seat up about the joys of plane travel until the bird was airborne and I put my iPod on, only to notice out of the corner of my eye that the man was in the process of consuming three bottles of wine over the course of our 1.75 hour flight.

He was drunk when we landed and profane when they told him he'd missed his connection home. He swore a lot, laughed a lot and looked at me altogether too much. I was happy to get away from him.

They told me I'd missed my flight, but when I got into the terminal the departures board said the gate was just closing, as if to spite me. By the time I got through passport control it had vanished from the board and I resigned myself to a new connection. I did not resign myself enough.

The KLM transfer desk was swamped. Despite the fact that about a million flights had been delayed or canceled the airline in its infinite wisdom had only about three people working the desk. I took my place at the back of a very, very long line and watched the sunset as I measured my forward progress in inches per hour.

At about the one hour mark they handed out ham sandwiches. At about the two hour mark, still miles from anywhere, I went on tilt. I nearly punched the wall. All of the music on my iPod was infuriating. I had to take a deep breath and walk around a bit to calm down. I turned off my iPod and made frustrated conversation with the people around me, all of whom were caught in the same traveler's hell that I was.

The line inched forward and sometimes it didn't. Nobody from KLM came out to explain the situation or, heaven forbid, apologize for our treatment. We waited. We bitched. The man behind me was headed to Bahrain to visit his ailing mother. The airline couldn't help him. The man in front of me was headed home to Bristol. There was a flight to Bristol leaving soon, but KLM staff couldn't help him. Both men were told to wait in the line for an agent to see them. It took four and a half hours. IT TOOK FOUR AND A HALF HOURS.

Four and a half hours in line and finally, finally, I reached the transfer agent, having heard horror stories from other travelers about the lack of hotel space/vouchers and the fact that some parties were being held over until Sunday. That wouldn't work for me. I leave for vacation on Sunday. I had to get home.

The transfer computer spat out a new itinerary, involving a 24 hour delay, a flight to Toronto and a flight to Vancouver. I would get in at 1:20 am on Sunday morning, fully 33 hours late and only 16 or so hours until I had to leave Vancouver again. The transfer computer also spat out a voucher worth 10 euros at any restaurant in the terminal, plus a voucher good for two free five minute phone calls and a voucher good for 50 euros off of my next KLM flight. No hotel arrangements.

I reached the transfer agent and asked if she could get me out in the morning. She (KLM employee Y.L. Barry) flat refused without bothering to check her computer. Throughout our conversation she was confrontational, rude and utterly without empathy for my situation. She didn't apologize or even greet me at the desk.

She denied me any hotel arrangements. I asked her how she could justify her company's treating passengers in such a way. She handed me my ticket and told me to leave. I asked her again. She refused to respond. I walked away as she muttered "Piss off" behind me. So turned around and asked her to repeat herself. She laughed at me. I took down her name. She told me her company didn't need people like me. I told her fuck off and left in a huff. I wrote an angry email to KLM explaining just why they do need people like me later that evening.

Anyways I booked a hotel for the night despite rampant rumors in the line that there were no hotels available. I had to pay for it, but I'd be damned if I was going to spend nineteen hours in an airport terminal. Booked the room, caught the (very crowded) shuttle - they all went to a different hotel, win - checked in, got the free toothbrush/toothpaste kit, found my room, ordered room service and watched a movie.

And now here I am. My flight doesn't board until 5pm and I have no luggage to check. I even have my ticket already so I don't have to check in. I'm just waiting, running worst-case scenarios through my head. My train leaves Vancouver at 5:30 pm on Sunday evening and I'd rather like to be on it.

The joys of traveling.

***

Anyways I interviewed Mats Sundin, yeah. I was stressed about it beforehand but it went fairly well. I told him I'd grown up in Southern Ontario watching him and it was a good way to break the ice I suppose. Anyways I got some good material (even if he wouldn't spill about his NHL plans) and nobody else has interviewed Mats Sundin lately so it was kind of cool. Really weird to hear that voice that you generally see on TV on the other end of your telephone line.

Two interesting stories I heard Warsaw:

Some guy left 30,000 euros in the back of a cab. His laptop and a video camera too. Apparently he'd just won the money playing casino games but still, what a disaster. Anyways he showed up in Warsaw and played as though nothing had gone wrong at all. But he didn't win his money back.

The second one is much better. So there's this girl, see. She has 400 euros and her cup size isn't what she'd like it to be. But 400 euros doesn't get you much in the fake breast department. She has a friend, though, and the friend is a highly-regarded poker player. And she explains the situation to her friend, who takes the 400 euros to her local casino and grinds it out for a while. Emerges with 8,000 euros, enough to pay for the girl's new cup size. Which she does. And now the girl is able to wander around the industry in low-cut tops showing off what 400 euros and a poker-playing friend can buy you.

***

Warsaw was fun, although I remained jet-lagged throughout my stay. On my day off I joined Mad, Benjo, Pip and Hilda on an expedition to the Warsaw Uprising museum. And it was an expedition. The cabbie was certifiable. He did the old, drive around Warsaw for a bit to run up the meter thing, in the middle of which he nearly killed us by trying to pass someone on the left-hand side on a two-lane road. The problem was, that person had stopped because he was waiting to turn left, so as we sped towards him on his left he started to turn, not expecting anyone to be so foolish as our cabbie. The cabbie honked the horn. The car continued to turn. The cabbie continued to honk, sped up. The car continued to turn. Finally at the last minute we both slammed on our brakes and avoided disaster by inches. We continued on our way.

The cabbie dropped us in front of a derelict looking light-industrial Communist-era compound with no explanation. The meter said 55 Zloty and we paid the man. Originally I handed him 100 Zloty and asked for change, but took 50 back when Mad and Pip produced a 5 Zloty note.

The man began to fleece us, demanding 20 Zloty "for boos." Which I guess meant bus. We gestured, he gestured, finally we gave him 75 Zloty and he vanished, leaving us to wander around aimlessly looking for the museum.

Ten minutes later he returned, gesturing wildly. I took his gestures to mean we should walk another two blocks or so, which we did. There was the Warsaw Uprising museum, housed in an old power plant and utterly spectacular.

The gist of the Warsaw Uprising: during WW2 the Polish ppl in Warsaw were subjugated by the Nazis and utterly ignored by the rest of the Allies. Towards the end of the war as the Soviets approached the Poles saw their chance to break free and liberate themselves with the help of Stalin. So they rose up as the Soviet Army reached the city outskirts. The Soviets halted their advance and refused to help. The Uprising was crushed. Many people died. The Soviets quickly took Warsaw and screwed its populace for the next 45-odd years. Tragic.

Anyways after the museum we headed back to the hotel, had a decent meal and played a game of Scrabble. That about sums it up.

***

I just finished season one of The Wire. It is spectacular. Also watched Rendition, which is a movie about torture and the Patriot Act and was reasonable. And finished my Raymond Chandler book still madly in love with his writing.

Recent wonderfully bad dance pop I've paid to download:

Lady Gaga - Just Dance (RedOne remix)
Britney Spears - Break The Ice
Madonna - Miles Away
iiO - Rapture

I wholeheartedly recommend them all.

***

Right, I should go. Shuttle leaves in 20 minutes. Pray I get home safe this time around!

O

Oh, the places I've been. I guess the last time I wrote it was Halloween or thereabouts and I was in Hammond, Indiana, a red brick, blue-collar little backwater on the shore of Lake Michigan and a half-hour down the Indiana Skyway from Chicago.

I was staying at a Ramada on the side of the freeway and commuting via shuttle/Steve Horton's car to work every morning, which was about a ten-minute drive down Hammond's main drag, which featured along its potholed progression such local landmarks as the Athenian Steel Company, the Calumet Pallet Company and, nestled between the two, the "This Is It" topless revue, a boxy, windowless edifice marked by the sad-sack steel palm tree out front and its generally jam-packed parking lot.

Anyways. I liked Hammond. It reminded me of Windsor, kind of, in a midwestern working-class way. The people were friendly, the food was plentiful and bland and the work was pretty easy. I was there for three days and if I'd been smart, I would have stuck around a bit longer because the Avalanche played in Chicago the day I left, and Obama's victory rally was the day after. But I didn't even think about it and instead watched the election and the rally from Vancouver.

Spent a week or so in Vancity and then caught a plane to Vegas, where thankfully I was only staying for a couple of days. Holed up at the Rio once more, meaning bad food, annoying tourists and ridiculous work hours, but I guess it wasn't bad.

The day I arrived Lance and I hit up the Las Vegas Wranglers ECHL hockey game. I wasn't aware there was hockey in Vegas and it immediately made me like the place a little bit more (I still hate you, Vegas).

The arena is attached to the Orleans Casino, so we took a cab over and paid $21 for our choice of seats, checked out the venue and then settled in to watch the action. ECHL is the minor-minor leagues, with players banking like $500 a week to play and is pretty much the league where dreams go to die. So I was expecting chippy, scrappy play without much actual skill, but I walked away pleasantly surprised.

The Wranglers beat the Phoenix Roadrunners 6-2 in a game that saw plenty of goals and a bunch of fights as well, as well as the hilarious spectacle of the few, the proud, the Wranglers faithful and their foul-mouthed fan support. Directly in front of me and Lance was a middle aged dude in cut-off shorts and a mullet, joined by his eight-year-old daughter (who had a femulet) and a person who I can only assume was his brother, Buck.

Anyway, the crowd was exceedingly profane and negative, as I've found most American crowds to be. They got drunk and screamed profanities and epithets at the opposing team and the refs all night long, which was funny if a little bit sad. All of the sporting events I've been to in the States have featured crowds who seemed more interested in denigrating the opposition than cheering on their own team, whereas in Canada the fans are just as passionate (if not more so), but concentrate mainly on urging on their own side.

It was fun, though, and whenever I have the misfortune to be in Vegas during hockey season I'll be checking out a game or two if possible. Anyway the rest of the trip was a pretty solid work session, with Matt and I logging some serious hours over two terribly scheduled days (Sunday saw us work from 10am to 3 am and Monday from 10 pm to 3am) before I pulled an all-nighter and caught the 9am flight back to Vancouver.

Spent 30 hours or so in Vancouver doing not much besides sleeping, errands and unpacking/repacking before returning to the airport and catching the red-eye to Amsterdam in the mother of quick turnarounds.

I was on KLM, with whom I'd never flown before and I was pretty happy with the experience, even though I slept not a wink on the nine hour flight. It's too bad they're not Star Alliance partners, because the flight had the same level of service as Lufthansa, who I prefer to fly to Europe, except with the addition of seat back entertainment.

So I watched a bunch of movies and tried in vain to sleep but couldn't. Instead landed in Amsterdam in a fog, endured the obligatory grope session from airport security and caught an afternoon flight to Warsaw, where I checked-in to my hotel (the Hyatt, superb), ordered room service and proceeded to indulge in one of my trademark 16-hour power naps.

I had the next day off so I went for a long walk, braving the chill air in search of food and historic enlightenment. In my usual fashion I spurned all food options until the point of starvation and wound up paying 100 Zloty ($50 or so I guess) for an admittedly pretty good lunch of borscht, steak and potatoes.

As far as historic enlightenment, I found that too. I walked to the Old City, which was built between the 1500s and 1800s and then destroyed by the Nazis in World War 2. The Poles rebuilt it after the war and it was declared a UNESCO World Heritage site in the 1950s. It was spectacular, with cobblestone streets and plenty of restored architecture. I took tons of bad pictures and I think I'd rather they provide the description, so check Facebook I guess.

I also visited the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and the Palace of Culture and Science before wandering back to the hotel as night fell at 4 p.m. Wee Man had just arrived so I checked him into his room and then joined a mass of multicultural media types for a late dinner at a decent bar. The rest of the troupe went dancing but I begged off as usual and went back to bed.

Anyways since then I've been working, which has been alright except that as per my custom I'm supremely jet-lagged. I've been trying to go to bed late enough that I'm adapting to the local schedule but early enough that I'm getting enough sleep but it keeps backfiring. We work from 2 pm to 11 pm and I try to sleep at 3:30 am or so, but I always wind up waking up fully awake at 9ish in the morning, which just isn't fun. Then I'm exhausted by the middle of the day.

The other problem is one that's been pretty common for me on my trips to Europe. I'm always incredibly hungry and there never seems to be enough food. The hotel here is kind of in the middle of a nothing district with no restaurants around, so we're pretty much bound by the food options inside, which are limited.

There are a couple of swank restaurants and then the bar, which sells a $20 hamburger and a couple of other greasy options but nothing besides, meaning I've been eating french fries on the daily and alternating the burger with a club sandwich while trying to add variety with the strange little sandwiches they serve us in the media room. And, unfortunately, eating room service every night, which is bloody expensive.

Anyways, other than that it's a blast. Plenty of friends here and the work isn't too strenuous. I'm here until Friday, with Thursday off and a bunch of us are going to go museum-hopping, from what I gather. It should be fun - the last time I was in Warsaw I was really unhappy that I didn't get to see anything of the city and this time is much different, so that's great.

On Friday morning I fly back to Vancouver via Amsterdam but it don't quit after that as I'm leaving on a transcontinental train journey 48 hours after I touch down. I'm in the middle of a ridiculous travel spell that will have me globe-trotting into 2009. The schedule is as follows:

Vancouver - Vegas - Vancouver (30 hours) - Warsaw (aka now) - Vancouver (48 hours) - Train (3 days across Canada) - Toronto (1 week vacation) - Mexico - Prague - Atlantic City - Ontario (Xmas) - Train (4 days across Canada) - Vancouver (72 hours ish) - Australia???

It's going to be a bit crazy. I'm pretty excited though. It's been over a year since I took the train last and I'm ready to do it again. Then it's Andrew and Terry's birthday when I'm in Toronto, so we'll be celebrating that. I love Prague and I'm taking the train from Atlantic City to St. Catharines in mid-December, which is always romantic and Christmasy. And after Christmas I'm taking the train back to Vancouver in first class over New Years, which should be incredible.

The only problem is I've got a ton of stuff I have to do while I'm in the middle of all of this travel! But I guess I'll figure it out one way or the other.

***

Movies I've watched recently:

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford - Pretty great. Beautifully shot and very well acted by both Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck.

Zack and Miri Make A Porno - A huge disappointment. Kevin Smith is clearly no Judd Apatow. The movie had its funny moments, but Seth Rogan and Elizabeth Banks had no chemistry, for starters, and there was no evidence anywhere in the script or in their acting that they had any desire to form a romance. The romantic parts were hackneyed, the actual "making a porno" part was underused and it just kind of sucked. Plus Justin Long was kind of funny as a gay porn star, but kind of offensive at the same time.

G.I. Jane - Ha! Loved it. I watched a bit of it on the shuttle back from the casino in Hammond and then saw it for $6 at Future Shop back in Vancouver. Bought it and watched it here in Warsaw and yeah, it was good.

Tropic Thunder - watched it on the plane to Amsterdam and laughed out loud a couple of times, disturbing the lady beside me. Better than I'd expected, even if it was a bit uneven. Definitely worth seeing.

Vantage Point - Meh. Kind of an interesting format for an action movie but also a difficult one to pull off. It passed the time.

Step-Brothers - No. Impossible to believe that any reasonable human being would buy the thought of not one, but two people allowing their spawn to continue living and mooching off of them into their 40s. Also impossible to believe that people find the Will Farrell man-boy shtick all that funny anymore.

annnnd, I've also been watching last season's House, Grey's Anatomy and Entourage. All of which are great, thanks. And reading Bret Easton Ellis' The Rules of Attraction, which took me over a month to finish and which I wasn't really feeling. I mean it was good, but I just didn't care. Also I passed up applying to Bennington (where Ellis went to university) for grad school because I figured Camden (the school in the book) is based on it and he made it seem like a shithole. I'm now reading a collection of stories by Raymond Chandler and they are awesome.

Right, I now have to wake up and go to work, but not before stuffing my face with more grease. Happy trails.

O

This is a moment we'll be able to tell our grandkids about.