Category: trip reports

I’ve been playing poker a long time – too long. While life events took me off the path of guns and glory, greatness and bracelets, when I do stray outside my routine of being the unknown in games small and big all over, it’s mostly to return to the play in the game. Because I remember enjoying poker, enjoying it maybe too much. That bug that unites […]

Up, high among the shadowy beams of the ceiling or an unclear memory, I see or imagine a fan spinning so deliberately that I’d be wiser to say it was turning. An illusion of memory, though – and of a place I wasn’t sure I wanted to visit. In reality, light poured in from the skylit atrium, that open interior the ancients passed down to us, among […]

The participants and assorted hangers-on, including your shady blogging servant, were listening. Christian Soto, full ring expert and tournament debauch, was wedged into one end of the living room sofa, a contradiction in posture and attitude. His arm was comfortably, even carelessly thrown across the black leather back of the living room sofa facing the endlessly running but silent sports channel. Soto’s face, on the other hand, […]

I grabbed the keys from Steve: time for hospital. Downstairs, Jason was suffering. Earlier that morning, he had identified a ring of pain around his lower abdomen. I instinctively felt this was not gastric from the area he pointed out – yet how could it not be the Mexican Journalist’s abject legacy? We overlook small things in poker, things we ourselves see but ignore, then want to […]

Matt Berkey is a sinewy man with a lean, slightly bulbous skull, shaven to the uneven surface his pock marked and rough face allows. His mouth, lined with a strong nasolabial fold, is naturally serious. When he grows his hair out, it clumps dense and brown and neat, vaguely Briton, yet in that state it doesn’t seem to belong to this particular face and head – a […]

The screenwriters are gone. I’m alone at a long metal table in a back room of a café with my laptop.  The meeting had in fact been successful, but it was short. Two members with work scheduled to present didn’t come. While the group had deliberated, I stared at the chat app, waiting to hear from the one that hadn’t even informed us of her whereabouts or […]

It’s all old men today. I hustle past one on the sidewalk, but ahead, another totters over his cane. When I sit down at a café next to the biotech firm, there is one sitting with nothing in front of him. His hands are filthy and his nails long and dirty. He is covered in a greasy hoodie. He talks to himself. There is an underpass full […]