Friday Mental Massage: The last Friday

When I woke up this morning, I put on a live Allman Brothers album, opened all the curtains, and sat in the Carolina sunshine. Everything is green, I wake up every morning in a familiar bed, and I know exactly how long it will take me to get that first shot of caffeine. Living at home with a new baby is not easy. Being a family of four is harder than even I expected it to be. Still, this is home, and it is as comfortable as anywhere right now.

This is the last Friday I’ll spend at here for a while. This time next week, I’ll be waking up to cover one of the biggest events in the world. It’s $50,000 entry fee makes it an exclusive club and I again have the dubious honor of eavesdropping on the degeneracy.

Because I’m getting ready to jump into several weeks of writing and 16-18 hour days, I’m not going to spend a lot of time here today. I’ve done quite a bit of writing this week, and I need to recharge my noodle. Here are a couple of things that didn’t appear here.

Fringe: Jeffrey Pollack and the Fine Line–My buddy Pauly has been with me every year at the World Series of Poker since 2005. Because he is on Phish tour right now, he has asked some of the more well-known poker writers to fill in for him on his popular blog. The piece I linked is my submission from today. For those who don’t know the WSOP, it may be a little Inside Baseball for your taste. Nonetheless, it’s fairly reader-friendly even if you don’t know poker very well, and it gives you a good idea of what my life is like every summer.

In Memory of Chiquitita is a piece I wrote for the PokerStars Blog. I don’t get a ton of opportunities to write from the heart there, but when a man I met last winter died unexpectedly, I felt like I needed to write something about him.

Now, it’s time to get in gear and pack as much as I can into my remaining days at home. Over the next five days, I intend to get finish up some undone work, get a real massage, hang out with my family as much as possible, go to a minor league baseball game with my boys for Father’s Day, hit the weekly poker game, get some shopping done, and pack.

And then, to Las Vegas.

The Friday Mental Massage is how this blog would appear if I didn’t care what my writing looked like and people cared about the mundane aspects of my life. Its goal is to massage all the junk out of my mental muscles at week’s end with the hope of returning to better writing and subject matter.