Inspiration comes from odd places. You can’t look for it. It has to find you.

It’s like a good Italian beef.

You know, the juicy kind, with soggy bread, hot sweet peppers and crunchy, greasy chips on the side? One day you’re just riding down the street in a truck, minding your own business and out of the corner of your eye you glimpse the yellow and blue colors symbolic of the almighty Vienna Beef, the sign that jogs memories of being a 12-year-old on your first trip into Chicago, eating from a street stand near Kedzie and Irving Park.

That, my friends, is inspiration.

Now, I’ve been meaning to blog for a few days and even though I’ve been off work, I’ve been lazy. Just haven’t felt like getting into it and posting anything.

When I was “freelancing” and just living off, er, I mean, enjoying life with sugar-mama back in the fall, I had time and plenty of freedom (READ: boredom) to be able to channel my creativity into this deal. Not so much now that this whole “full-time work” thing is going on.

But, today I’ve had two forms of inspiration. And both were Facebook-related.

First, this FB post from Saved By the Bell, which is not only brilliant, but epitomizes why we loved this show and watched it every day from 3-4 p.m. during my sophomore through senior years of college:

Happy International Women’s Day!! In honor of all you women, here’s a special qoute from SBTB: 

Jessie: “Haven’t You Ever Heard of the Women’s Movement?”
Slater: “Sure. Put on something cute, and MOVE it into the kitchen!”

Brilliant. BRILLIANT.

Who came up with this stuff and how shitty has the world become that it’s no longer just funny? People make it out to be more than it is, which is, drumroll please: funny.

I mean, you don’t have to believe this is true or serious. It used to be that you could enjoy just making fun of people. Now, with all these kids growing up having gotten medals just for “trying your hardest” (whatthefuckever that means), the whole country is going soft and it’s a burgeoning land of pussies who have no idea how to work hard and with purpose.

Okay, maybe that’s over the top. Maybe I’m sounding like the old, angry uncle at the family reunion, the one at the picnic table by himself, wearing a white T-shirt, drinking a 12-pack of Hamms out of the styrofoam cooler. Whatthefuckever.

I do feel old. I feel old because all my friends, who at one time were cool, are all getting old. The fuckers are ancient. And now that I don’t work on a college campus, I’m starting to feel like they must have felt 15 years ago. Bitter, tired, achy, forgetful. How terrible.

This was the inspiration for this blog because I see one of my buddies is turning 40 today.

Holy. Shit.

That’s a big GD number right there people. The scarier part? I’ve been friends with the fat fuck (yes, he’s lost about 309,384 pounds and is down to about 1,239 metric tons, but still… ) since fifth grade, so about as long as Lupe Fiasco, Devin Hester, Kat Von D, Danica Patrick, Apolo Anton Ohno and LeAnn Rimes and Ben Roethlisberger have been alive.

Seriously.

Seriously?

WTF? 

Well, anyway, I was on his FB page to give him a nice, warm, good-friend birthday greeting and I started looking at some of the pictures on his wall and it made me literally smile. Lot of good shit there, and lot of it I was there for.

Bad mullets, poker games from the 1980s and early 1990s, graduation parties, high school wrestling practice, academic honors awards ceremonies, our yearly poker weekend. Good, good shit my friend.

So with that, it has inspired me. And it goes back to me talking a while ago about wishing I’d take the time and write stuff down, whether for a book or just for myself, about things I’ve experienced, memories, fun and shitty times. So, for the couple of you who told me I definitely should, I’m going to start here.

From now on, I’m going to make time every week to write here on the blog at least one memory I have. It may be fun, cool and awesome like the first CCMP.

Or maybe it’ll be something that stands out in my mind every now and then, like how I loved the first warm day of spring during college when you could take a cool shower with a cold beer to shake off the cobwebs of a strong Saturday night in the Beer Garden or at Boomers.

Or maybe it’ll be a shitty something, like, um, well, something shitty.

Whatever it is, I’m going to start writing one a week. If I don’t have it posted on Tuesdays from now on, I’m leaving it on you, one of the 12 readers of this blog to call me out. And if you have a memory of us, you and me, that you’d like to see on here, send it my way. I’m open.

So for this week’s memory, I’ll start with one of those poker games back home in a time and place long ago.

It was the summer after I gradumtated college. After working six of the previous seven summers doing blacktopping and seal coating, I had got fed up with my boss/brother/uncle and quit during the middle of a job. I was running a truck, and we were on a site and he came out and was being a dick, and I told him to fuck off and walked off the job and walked about nine miles home.

It wasn’t one of my smartest moments because 1) it was before cell phones were available and while I could have stopped at a pay phone, I had no cash and it was the middle of the day and everyone was at work and 2) I had no other job options and needed to get some kind of income to pay for expenses.

So, what’d we do? Of course, we had a poker game. And I lost most of my money.

But that’s not the story here. The story came about six weeks later when we had another (not the only or next, but another) poker game. This one was at Rush’s parent’s house. It was about 14 people and we had three tables going, playing nickel, dime, quarter like always. I had about $40 on me and got in a little groove early, was up $10-12 and felt good.

Then, I didn’t feel so good. And then I felt worse. And then I was just trying to claw back to even. And after a while I was trying to scrape my way back to down only $30 and then I was hoping to at least walk out with some money at all.

This was about the time in my life where I started getting the philosophy that I still carry today: don’t take any money into a game that you don’t want to lose because you probably won’t come out with any.

Now, in the long haul, I’ve made money. I can hold my own, other than on Blackjack, and while I don’t always win, I’ve won my share. Bitches.

But on this night, not so much. This was the infamous “unemployment check” night.

See, after I had quit and walked off the job a few weeks earlier, the summer was almost over and I knew I couldn’t latch on with another company doing blacktopping (nor did I want to… I did have a college degree as a dual major in  mathematics and economics with a minor in marketing that I was oh so close to using while blacktopping).

So like the full-time guys I worked with who just drew unemployment during the winter when we couldn’t blacktop/seal, I just went down and started to get a check for being out of work. Which was nice. Sit around and look for a job and then they give you money. It was great, for like a week. And then I was bored. And I wanted to play poker every night. Luckily, I couldn’t because everyone else had jobs of some sort.

But on this night, all the guys were in town, the time was there and we all had some money in our pockets.

So we went at it. And I lost. And lost. And lost. Finally after my $40 in cash that I had brought was gone, I started bumming off others. First Aaron, then Rush, hell I think even Carlson won some money that night and I was getting change off him. I owed about seven people when someone decided they’d just buy up all my debt and consolidate.

At that point, I was in for about $50 in IOU’s on top of the $40 I had already lost. All, remember, while playing nickel, dime, quarter games.

Well, at this point, someone started playing in-between, which to this day is the last time I played in-between. I figured it was best way to climb back to even, so I took the last $5 I had borrowed and played my balls off.

I won a couple bucks, then doubled up. Pretty soon, I was up $15 from where I started, so only down $70 on the night. And then I was down $58 and after a while I climbed toward $40.

Then, the fatal mistake.

Someone made a comment that they thought I might be able to climb out of the hole and I said that it didn’t matter. I was trying to reverse jou-jou the bad jou-jou they were giving me, and it reversed itself backward on me.

I said it didn’t matter because I still had $120 unemployment check at home. I was going to at least climb back and only be down the $40 I came with, which at this point meant I only had to make up about $18 and then double up and I was even by being down $40 (yes, this is what I call “justification poker math”).

Well, I doubled up. But the wrong way.

After about 30 minutes I was still down $40 of borrowed money and I hit an A-2. There were only two 2s left in the deck and I just pulled one. Of course, what could I do other than pot it?

And lose.

I lost on a 2 to double the pot, making it $80 in one hand of nickel, dime, quarter. Plus the $40 I was already set on IOU’s for.

What was left to do at 4:30 in the morning? Drive home, get the unemployment check, bring it back to Rush’s house and sign it over.

The moral of the story?

There is none. I fucking lost $160 in one seven-hour session playing nickel, dime, quarter, including a $120 unemployment check that I had to sign over. What the hell kind of moral could there be?

But I have the memories, exciting, stupid, strange, outrageous as they are. And they’re all mine because I’m guessing not many people have one like this.

And that’s the life that was. Part 1.