Mr. Black was at the apartment, sitting on the couch.  He had two female guests and the apartment to himself.  One was the lead singer of a local band, the other her friend.  Things were rapidly escalating things toward sex when he got my text message.  Judging by the speed of his arrival, the ensuing conversation could not have been more complicated than You bitches gotta go.

The street was jammed.  Cabs and cops crawled back and forth between the bars.  Sport bikes trolled down the street, blipping their engines in the slow traffic.  More bikes lined the curb, their riders standing in groups.  Guidos and club girls thronged the sidewalks.  Street lamps and neon signs cast a false twilight over the whole scene.

The Black Man wedged the Abrams into a spot up the block.  If he was displeased, he didn’t show it.  Mr. Black compartmentalizes stress for a living.  Extricating Willy Pete was Priority One – he could knock me upside the head later.

Willy Pete was just one drunk in a teeming mass of drunks.  Left on his own, in his current condition, trouble was inevitable.  My blood alcohol level had dropped over the last hour, and my frustration was mounting.  This was all my fault. Read more

Bedpan had just finished an overnight shift at the hospital when he found me. I was sprawled out on the couch.  My boots were still on, hat rested over my eyes.  An empty bottle of Evan Williams set on the floor next to me.  My .45 was disassembled neatly on the coffee table, eight Federal hollow points standing in a row beside it.

Read more

Humans do not want equality.  We strive at every turn to create order and structure.  Specialization.  Division of labor.  A vast network of people taking orders from someone higher up the food chain, separated by invisible layers of social abstraction.

The seduction community attempts to manipulate this system by analyzing the correlation between certain behaviors and a desired effect.  The method is crude, but the attempt to examine causal relationships in human behavior is valid.

Understanding the rules of any system increases the odds of working that system in your favor.  In essence, gaming the game.

Unfortunately, the average Player doesn’t stand a chance if their Game fails at the concept level.  Here are a few common fuck-ups Pick Up Artists make in their basic understanding of Game. Read more

I fell in love the moment I walked inside.  What a dive.

It was close confines.  The air was thick with cigarette smoke.  The bar was lit by the glow from a single string of Christmas lights.  The low ceiling was plastered with beer cans and black plastic.  An old coin-op bowling machine clogged up the entrance.  Punks and hardscrabble clogged the bar.

We wouldn’t have known the place was there if Hack’s old roommate hadn’t showed us where it was.  There was no sign outside, just a couple of people smoking and a neon in the window.

The Bar With No Name.

Puke and piss and beer made the floor adhesive.  The bartender was a chubby blonde.  She worked her massive tits for all they were worth.  She comped our first round.

Hack and I sat at the far end of the bar.  There was no door on the back room, and even from 3 feet away we couldn’t see what was inside.

Coke and dirty sex.

The jukebox was everything you would expect.  Tom Waits.  Social D.  Dropkick Murphys.  Cadence to Arms played every 15 minutes.  Fights broke out on the hour.

And no one cared.

It was fucking beautiful.  It was every cliche of a roughneck dive bar ever written, and we had stumbled right into the middle of it.  It didn’t matter if you were young or old, drunk, dumb, or dirt poor.  If you could stand the smell, you could get a drink.

The cops never came.  When heads needed smashing, Do what thou Wilt was the extent of the law.

No one cared about the clothes you wore, or what you drove.  It didn’t matter if you were ugly or angry or try-hard.  If you didn’t belong anywhere else, or refused to fit in, this was the place for you.

I miss that bar.

“Several senior U.S. Air Force officers have told me that when the U.S. Air Force tried to preselect fighter pilots after World War II, the only common denominator they could find among their World War II aces was that they had been involved in a lot of fights as children.“

- On Killing; Lt. Col. Dave Grossman

Read more

Willy Pete had an impressive resume.  He dropped out of high school at sixteen to pursue a life of failure.  By his mid twenties, Probation was just a mail-in form.  Breaking and Entering.  Pandering.  Assault with a Deadly Weapon.  Accomplished meth cook.

He beat that last rap, but not before being dragged off at the muzzle of a German sub-machine gun.

When I met Willy Pete, he was on the straight and narrow.  Mostly.  With a stint in rehab behind him, he was going light on the booze and holding himself together. Read more

I walked into the bar alone.  Cinqo de Mayo fell on a week night, and no one was returning my calls.  Three feet through the door I ran into a kid I knew from around the neighborhood.

He turned small talk into a boring lecture about college.  Art school fag.  He moaned about being a walking cliche while I struggled to remember his name.  I eyeballed the bar nervously, more interested in a drink than anything he had to say.

“So, uh . . . where are all the hot, straight chicks?” Read more

I have a new, Official Theme Song.  Without further ado, I present you with:

Screamin’ Jay Hawkins: I Am The Cool

It was raining.  I lifted the shade to watch it streak down the glass.  Across the street I could see office workers plugging into their intravenous caffeine drips.  I headed down to the gym to sweat the liquor out of my system.

I skipped breakfast and wandered off in the rain.

My eyes went in and out of focus.  I felt weary.  I pulled my hat low to hide my bloodshot squint and caught the Local.

Read more

“How the fuck am I supposed to live up to that!?” I snarled, and whipped the book across the room.

I didn’t remember the incident until Jack reminded me the next day.

Read more