Your "Take the Good, Take the Bad" Quizo Update

Well, we’re here at the beginning of yet another attempt on my part to stop smoking, a little more than a year after my previous, forced attempt. As it stands I have been awake for several hours now without a cigarette and feel like I would probably need to kill only one or two people to feel good again, so I figure that’s a decent start. It’s not that I particularly want to stop smoking – in fact I do not – but I very much want to stop PAYING for cigarettes, so unless someone can come up with a foolproof way for me to mooch a pack of cigarettes every weekday (two packs a day on the weekends) it looks like this is the only way out for me.

Because – as I mentioned previous – I have an exam tomorrow night I have held off on picking up Grand Theft Auto IV, since I am fully aware that were I to get it when the game was released last week not a single moment of my free time would have been spent studying. Instead, I made myself into a paragon of academic virtue, bravely resisting the triple siren songs of virtual darts, virtual prostitutes, and a virtual Times Square (all of which are in the game) and devoted myself once again to the all-encompassing study of higher mathematics.

Okay, that isn’t necessarily 100% true. I took some time off this Saturday for what was originally billed as “POKER, STEAK, and IRON MAN.” I said beforehand, if you are a carnivorous heterosexual male that is a Saturday and a half right there. POKER, STEAK, and IRON MAN. Unfortunately, the gods of chance were once again on the side of the chowderhead fuckwits that now clog Atlantic City poker rooms (thus denying me 700-some dollars that were rightfully mine) and when we went out for steaks, I dunno, the cook decided he didn’t like the cut of our jib or something and EVERYONE at my table got their meat cooked dreadfully far less than their order – my medium well was medium rare at best, and other people’s medium rare steaks kept asking if they could go outside and chew on some grass.

Plus, between these two events there was an excursion that, at the time, I summed up as, “so, we’re heading back into AC, even though we don’t know how to get there from here, to find a bookstore, even though we don’t know where it is, to buy a book, even though we’re not sure the book actually exists?”

My friend Joe looked at me and said, “that’s the plan,” and then, after starting up his car, related to me the story of how he had just that week been notified that the people suing him had announced that they would not be pursuing the judgment they got against him for totaling his previous car on them.

Nervously eyeing the handle over the passenger window I replied, “this plan is sub-optimal.”

So, robbed at the poker table, disheartened on the book hunt – turns out the book did NOT, in fact, exist, though I did have to dodge a whole lot of non-virtual prostitutes up and down a very long and very windy stretch of Pacific Avenue to learn that – and sickened (almost literally) at the steakhouse, my hopes for a study break that would not leave me weeping and broken rested solely on the shoulders of Iron Man.

I was not disappointed.

The movie is amazingly, ridiculously, stupidly awesome.

I can’t wait to see it again.

If you do not love it you do not have a soul.

That is all.

JLK