For over three years, I started most every day pouring my thoughts, torments, and emotions on some blog.  The locale has shifted, but the ritual remained.  Jumping away for I’m not sure how long (maybe two week?) has had its own interesting twists.  The first day, I felt almost panicky, although I’d probably typed for a day or three before I finally stopped.  After three or four days, I started to consciously avoid this admin panel, feeling a different kind of anxiety.  I didn’t want to document much of anything inside of me.

I’ve gradually driven away my fans, my lurkers, those whom I revolted (I doubt there were many).  Now, I have a few deep friends and those who accidentally stumble upon the site.  For many months, I was consumed by poker while trying to live a normal life and work a normal day.  The last ten weeks, it’s been launching a youth soccer club that took the place of poker.  I’d felt I needed to do something constructive with all of that discretionary time and energy, so I focused it all in a new direction.

I haven’t enjoyed getting yelled at by parents who feel their daughter or son has been wronged or should be playing professionally by now.  I haven’t enjoyed being told I was clueless or incompetent by other parent-coaches.  I haven’t enjoyed feeling the weight of the eyes of 150 parents and 75 boys and girls, trying to control things that aren’t in my control.  I haven’t liked being called a control freak as I had to do 150 things to get this where it is today.

The bigger challenge for me is figuring out why I have to have some huge avocation that saps every ounce of energy and attention from me when I can’t do the same for my business and career.  This summer has been quite similar to my WSOP summer in that I was consumed.

I’ve lost alot of traction and energy for this site along the way.  I had a new vision when I redesigned the site to broaden my content, to share more of myself in a wider array of topics.  Maybe I’ll get it back.  Maybe this has been the final part of a cathartic process to relaunch my blog.  We’ll see.

For those of you who have occasionally peaked to see if there is anyone here, I appreciate that.  For those who have continued to encourage me, thanks as well.  I hope I am back soon, and I hope others are as well.  I hope so.

PokerStars Game #19777921814:  Hold’em No Limit ($0.25/$0.50) - 2008/08/21 - 00:47:39 (ET)
Table ‘Phereclos’ 6-max Seat #2 is the button
Seat 1: peiscottster ($135.60 in chips)
Seat 2: Veritas618 ($54 in chips)
Seat 3: visavis1111 ($98.10 in chips)
Seat 4: csquard ($48.65 in chips)
Seat 5: jackiemike ($22.40 in chips)
Seat 6: rdbougi83 ($18 in chips)
visavis1111: posts small blind $0.25
csquard: posts big blind $0.50
*** HOLE CARDS ***
Dealt to csquard [As Ah]
jackiemike: raises $1 to $1.50
rdbougi83: raises $3.50 to $5
peiscottster: folds
Veritas618: folds
visavis1111: folds
csquard: raises $18 to $23
jackiemike: folds
rdbougi83: calls $13 and is all-in
Uncalled bet ($5) returned to csquard
*** FLOP *** [Qh Td Ad]
*** TURN *** [Qh Td Ad] [Ac]
*** RIVER *** [Qh Td Ad Ac] [9d]
*** SHOW DOWN ***
csquard: shows [As Ah] (four of a kind, Aces)
rdbougi83: shows [Qs Qd] (a full house, Queens full of Aces)
csquard collected $35.90 from pot
*** SUMMARY ***
Total pot $37.75 | Rake $1.85
Board [Qh Td Ad Ac 9d]
Seat 1: peiscottster folded before Flop (didn’t bet)
Seat 2: Veritas618 (button) folded before Flop (didn’t bet)
Seat 3: visavis1111 (small blind) folded before Flop
Seat 4: csquard (big blind) showed [As Ah] and won ($35.90) with four of a kind, Aces
Seat 5: jackiemike folded before Flop
Seat 6: rdbougi83 showed [Qs Qd] and lost with a full house, Queens full of Aces

For the few people who have stumbled upon this site, I’ve always been known as one who will bare his soul at the drop of a hat.  I’ve drifted away from that, partly for lack of dialogue with others, partly due to a struggle I’m in the midst of.  I feel that I’ve slipped closer and closer to superficiality.  It’s complicated, and I’ve deleted about eight posts that I’ve written over the last few days.  That’s all I have for now on that.

Not a ton of content, but Marc Aspland’s blog on the Times (UK) website has just magnificent images as well as very insightful commentary on photography.  It is a must read and see every day, and you’ll be glad you stopped by again and again.

You might say Broadway is the best thing going for New York City.  Grabbing a slice, a bagel with a smear and a regular coffee, shoe shines, Junior’s cheesecake, Stage Deli, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Boston Sucks t-shirts at Yankee Stadium.  The list is as long as your imagination of what makes New York great.

There is now one less thing that makes New York the best city in the world.  Christopher “Mad Dog” Russo has left WFAN, ending his partnership with Mike Francesca after 19 years.  This pair arguably created sports talk radio.  Their level of preparation for each day combined with their strong opinions and quick recall to make those long afternoon and evening drives something I looked forward to.  I called in a couple of times, awed with the responsibility of sounding coherent and insightful, biting off as little as I felt I could make do with.

Their show is by far the biggest thing I miss about our time living in New Jersey, and there isn’t even a close second (shoveling snow and bailing out our basement after any heavy rain is somewhere way down the list).  It truly is the end of an era for sports fans everywhere.

We’re trained monkeys, we Americans.  Every four years, we plop down to watch teenage girls flipping over and over and over again.  They pound into the floor in ways that would rip every tendon and break every bone in my ankles (I sit here at two in the morning nursing my second strained calf after an afternoon of soccer coaching followed by two sets of tennis).

The daughter of this guy just took the All Around Gold Medal in Artistic Gymnastics (which used to be called Gymnastics).

We’re all experts in the bizarre scoring, with no clue how the parameters of the scoring are either established or ultimately determined.  Much like the ridiculousness that is figure skating, we somehow have to wade into all of this each Olympiad and hope we’ve learned enough to hold a conversation with our neighbor or wife (or our neighbor’s wife).

We weathered the outrageous controversy that the Chinese might actually be too young, giving them the incredible advantage of being too stupid to understand that they should feel terrified that they may lose out on a Wheaties box deal if they fall on their little butts.  I do know that if I need bypass surgery, I’m heading to some Middle School in Shanghai and letting one of those little pre-teens take a crack at it.

And now the lanky SMU student from Plano (where a childhood friend played in a 30,000 seat football stadium in high school in the mid-’80s before heading to A&M) has beaten the next Mary Lou Retton.  Of course, I stayed up to watch all this mess with an icepack on my calf, then cried as Nastia Liukin fought to hold back the tears on the medals stand as her father received hugs from overweight Pageant Moms in the background.

I love America.

The Atlantic is bookmarked I think because my brother occasionally forwards things to me from it.  In the September 2008 issue, there is a brilliant article detailing the Senator Hillary Clinton campaign, looking in a detailed manner at how the staff worked to lose the Democratic nomination.  The core lesson to me is a lack of execution, the inability to decide on a path then complete actions with hopes for an expected outcome.  Regadless of who you have supported or do support, it is a fascinating read.  We can all learn from this in our professional lives especially.

It hasn’t been a great first couple hours this morning.  Unmotivated to start looking for new business from scratch, unconvinced on whether to pursue light bulbs in my mind, disappointed with the list of new efforts stagnating on my laptop.

I headed upstairs to click the coffee maker back on, heating up the final two cups of coffee.  After a quick pit stop, I wandered over to the now weathered kitchen table that the five of us eat almost all of our meals.  I plopped down to take in the wonderment of mother and son, at work with Play-Doh.

It’s a decision we’ve made or avoided making over the last decade or so, the mother of our boys setting aside her credentials as a Chemist and Chemical Engineer to take on her primary vocation of mother.  It is a rare blessing that we have as a family, these imperceptible nudges and nuanced directions to turn babies into boys, and hopefully boys into men.

Maybe it would be better if this asset called stay-at-home-mother was deployed rigorously toward advanced tutoring, contemporary fitness drills, some new-age art and creativity mind-melding.  Yet it was the two of them sitting on the bench, a plastic bin of realized profits amid stray plastic knives, clay becoming eyes and pizza and the imaginings of a fifty-month old.

I sat across from them, just taking it in after wasting two hours of my life this morning, trying to think up a way to think up a way to find what comes next.  If you stumbled here, hello.  If you have some youngster that shares your DNA, take a big step back this afternoon or evening and just be in his or her midst, either alone or with your spouse/lover/significant other.

Stay-at-home or not, travel heavily or not, juggle or not.  In my Suburbia with my Ti-Vo at the ready, the blessing of witnessing a mother nurturing a child is as magical today as ever.

In an ironic twist for me, I awarded a Republic of Georgia national jersey to the soccer coach working with me to launch a new soccer club (the new little hobby that has consumed me the last two months).  We used the specific red in the Georgia’s flag for the logo design of the new club.  All of this was the first I’d really thought of this nation in my life.  Since I handed Coach David that jersey, his homeland has been in upheaval, his brother was called into active duty since he was slightly under 50 years of age, even though he’d only recently had open-heart surgery.  He was raised as a Georgian Soviet, played football professionally in the Soviet Union, and won what would now be the Champions League back in the 1980’s.

So Russia has been at war with this nation over the last week, and today a cease fire has been announced.  Should we care about any of this?

Not only should we care about all of this, but we should be stunned by both the turn of events as well as anxious about the next decade.

Georgia was one of the few nations who joined the US in Iraq, brought to our collective attention when 2,000 troops were ordered back to Georgia this past week.  They have pursued NATO membership, wishing to join the ranks of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovenia, and Slovakia among others.  President Bush was the first and only US president ever to visit the Republic of Georgia.

Regardless of who exactly did what to start this, Russia has been waging war against Georgia over the last week.  The US response seems to have been limited to chatting at the Olympics between Bush and Putin, as well as some sort of assistance to get the 2,000 Georgian troops from Iraq back to Georgia.

The aftermath of all this is much more important than the actual incident, with my apologies to the families of soldiers and civilians who lost their lives in Georgia this week.  Georgia is a relatively new ally of the US, much like Pakistan for that matter.  What exactly does that buy you in our new world order?  Who sets our foreign policy when it comes to our alliances, the President or Congress?  And how exactly should all of this work in the future?

Obviously, the US did not come to the defense of our dear friends, the Georgians.  We did not cut off diplomatic ties with Russia, did not send in aircraft to support the troops.  What have we told Russia, France, England, India, Pakistan, North Korea, China, Uganda, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Japan, Vietnam, Serbia, and countless others around the world?

No, the 21st Century is a much more complex one when it comes to good and evil, friend and foe.  Throw in diminishing raw materials and a finite energy supply, and we have indeed entered into a world of fractured misunderstanding.  We have only a hint of realization that we poorly understand these sub-nations, these emerging places of interest.

We had a severe problem once at the Aerospace company I worked in when we lived in Phoenix, and the CEO had a day where everyone would “Stand Down.”  Basically, we took a day where everyone stopped to focus on our core problem, much as he said the Navy would do in a time of crisis.

In the midst of this Election period and the aftermath of Iraq and this crisis in Georgia, it is time for a “Stand Down” for our leaders; really, for all of us.

It’s been refreshing in some ways to accidentally step away from this site, this after investing a significant amount to refresh the look and feel of my site.  I missed the third anniversary of the launch of my blog in the process.  In essence, I took probably 3-6 weeks off to launch a new soccer club, and I have been richly rewarded to invest so much discretionary time into something of great value to others.

As with most folks, alot has happened in the last few weeks.  Probably the highlight away from the soccer venture was taking my wife to an evening with Julie Andrews.  I thought it would be fairly dull, to be honest.  Andrews had throat surgery over a decade ago, and she retired her voice soon after.  We made our way to the new ampitheater which now houses the Atlanta Symphony for what promised to be an evening of music narrated by Andrews.  What was rolled out was a gift to everyone there.  “The Sound of Music” notes were unmistakable from from the ASO, then the images came on the big screens around the stage.

Andrews came out with three men and two women, and the quintet would sing different Rogers and Hammerstein songs solo or together.  Andrews would take over or join them on occasion, and you really didn’t care what she sounded like.  Her vocal range, once like a sparrow’s, had been transformed into a Lou Rawls-like bass at times.  She would change key in mid-song, much like you or I would in some sing-along.  It was an incredible gift that she has given us for the last fifty years, and it was an incredible gift that she gave my wife and me that Saturday evening.

One of the forgotten gems that she shared was her first television appearance, a live production of “Cinderalla” in 1957.

From “My Fair Lady” to “The King and I,” notes morphed from memories decades old.

From thirty years ago, an Evening with Julie Andrews in Japan (1977)

These days seem like gifts to me, I must confess.  After days of drifting and bobbing, days of neglect, days of forbidden thoughts, days of self, I cherish each day of potential now, each day of nurturing, each day of subtle joy.

I am thankful for the love of my life choosing me each morning and evening when life could be easier away from me.  She is growing her hair to chop it off as a gift to cancer victims, but she’s become more beautiful to me with each passing day.  That beauty will fade, I realize.  It’s never been about the beauty for me.  When you find a spirit so vast yet gentle, you cherish each and every moment with that soul.

Our boys started school (7th and 5th grade), leaving our youngest to hold down the fort as he waits for his final year of pre-school to commence.  I wait for the day when the boys walk away from me, when I no longer am fun or interesting, when I’m unable to create a spark in the eye of one of these three young men.  The older boys are definitely on their own at twelve and ten, but they still love their mother dearly and still love me.

These gifts, the gift of a new day.