I have been very bad about blogging lately-- I keep having ideas in my head and then deciding not to write about them. I now have some time to kill in the airport, so I'm going to type until it's no longer time to type. I hope that this blog will have very few uses of the delete button and I expect it to be disjointed.

I'm heading to Europe for the first time in a few years to play poker tournaments. I'm not sure why I decided to do this this year. I thought it'd be a good idea because I could play poker online when I wasn't playing in live events, but that was an oversight on my part-- I can't play on Poker Stars from France (I assume I can't play on other sites either, but I haven't opened accounts anyways). So now I feel like even more of an idiot: I can't play online and I've got a "home" at three places in North America, but am going to spring for more rentals in France and Italy for three weeks. What sounded like an efficient idea turned out to be quite the opposite. Either way, I'm prepared to try to win a bunch of money in a live tournament. Taking "shots" at live tournaments sounds more and more appealing as poker goes on to me.

My mind has an incredible ability to go from moving very fast to barely moving at all. To use a cliche, if a girl were to ask me (the stupidest fucking question in the world) "what are you thinking?" the answer my range from absolutely nothing (seriously, why do I always have to be thinking about something?) to something absurd where my mind is trying to remember details about some fiction book that I read 10 years ago. There aren't many middle grounds. I also have an incredible ability to auto pilot. Sometimes I find myself answering questions and saying relatively smart things and I've almost lost track of time, I can't consciously remember anything about it. It's very weird, it's like when you're driving on the highway and you have no idea what happened for the last 5 minutes.

The airport is an incredible place to people watch. I was just walking down the terminal, which must have been a mile long or something absurd-- it looked like the Matrix-- and just looking at everyone you can get a sense of who they are. I can tell who thinks they are more important than they really are and I can see people who are only concerned with themselves and people who are aware of what's going on around them. I realize most of this doesn't make much sense, but you can tell a lot about someone by the expression on their face.

A few weeks ago I finished The Ice Man, a book about Richard Kuklinski (Polish guy who was a Mafia hitman, killed a couple hundred people). It was an incredible story, but was written so poorly-- indeed, this guy loved the word indeed. Now I'm hoping to finish Jon Krakauer's book about Pat Tillman on the plane, even though I'm only ~15% through it right now (8 hour flights leave room for wiggle). No links, sorry, that is what happens when you title the blog "Stream of Consciousness" and you type real fast.

I've been doing pretty well in live tournaments lately, so here's to hoping that I win one of these crazy things in Europe.