300

"Championship Bowling" host Fred Wolf
often said, "If you can do it with a
pencil, you can do it with a bowling ball." 
I can assure you that you cannot write
with a bowling ball.  Nor can you do
some other things I can't talk about
here, because this is a family blog.

I've hit 300!

Today marks the 301^st post on the “WannaBet” blog, something I started on a lark nearly 10 years ago.  This blog has come a long way since then.  As have I. 

Since all communication has purpose, the purpose of the blog back then was to go hand-in-hand with the release of my first ebook about Poker.  “All the trades” said that in order to promote your wares, “ya gotta have a blog,” so I did.  I wasn’t hard to convince, since I like to write.  Always have, though I haven’t always put myself out there.

Those of you who knew me back when might recall that I was a very shy individual until about 8^th grade when I did something very stupid; I ran for class Vice President.  Really, I did, even though
(a) those things are always popularity contests, not actually about who has the best “platform” or “ideas”,
(b) I knew this, and
(c) I was very very unpopular.  

Why yes, it was a disaster, and you’d think that would have shut me up and locked me into a deep dungeon for years.  It almost did, but then I got the idea to run for homeroom president in 9^th grade and actually won.  How could this happen?  Well, I was only president for the first semester, because I agreed to share the position with another non-cool-kid and we basically split the cool-kids vote so that we’d win each time.  We were math people and we could add – we knew there were more uncool kids than cool kids in our homeroom, and cool kids don’t do math.

But it wasn’t until I found out about radio in high school that I really came out of my shell.  I still wasn’t cool, but I didn’t feel bad about myself anymore.  Hell, I even tried out for a class play my senior year, and that was something else (and I got a part, though not the one I tried out for).  Acting was different than radio because in radio NO ONE SEES YOU and yet you still can communicate with the audience.  As an actor, everyone sees you.  Still, I didn’t wet myself, so it turned out OK.

I never set the radio world on fire, but being in the industry (briefly the first time) gave me more confidence, something I lacked in spades.  I matured enough to get a job, start a career, get married*, the whole nine yards.  One thing I began to do in my off-hours of work (where ever I worked, in a variety of jobs) was write.  Writing was like radio in that you could communicate but people didn’t see you (so you could really put yourself out there without fear).  Of course, few people (if any) saw any of what I wrote, but it felt good in a way that I didn’t understand back then.  Call it cathartic if you will, but writing filled a need I didn’t know I had.

At some point my writing “skills” tiptoed into my work.  I decided my memos at the bank no longer had to be boring, so I spiced ‘em up so that people would actually READ them (isn’t that the point?).  I wrote about my memos back in 2016 in this post here if you’re interested, my point being that I had learned that the idea of writing was to communicate EFFECTIVELY (even if it pissed off the brass at the bank).  I endeavored to improve my writing skills, and broaden I wrote about.

From the bank to the university to being back in radio to marketing research, I wrote all sorts of stuff.  Newsletters, memos, reports; and in each one I tried to use my “voice” – speaking plainly, with a dash of humor, always trying to effectively get my point across.  I thought I succeeded well enough.

But one day…I was facing complete unemployment, wondering what in hell I’d do for a living, having gone through several “careers” and facing another 15-20 years of my life before I could hope to retire.  The answer?  WRITING!  I did a bunch of freelance work, was a reporter for a weekly paper in Boise, and discovered two things:
(1) I loved to write, and
(2) there was no way in hell I could make enough money by writing alone.  

Fate stepped in with a full-time job at the marketing research center, and then the big change in life running the ice cream parlor, but all the time I kept writing.

Not me.

In the last ten years, most of that writing has appeared here.  Yes, I’m still trying to write a great novel (sometime soon I’ll tell you about attempt #3).  The blog serves me as an outlet for some of my anger and frustration.  I try not to be an angry old man yelling at clouds.  Early on I used my blog as a megaphone to push for online poker in the US (which dried up about the same time I wrote the poker books and started the blog, ironically).  Sheldon Adelson was my big adversary then; later on, it was “the former guy” aka the Orange Menace who incurred much of my wrath.  There’s been humor, and whimsy, but mainly WannaBet was a mirror on how I felt that day, that week.  There have been a few good times and a lot of struggles.  Things are looking up now, and hopefully I’ll share more mirth here sooner rather than later.

There have been noticeable gaps when I didn’t post anything for months (in a couple of cases, more than a year).  I’ve still been writing – mostly online screeds or diatribes on social media (and all those attempts at novel writing).  I realize now that the former was time wasted, as I was actually trying to convince folks on the other side of their folly using logic.  Yeah, pretty stupid, I know.  You know how that turned out.  The tinfoil anti-antifa crowd distains things like facts and evidence and lives for the slightly off-key music that echoes inside their tiny heads.  I wrote a shitload of words, all for naught.  I won’t make that mistake again, partly because I have a block list that spans a couple of pages now.  Better for my blood pressure, too.

So here I am babbling about, but that’s the great thing about this blog.  It’s free and you, the reader, are always as free to reject what is written, just as I am free to write whatever I please.  I do aim to please, but sometimes my aim is off.  Like being drunk in front of one of those tiny urinals.

Thank you for bearing with me these last 300 posts, and a warning:  There will no doubt be more.

 

* yeah, sometime I’ll talk about my dating prowess (or lack thereof), but I’ll have to be very very drunk to get that started.  Don’t hold your breath.