10/06/2005 07:57:00 AM|||Travis|||

What a great place this missoula is. You really can't find a reason to leave and can't come up with a good enough one to stay. It is a black hole of sorts. At least for me anyways, until yesterday when I stayed up until 9AM reading "The Game" by Neil Strauss which left me completely and utterly wrecked.

Perhaps it was the sleep deprivation, or somebody slipped something into my coffee. But for some reason I became a broken man. The book is a non-fictional account of how Style (aka Neil) broke into the society of Pick-Up-Artists that I was already a part of and blew the lid off of the whole thing with a New York Times piece and the book.

The real killer was how close I was to all of it. I was 2 hours north of the "Project Hollywood" mansion they spoke about in the book and stopped by for several of the free seminars. After having read the book, I now have context for why Mystery was a wreck, why the girl in the room had such a mischevious grin on her face, why the marriage was considered an April Fool's prank and why Courtney Love tapped my friend on the shoulder (actually it was more of a grab... like a football linebacker taking out a reciever) and asked where Neil was. At each little corner of the book I couldn't stop thinking to myself "HOLY SHIT. I was there for that." All of the posts in the book taken from the fast seduction community I had read on the boards. It all felt so close, so attainable....

So I became broken. After the computer game company dream shattered into a million little pieces I haven't had an audacious goal that gives my life focus or meaning. Reading about Neil's adventures only reminded me of my own pathetic insignificance. My world crumbled around me and I wondered if I was going to wake up someday with a mediocre life and wonder what happened to my illusions of grandeur. And it killed me.

|||112861225176324797|||A Broken Man