My friend K.'s longtime girlfriend is out of town for a while, so as a break from what I assume has been nonstop, frenetic masturbation, he is having some of the boys over on Saturday night for some poker.

This ought to be good, since we are all, to a man, hopeless poker players. But I'm guessing there's been some secondhand infection going on courtesy of the freaky breakout popularity of the World Poker Tour that broadcasts on the Travel Channel, also known as the "We Will Ram Free Advertising for Las Vegas Down Your Throat" Channel. So we'll do it, and it will be comically bad. The last time we did this--"Let's play seven-card stud." "Okay. How do you play that?"--we got very drunk, at one point abandoning the poker game to play--I'm not kidding--a game of four-square. (We were in a theater space that time.) Manly. We ended that particular evening by going out into the alley and taking erratic swings at raw eggs with a golf putter.

One hopes we pull it in somewhat for this evening, as we're doing it at K.'s place, and as a compulsive neat freak, I'm not sure he's psychically prepared to see eggs exploding off of his picture window. Also in attendance should be C., a genial block of a fellow whose skull glows incandescantly after a few drinks; sleepy-eyed E., who has an unpredictable penchant for suddenly "cupping your junk" just to provoke a reaction; T., who appears to be built out of hyperanimate Tinker Toys and will at any minute lapse into a deeply alarming Cajun dialect (his karaoke performances are, ah, memorable); B., probably the most successful acting-wise of the group, for which he is genially hated, and thus we tirelessly mock his giant chin; and finally, D., a laconic fellow with an acid wit whom I once accused of looking at me like I was "a worm." (I was, of course, being insane, and every now and then he fixes me with a steely glare and intones, "Worm.")

And of course there will be me, the shithead who writes well-meant but ultimately crummy things about his friends, for which he will be the recipient of many vicious junk-cuppings, I assume. C'est la guerre.

In K.'s email invitation, he exhorted us to bring "manly" music, which, of course, means terrible music. In this we will not disappoint. D. has already been tapped to bring, God help me, Slayer, and B. has promised to bring some (note casual abridgment) "Tull." K. immediately replied that there was hardly anything more masculine than a band with a flautist; I refrained from pointing out that a guy wearing hairspray and hitting an E above high C vibrato might not be either, but that's just maybe because I wonder if nobody brings up Slayer again, everyone will forget about it. I'm sorely tempted to poison the well by bringing an Indigo Girls CD, but this plan won't work because 1. I don't own any Indigo Girls, because 2. I find them intolerable.

(Full disclosure: The last time we did the poker night thing, we did a similar "manly music" thing. Delving deep into my unforgivable collection of old cassettes bought in the 80s, I showed up with--and insisted on playing--Winger. I have no excuse, except just to say that it's fun sometimes to be willfully perverse.)

Actually, it occurs to me now . . . we're getting together on Saturday night. I may have to go out and find an old Bay City Rollers album. Slayer, indeed.