Hey guys,
What up?!?
I was just browsing through here like a do once in awhile (don't think I'm not keeping tabs on you guys!) and I saw someone mention "The Game"... the new book by Neil Strauss aka Style. I grabbed my copy yesterday and I COULD NOT put it down... truly a MUST READ.
It's the first mainstream book to REALLY discuss the types of things we talk about in here... and it even has a couple of stories about me in it! (the names have been changed, so I'll let you guess which one... but you oldschoolers will probably recognize it right away...
)
Anyways... I wanted to give you guys a special sneak peak... Neil sent me the 1st chapter a while ago to check it out... and now that the book is released he said it was cool if I shared it wherever I wanted. So... here you go!
Oh... and to answer Jason's question, you can get it at Amazon.com (just do a search for "The Game" Neil Strauss) or any bookstore. I highly recommend it...
The Game
Penetrating The Secret Society Of Pick-up Artists
Neil Strauss
ReganBooks
An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
Dedicated to the thousands of people I talked to in bars, clubs, malls, airports, grocery stores, subways, and elevators over the last two years. If you are reading this, I want you to know that I wasn’t running game on you. I was being sincere. Really. You were different.
STEP ONE: MEET STYLE
I am far from attractive. My nose is too large for my face and, while not hooked, has a bump in the ridge. Though I am not bald, to say that my hair is thinning would be an understatement. There are just wispy Rogaine-enhanced growths covering the top of my head like tumbleweeds. In my opinion, my eyes are small and beady, though they do have a lively glimmer, which is doomed to remain my secret because no one can see it behind my glasses. I have indentations on either side of my forehead, which I like and believe add character to my face, though I’ve never actually been complimented on them.
I am shorter than I’d like to be and so skinny that I look malnourished to most people, no matter how much I eat. When I look down at my pale, slouched body, I wonder why any woman would want to sleep next to it, let alone embrace it. So, for me, meeting girls takes work. I’m not the kind of guy women giggle over at a bar or want to take home when they’re feeling drunk and crazy. I can’t offer them a piece of my fame and bragging rights like a rock star, or cocaine and a mansion like so many other men in Los Angeles. All I have is my mind, and nobody can see that.
You may notice that I haven’t mentioned my personality. This is because my personality has completely changed. Or, to put it more accurately, I completely changed my personality. I invented Style, my alter ego. And in the course of two years, Style became more popular than I ever was—especially with women.
It was never my intention to change my personality or walk through the world under an assumed identity. In fact, I was happy with myself and my life. That is, until an innocent phone call (it always starts with an innocent phone call) led me on a journey into one of the oddest and most exciting underground communities that, in more than a dozen years of journalism, I have ever come across. The call was from Jeremie Ruby-Strauss (no relation), a book editor who had stumbled across a document on the Internet called “the layguide,” short for The How-to-Lay-Girls Guide. Compressed into 150 sizzling pages, he said, was the collected wisdom of dozens of pick-up artists who had been exchanging their knowledge in newsgroups for nearly a decade, secretly working to turn the art of seduction into an exact science. The information needed to be rewritten and organized into a coherent how-to book, and he thought I was the man to do it.
I wasn’t so sure. I want to write literature, not give advice to horny adolescents. But, of course, I told him it wouldn’t hurt to take a look at it.
The moment I started reading, my life changed. More than any other book or document—be it the Bible, Crime and Punishment, or The Joy of Cooking—the layguide opened my eyes. And not necessarily because of the information in it, but because of the path it sent me hurtling down.
When I look back on my teenage years, I have one major regret, and it has nothing to do with not studying hard enough, not being nice to my mother, or crashing my father’s car into that public bus. It is simply that I didn’t fool around with enough girls. I am a deep man—I re-read James Joyce’s Ulysses every three years for fun. I consider myself reasonably intuitive. I am at core a good person, and I try to avoid hurting others. But I can’t seem to evolve to the next state of being, because I spend far too much time thinking about women.
And I know I’m not alone. When I first met Hugh Hefner, he was seventy-three. He had slept with over a thousand of the most beautiful women in the world, by his own account, but all he wanted to talk about were his three girlfriends—Mandy, Brandy, and Sandy. And how, thanks to Viagra, he could keep them all satisfied (though his money probably satisfied them enough). If he ever wanted to sleep with somebody else, he said, the rule was that they’d all do it together. So what I gathered from the conversation was that here was a guy who’s had all the sex he wanted his whole life, and at seventy-three he’s still chasing tail. When does it stop? If Hugh Hefner isn’t over it yet, when am I going to be?
If the layguide had never crossed my path, I, like most men, would never have evolved in my thinking about the opposite sex. In fact, I probably started off worse than most men. In my preteen years, there were no games of doctor, no girls who charged a dollar to look up their skirts, no tickling classmates in places I wasn’t supposed to touch. I spent most of teenage life grounded, so when my sole adolescent sexual opportunity occurred—a drunken freshman girl called and offered me a *******—I was forced to decline, or else suffer my mother’s wrath. In college I began to find myself: the things I was interested in, the personality I’d always been too shy to express, the group of friends who would expand my mind with drugs and conversation (in that order). But I never became comfortable around women: they intimidated me. In four years of college, I did not sleep with a single woman on campus.
After school I took a job at the New York Times as a cultural reporter, where I began to build confidence in myself and my opinions. Eventually, I gained access to a privileged world where no rules applied: I went on the road with Marilyn Manson and Motley Crue to write books with them. In all that time, with all those backstage passes, I didn’t get so much as a single kiss from anyone except Tommy Lee. After that, I pretty much gave up hope. Some guys had it; other guys didn’t. I clearly didn’t.
The problem wasn’t that I’d never been laid. It was that the few times I did get lucky, I’d turn a one-night stand into a two-year stand because I didn’t know when it was going to happen again. The layguide had an acronym for people like me. They called them AFCs: average frustrated chumps. I was an AFC. Not like Dustin.
I met Dustin the year I graduated from college. He was friends with a classmate of mine named Marko, a faux-aristocratic Serbian who had been my companion in girllessness since nursery school, thanks largely to his head, which was shaped like a watermelon. Dustin wasn’t any taller, richer, more famous, or better looking than either of us. But he did possess one quality we didn’t: he attracted women.
When Marko first introduced me to him, I was unimpressed. He was short and swarthy, with long curly brown hair and a cheesy button-down gigolo shirt with two too many buttons undone. That night, we went to a Chicago club called Drink, As we checked our coats, Dustin asked , “Do you know if there are any dark corners in here?”
What up?!?
I was just browsing through here like a do once in awhile (don't think I'm not keeping tabs on you guys!) and I saw someone mention "The Game"... the new book by Neil Strauss aka Style. I grabbed my copy yesterday and I COULD NOT put it down... truly a MUST READ.
It's the first mainstream book to REALLY discuss the types of things we talk about in here... and it even has a couple of stories about me in it! (the names have been changed, so I'll let you guess which one... but you oldschoolers will probably recognize it right away...
)Anyways... I wanted to give you guys a special sneak peak... Neil sent me the 1st chapter a while ago to check it out... and now that the book is released he said it was cool if I shared it wherever I wanted. So... here you go!
Oh... and to answer Jason's question, you can get it at Amazon.com (just do a search for "The Game" Neil Strauss) or any bookstore. I highly recommend it...
The Game
Penetrating The Secret Society Of Pick-up Artists
Neil Strauss
ReganBooks
An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
Dedicated to the thousands of people I talked to in bars, clubs, malls, airports, grocery stores, subways, and elevators over the last two years. If you are reading this, I want you to know that I wasn’t running game on you. I was being sincere. Really. You were different.
STEP ONE: MEET STYLE
I am far from attractive. My nose is too large for my face and, while not hooked, has a bump in the ridge. Though I am not bald, to say that my hair is thinning would be an understatement. There are just wispy Rogaine-enhanced growths covering the top of my head like tumbleweeds. In my opinion, my eyes are small and beady, though they do have a lively glimmer, which is doomed to remain my secret because no one can see it behind my glasses. I have indentations on either side of my forehead, which I like and believe add character to my face, though I’ve never actually been complimented on them.
I am shorter than I’d like to be and so skinny that I look malnourished to most people, no matter how much I eat. When I look down at my pale, slouched body, I wonder why any woman would want to sleep next to it, let alone embrace it. So, for me, meeting girls takes work. I’m not the kind of guy women giggle over at a bar or want to take home when they’re feeling drunk and crazy. I can’t offer them a piece of my fame and bragging rights like a rock star, or cocaine and a mansion like so many other men in Los Angeles. All I have is my mind, and nobody can see that.
You may notice that I haven’t mentioned my personality. This is because my personality has completely changed. Or, to put it more accurately, I completely changed my personality. I invented Style, my alter ego. And in the course of two years, Style became more popular than I ever was—especially with women.
It was never my intention to change my personality or walk through the world under an assumed identity. In fact, I was happy with myself and my life. That is, until an innocent phone call (it always starts with an innocent phone call) led me on a journey into one of the oddest and most exciting underground communities that, in more than a dozen years of journalism, I have ever come across. The call was from Jeremie Ruby-Strauss (no relation), a book editor who had stumbled across a document on the Internet called “the layguide,” short for The How-to-Lay-Girls Guide. Compressed into 150 sizzling pages, he said, was the collected wisdom of dozens of pick-up artists who had been exchanging their knowledge in newsgroups for nearly a decade, secretly working to turn the art of seduction into an exact science. The information needed to be rewritten and organized into a coherent how-to book, and he thought I was the man to do it.
I wasn’t so sure. I want to write literature, not give advice to horny adolescents. But, of course, I told him it wouldn’t hurt to take a look at it.
The moment I started reading, my life changed. More than any other book or document—be it the Bible, Crime and Punishment, or The Joy of Cooking—the layguide opened my eyes. And not necessarily because of the information in it, but because of the path it sent me hurtling down.
When I look back on my teenage years, I have one major regret, and it has nothing to do with not studying hard enough, not being nice to my mother, or crashing my father’s car into that public bus. It is simply that I didn’t fool around with enough girls. I am a deep man—I re-read James Joyce’s Ulysses every three years for fun. I consider myself reasonably intuitive. I am at core a good person, and I try to avoid hurting others. But I can’t seem to evolve to the next state of being, because I spend far too much time thinking about women.
And I know I’m not alone. When I first met Hugh Hefner, he was seventy-three. He had slept with over a thousand of the most beautiful women in the world, by his own account, but all he wanted to talk about were his three girlfriends—Mandy, Brandy, and Sandy. And how, thanks to Viagra, he could keep them all satisfied (though his money probably satisfied them enough). If he ever wanted to sleep with somebody else, he said, the rule was that they’d all do it together. So what I gathered from the conversation was that here was a guy who’s had all the sex he wanted his whole life, and at seventy-three he’s still chasing tail. When does it stop? If Hugh Hefner isn’t over it yet, when am I going to be?
If the layguide had never crossed my path, I, like most men, would never have evolved in my thinking about the opposite sex. In fact, I probably started off worse than most men. In my preteen years, there were no games of doctor, no girls who charged a dollar to look up their skirts, no tickling classmates in places I wasn’t supposed to touch. I spent most of teenage life grounded, so when my sole adolescent sexual opportunity occurred—a drunken freshman girl called and offered me a *******—I was forced to decline, or else suffer my mother’s wrath. In college I began to find myself: the things I was interested in, the personality I’d always been too shy to express, the group of friends who would expand my mind with drugs and conversation (in that order). But I never became comfortable around women: they intimidated me. In four years of college, I did not sleep with a single woman on campus.
After school I took a job at the New York Times as a cultural reporter, where I began to build confidence in myself and my opinions. Eventually, I gained access to a privileged world where no rules applied: I went on the road with Marilyn Manson and Motley Crue to write books with them. In all that time, with all those backstage passes, I didn’t get so much as a single kiss from anyone except Tommy Lee. After that, I pretty much gave up hope. Some guys had it; other guys didn’t. I clearly didn’t.
The problem wasn’t that I’d never been laid. It was that the few times I did get lucky, I’d turn a one-night stand into a two-year stand because I didn’t know when it was going to happen again. The layguide had an acronym for people like me. They called them AFCs: average frustrated chumps. I was an AFC. Not like Dustin.
I met Dustin the year I graduated from college. He was friends with a classmate of mine named Marko, a faux-aristocratic Serbian who had been my companion in girllessness since nursery school, thanks largely to his head, which was shaped like a watermelon. Dustin wasn’t any taller, richer, more famous, or better looking than either of us. But he did possess one quality we didn’t: he attracted women.
When Marko first introduced me to him, I was unimpressed. He was short and swarthy, with long curly brown hair and a cheesy button-down gigolo shirt with two too many buttons undone. That night, we went to a Chicago club called Drink, As we checked our coats, Dustin asked , “Do you know if there are any dark corners in here?”
