Michael Northrop

So I was just at 7-11 and the guy in front of me in line was buying $175 worth of Mafia Wars game cards. Now, I play me some Mafia Wars—it’s on Facebook, like Farmville—but I’ve never bought a game card. Have I considered it? I guess: Maybe a $10 nudge to help me finish off a particularly tough “job tier” in “Bangkok.” But I’ve never done it because A) it’s a ridiculous waste of $10, and B) I didn’t want to be that guy. And now I’ve met that guy!

Yes, but if it’s $175 of your own, real money, you are an incredible tool!

Apparently, you can only buy $100 worth at a time—so as not to upset the delicate ecosystem of online organized crime. This guy had been around that block before, though, and was explaining it to the clerk. “No, no! You can only do four at once! You’ve got to close it out and start again.”

So the clerk sold him four, $25 cards for $100 (apparently there’s no sales tax on Mafia Wars game cards—good to know!), took his money, and then sold him three more cards and a pack of Marlboro Lights. Grand total: $187.12. Both times, the guy threw a $100 bill at the clerk, to show everyone in the rapidly growing line that he wasn’t, you know, a loser.

But he was a loser! And a smoker! And rude! And enormously fat! Just to be clear: He exceeded the legal limit on Mafia Wars! Hahaha! In fact, after he finished his complicated, illicit transaction and left, I made up a song about him. It goes:

Where did the loser go?
He’s quite the loser, though!

I hummed it all the way home. And now I’m going to play some Mafia Wars. But not that much, with no cigarette breaks, and for free.

1. One of the many things that I am doing though no one asked me to is thinking up picture book ideas. I ghost-wrote a BEST-SELLING picture book that I cannot tell you about, so I thought I would use that experience to write a few potentially ILL-CONCEIVED picture books on spec. One of the ideas I had was Squirmin’ Herman and the Deadly Mermen, but I had to scrap it because Squirmin’ Herman is the name of a cartoon worm.

2. My debut novel began appearing in bookstores one year ago this week. I made this bookaversary vlog for my agent’s site, Crowe’s Nest:

3. I got off to a later start than planned today because I was trying to level up in Zynga Poker (on Facebook) in order to gain a bonus item in (Zynga’s) Mafia Wars. Also, I was hungover after having one too many white russians while staying up till 2:30 for no reason at all. I think that sums up my life pretty well.

1) Not to brag or anything, but I recently went over $1 billion in Mafia Wars on Facebook.

2) I went to The Nutcracker at New York City Ballet last night. There was a little girl in the row in front of me, wearing a dress with a bow on the back and polished shoes with buckles on the top. She stood at the railing the whole time, absolutely spellbound. Occasionally, she would turn to her mother with an astonished, can-you-believe-this-is-happening? look on her face. She left with visions of the Sugar Plum Fairy dancing in her head; in this case, NYCB principal Sara Mearns, who was amazing.

3) Google Alerts has kicked into overdrive lately. It served up, like, 10 results for “Michael Northrop” yesterday. It informed me of one of my tweets and that video of a mosquito flying into my eye.

4) For the second night in a row, the mouse that I share with the apartment next door has taken the bait out of my new mousetraps. At this point, I am just going to feed the little guy to death.

5) I am not freelancing today and don’t need to be up at any particular time, and yet I wrote this between 5:59 and 6:24 am.