I had the following conversation with my parents:

Mom… Dad… please, sit down… there’s something I have to tell you…no, Dad, you don’t need a cigarette.  Mom… yes, you need a drink.

The last few years have been a whirlwind… and in that time, many things have happened to me that I’m not so proud of… no seriously, Dad, no cigarettes.  Go get Mom a shot though…

(Dad comes back with two shots of Maker’s Mark.  Mom shoots ‘em both like she’s saying ‘what else ya got?’)

So anyway… here goes… I hope you still love me…

I haven’t been watching LOST.  Not since the second season.

Mom, no, don’t cry… it’s nothing that you did… Dad… please… will you look at me?  I’m sorry.  I didn’t mean for it to happen.  i just fell from the path.  I watched BATTLESTAR GALACTICA – doesn’t that frakking count?  I regret it horribly.  It’s not like I chose to be this way…

And then Dad threw me out.  Saying I was no son of his until I got myself back into LOST.  From that moment forth, I swore that I would do all I can to make penance to the hordes of LOST fans out there.

So… that leads me to introduce the man from Wilmington… Chad Handley.

Chad Handley’s into LOST – like a million other people smarter than me.  He’s a great writer with a lot of wit, and he’s got a little something for all the fans of Oceanic Flight 815.  I copied and pasted it for your enjoyment.

HOW LOST WRITERS DAMON LINDELOF AND CARLTON CUSE PLAY POKER

Damon Lindelof and Cuse share a hand on one side of the table. Their poker opponent holds his hand on the other side.

POKER OPPONENT: Okay, you’ve been telling us you have a great hand for 5 rounds now. Let’s see it.

LINDELOF: Oh, it’s fantastic all right.

CUSE: Wait until you see it.

POKER OPPONENT: Well, everybody’s shown their cards, so… It’s time to show yours.

LINDELOF: Oh, we’re going to show them.

CUSE: But first, let’s see what was going on before we had this hand.

FLASHBACK SCENE: Lindelof and Cuse sit at the table as the cards are shuffled.

BACK TO SCENE:

POKER OPPONENT: I know that happened. I was there. But if you could just show us your cards, we could move on.

LINDELOF: Don’t be so impatient.

CUSE: When we show you our cards, it’s going to blow your mind.

LINDELOF: But first, let’s see what happens 5 years after this hand.

FLASH FORWARD: Lindelof and Cuse sit around on their couches, running loose bills through a money-counter, watching a re-run of Lost.

BACK TO SCENE:

POKER OPPONENT: I really don’t see how this at all adds to the strength of your hand. If I’m being honest, it’s just making more upset that you’re making me wait. At this point you better have a royal flush, otherwise you’re just being a dick.

LINDELOF: Trust us.

CUSE: We’ve known what we were going to do with this hand for 5 rounds.

POKER OPPONENT: And does that plan involve showing your cards at some point?

CUSE: Don’t get hung up on what our “actual cards” are.

LINDELOF: Exactly. This hand is about the journey.

POKER OPPONENT: But see, the journey’s over. This is the final round of betting. This is the part where you kind of have to show us your hand.

LINDELOF: And we’re going to. And you’re going to love it, probably.

CUSE: But first, picture if you will what this round of poker would have been like if all of us had slightly different hands.

FLASH SIDEWAYS: All the guys silently look at their hands. They look pretty much as bored as they do in the actual game.

END FLASH SIDEWAYS:

POKER OPPONENT: What was that, now?

CUSE: A flash sideways! Boom!

LINDELOF: No one’s ever done that!

POKER OPPONENT: Yeah. Think there might be a reason why nobody’s ever done that?

LINDELOF & CUSE: Because it’s GENIUS.

POKER OPPONENT: Maybe. Or maybe it’s because it adds no information about your actual hand. I mean technically the stuff before your hand could give us insight into your hand, and the stuff after your hand could tell us something about the hand you had. But telling us about other hands you could have had, what does that do?

LINDELOF: He’s not getting it.

CUSE: I don’t think you understand what we just did. We just showed you other hands that we don’t have, but that we could have had.

LINDELOF: How is he not getting this?

POKER OPPONENT: But where is that going?

CUSE: Again, don’t get hung up on “where our hand is going” or “does our hand make sense” or “isn’t pretty much everything we’re now saying about our hand in direct contradiction to every previous statement we’ve ever made about our hand”. All that “head-thinking” will just keep you from enjoying our hand.

POKER OPPONENT: To be honest, it wouldn’t have bothered me so much if you didn’t waste more than half of the final round of betting telling us about hands that don‘t have anything to do with this one.

LINDELOF: What are you trying to say?

CUSE: You didn’t enjoy that?

POKER OPPONENT: It just took up a lot of time during the round in which you are supposed to be showing us your actual hand.

LINDELOF: But if we just showed you our hand, it would be over.

POKER OPPONENT: It is over. This is the last round. There’s no point in bluffing anymore. This is the part where you either have the cards or you don’t.

LINDELOF: What is with this weird obsession about what our “actual cards” are?

CUSE: Is that all this is about to you?

POKER OPPONENT: Yes. Mostly because you’ve been telling us for 5 rounds that you knew exactly what your hand was and that it was this great, incredible hand. So now we want to see it.

LINDELOF: But when we were telling you how awesome our cards were, we weren’t talking about how awesome our actual cards were.

CUSE. Right. We were talking about how awesome the journey to seeing our cards would be.

POKER OPPONENT: No you weren’t. Because that’s not what those words mean.

LINDELOF: Okay. Before we show this hand, we’re just going to do a quick one hour recap.

POKER OPPONENT: I’d rather you didn’t.

CUSE: Bear with us. Just a quick hour long run-down of everything that happened before, after, during, diagonally, and sideways from this hand.

LOOOONG RECAP MONTAGE of cards being shuffled, dealt out, bet, folded, etc.

BACK TO SCENE

POKER OPPONENT: Oh. My. God. Will you please just show your damn – What is this now?!

Lindelof and Cuse are now holding UNO cards.

LINDELOF: What?

POKER OPPONENT: Where did those cards come from?

CUSE: What are you talking about?

LINDELOF: These are the same cards we’ve always had.

POKER OPPONENT: I was here for entire hand. I remember what happened. You can’t play with cards from one deck for half of the round and then switch decks at the end and hope everybody doesn’t notice.

LINDELOF: Well let me answer your question with a question. Uno!

Lindelof lays his final card down on the table.

CUSE: How you like us now, bitch?

The Poker Opponent stares at them in blank disbelief. Stands away from the table.

POKER OPPONENT: Done.

Lindelof and Cuse sigh in relief.

LINDELLOFF: Thank God.

CUSE: Thought he’d never leave.

Lindelof tosses their actual hand, a busted straight, onto the table.

LINDELOFF: We might have actually had to show this piece of shit hand.

FIN

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