Suitedjustice's Ongoing Mid-life Crisis
I woke up in the middle of choking to death again; though to be accurate, it was towards the end of the process--woke up right away in a white hot panic with black spots of permanent unconsciousness swooping in across both sides of my vision.
Calm yourself, was the first important step. My lungs were soaked, steeped in the things that belonged only in my stomach, and locked up tight. My air passage was blocked and burning with bile and hydrochloric acid. No, I don't have asthma. I have a drinking problem.
Spoiler
Though, now that I think about it, is that inhaler thing any good? Maybe I'll try a hit sometime, just to see.
This was last Friday, just a few hours after I'd quit my office job of twelve years to take a shot at playing poker for a living out West in Nevada. This will not be my first shot at gambling for a living; although I have only tried something like this once before, many years ago.
Around the turn of the century I quit college most of the way through my senior year and I moved out to Las Vegas for 8 years. My experiences were somewhat of interest: rampant drunkenness, a stolen lab animal, solid card counting, North Korean meth, time spent with Mormons, advantage slot grinding, a cowardly pass on an FBI Most Wanted bounty, facing contempt of court charges, and dressing up as Albus Dumbledore. You can find that in my BBV thread.
[U][url]https://forumserver.twoplustwo.c...[/U][/URL] .
That thread held up pretty well in BBV, which is not nothing.
Starting meditative relaxation can be problematic when you're dying from choking on your own puke. I sat up straight, blind from the black splotches that had slapped away the weak light of the kitchen stove. I dropped my shoulders, relaxed my chest and upper arms, and then, projecting calm with all my might, I tried my throat. I pictured my lungs and throat opening up just a tiny passage, for just a little air to go by--something to get me started. And they did, untethering just the smallest little rivulet of air, and it made the most terrifying sound as it went through. It always does.
Whatever you've heard from actors pretending to gasp after being choked, the reality is worse. At least no one was with me this time. When that's been the case, the other person has invariably freaked the **** out when they've heard my gasping and choking routine, which only adds the burden of myself having to reassure them through nodding and non-frantic gestures, so that they won't call 911, as I hate the idea of calling the cops.
April 13th of this year was 14 months without me having a drink. During that long stretch I had honestly forgotten why I'd quit. That's right, I had completely purged from my recall the years of nighttime memories of myself almost choking to death, this happening once or twice every couple of weeks on average. Now, the terrifying night wakeups didn't happen even once during the 14 dry months. But 3 weeks back into drinking--oh yeah--there was that thing, wasn't there?.
Now, there was something else I'd forgotten about. And that's the Double Tap. The Double Tap happens when I don't force my drunk and tired and traumatized self to remain awake for a good two or three hours after a choking incident. If I fall back asleep before then, I wake up choking to death all over again. And sure enough, that happened last Friday, and I had to save myself again.
So on Saturday I jumped back on the waggy, and Cinco de Mayo is now my new anniversary date, and that's really enough about drinking. I'm not here to write about that business. I should have been done with it; and now I am.
My flight leaves for Reno in a few hours, and I'll be out there for the next 3 weeks scouting out the live poker games in the city. If I like it, that's where I'm moving to.
Pigs have wings.
Wednesday was an awful day at the tables. I was not card dead. I opened a lot of hands, and I lost almost all of them. I had AQ—suited and non—at least 10 times and lost every time.
I made somewhat nitty folds twice in two very big multiway pots, because in both cases the action dictated that someone had the goods, but in both cases it was I who had the goods.
Those two hands are going to haunt me for a long time. It was vital for me to know the differences between players who are reasonable and players who are action-prone. I chose to label them as reasonable—in which case I should have had second best hands—but it turns out that the players were more splashy—in which case I had the best hands. If I'd worked just a little harder on assessing players at the table that day, I would have gotten those distinctions correct and booked a win for the day, given the size of the pots.
MGM Springfield $1/$2 poker: 7 hours
(-$665.00)
MGM Springfield Slots: 2 hours
+$10.65
2024 Running Poker Total: 221 hours, +$1540.00
2024 Running Slot Total: 117 hours, +$5491.29
2024 Grand Total: 338 hours, +$7031.29
Wednesday was an awful day at the tables. I was not card dead. I opened a lot of hands, and I lost almost all of them. I had AQ—suited and non—at least 10 times and lost every time.
I made somewhat nitty folds twice in two very big multiway pots, because in both cases the action dictated that someone had the goods, but in both cases it was I who had the goods.
Those two hands are going to haunt me for a long time. It was vital for me to know the differences between players who are reasonable and
HH for the two big pots?
Wednesday was an awful day at the tables. I was not card dead. I opened a lot of hands, and I lost almost all of them. I had AQ—suited and non—at least 10 times and lost every time.
I made somewhat nitty folds twice in two very big multiway pots, because in both cases the action dictated that someone had the goods, but in both cases it was I who had the goods.
Those two hands are going to haunt me for a long time. It was vital for me to know the differences between players who are reasonable and
Are you being results orientated? Did you just catch the bottom of their range and would have lost in most cases?
Would you care about those two hands if you had of ended up with a winning day?
I didn't write down the exact HHs.
Hand one I had the low end of the straight on the turn for 2nd nuts. There were two flush draws on the board; I had neither of them. Player 1 bet $50, I flatted, player 2 raised to $150, back to player 1 who shoved for $450. I tank folded, thinking that I could already be drawing dead against a higher straight and/or I had reverse implied odds with a million combined outs against me. I should have raised the turn instead of flatting. Barring that, I should have reshoved when it got back to me. Player 1 had the nut flush draw and player 2 had a set.
Hand two had similar action on the river, but I had AK for top pair, top kicker and three of us got to the river with straights and two pairs on the board but not flushes. Player A had AQ for TP2K and player B had turned a low pair into an all-in 3-bet bluff.
Are you being results orientated? Did you just catch the bottom of their range and would have lost in most cases?
Would you care about those two hands if you had of ended up with a winning day?
If I had learned more about the players, I would have adjusted my ranges downward, though I still may have folded on hand two. If I'd had a winning day, the hands would have still bothered me, but not quite as much.
I'm taking a little break from poker. If I come back on Wednesday and work from Wed-Sat, I'll still be able to get in 40 hours for this week. That's the plan.
Meanwhile, I've listened to another album...
Rolling Stone's 470th Greatest Album of All Time: 400 Degreez by Juvenile (1998)
400 Degreez is a rap album from 1998 that topped off at #9 on the Billboard Top 200. It was put out by Terius Gray, aka Juvenile, a New Orleans native brought up in the city's Magnolia public housing project, aka The Nolia, also the childhood home of several other popular rap acts such as Turk, Soulja Slim, and Magnolia Shorty.
I've mentioned before that rap albums should get a pass on being judged by their backing music, but I largely enjoyed the music on this album. It's funk-based, varied, and conducive to Juvenile's vocal rhythms.
The album's first track, Intro, is charming as hell. Producer Mannie Fresh—also from the Nolia neighborhood—gives off short laughs after his lines that remind me of Digital Underground's Humpty at his most charismatic.
The only purpose of the track is to live up to its name; the Intro, talking up the album's players and what is to come, but the execution is crisp and the music is funky. I like it a lot.
As for the rest of 400 Degreez, the album's style is known as Southern or New Orleans rap, but the subject matter is standard gangsta rap fare, focusing on selling drugs, eliminating snitches and gang rivals, accumulating illicit profits, spending those profits in clubs, on women—treated with the unfortunate level of casual misogyny that is rife within this genre—and on items of conspicuous consumption, and enumerating the many luxury brand names that can be purchased from this lifestyle.
The album's title track: 400 Degreez, is fairly representative of the rest of the album. It's not a bad song; it had me nodding my head along with the beat. Juvenile's rapping is tuneful and hits the beat in a satisfying way.
Gangsta rap has never been my favorite genre, but I took on this project to expand my horizons, so I'm glad to have had the chance to hear one of the more popular and critically lauded examples.
Rolling Stone Says:
The New Orleans rapper’s third album reorientated hip-hop toward a new Southern sound, driven by producer Mannie Fresh’s intergalactic beats. “Ha” and “Back That Azz Up” were earthshaking singles, and Juvenile’s young-but-old growl brought out the blues in “Ghetto Children” and Dickensian horror in “Gone Ride With Me.” 400 Degreez added new sonic textures that pop music is still mining.
Mannie Fresh's loops and beats were my favorite part of the album.
The songs you posted are alright. I like some gangsta rap, so I thought I'd give the three singles on the album a listen as well. It turns out "Ha" ain't my thing, but I liked "Back That Azz Up" a lot better. "Follow Me Now" is kind of a funny one, I don't mind it.
The songs you posted are alright. I like some gangsta rap, so I thought I'd give the three singles on the album a listen as well. It turns out "Ha" ain't my thing, but I liked "Back That Azz Up" a lot better. "Follow Me Now" is kind of a funny one, I don't mind it.
It's interesting how the popularity of gangsta rap has endured for almost 4 decades across all cultures and throughout the world. There's apparently something very human about rooting for and identifying with the underdog criminal archetype, Jung's Trickster figure made manifest.
interesting edit, the song mostly fits
here's the original video recorded thirty years after the movie
Spoiler
I love this song. It's an old American folk song. In 1949, Bill Landford And The Landfordaires did the first version I ever heard. Moby did a remix of it on one of his albums.
There's also a Marilyn Manson version that's not his best work, imo.
And there's also Panzerfaust.
The random number generator movie-picker landed on Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, from 1973, so I watched it.
James Coburn played Pat Garrett, real-life outlaw turned lawman and killer of Billy "The Kid" Bonney. Coburn was one of those men with the manly voices from the Greatest Generation...
...although he was technically born into the very beginning of the subsequent Silent Generation, and his daughter-in-law claimed that his real sympathies fell in with the Hippies.
In addition to a commanding, irascible voice, Coburn also possessed just a hint of the ratface that always seemed perfect for Western badass bad guys.
In Peckinpah Westerns, everyone and no one is the bad guy, so Pat Garrett sort of gets the black hat label by default, as our sympathies lie with that doomed Trickster Billy the Kid, played by Kris Kristofferson, who was a super-hot acting commodity in the early and mid 1970s, until he starred in 1980's Heaven's Gate, a flop so colossal that it helped bring down the entire Auteur concept for making studio movies.
I'm okay with Kristofferson; I liked him without reservations as Rubber Duck in Peckinpah's Convoy, but I was 6 years old when I saw that, and tastes change over time. At age 8, I thought that Greg Evigan made acting look easy in the BJ and The Bear show, but that show is pretty damn painful to watch nowadays.
Spoiler
Also notable was Slim Pickens as a conflicted (and doomed, of course) sheriff. Pickens and his wonderful Texas drawl (by way of Kingsburg, CA) starred in two of my favorite scenes of all time, both of them from 1964's Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Here's the first, one that includes a young James Earl Jones as one of the bombers.
Trivia note: Pickens originally said, "Shoot, a fella could have a pretty good weekend in Dallas with all that stuff," but the city was changed in post to Vegas due to the movie being filmed soon after the Kennedy assassination, which of course occurred in and somewhat traumatized Dallas.
The second, and greatest Slim Pickens scene is not one that I'm going to post. It's at the very end of Dr. Strangelove, and it's a huge spoiler. So... no. Go see Dr. Strangelove if you haven't. You'll thank me.
Speaking of spoilers, for Pickens's sheriff's death in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, the film's music composer wrote a special song for the event. That composer was Bob Dylan, and that song was Knocking on Heaven's Door. Can you imagine having Dylan write and perform freaking Knocking on Heaven's Door for your character's death scene?
I mentioned upthread that I wanted to see how awful Bob Dylan's acting was in the movie, but he really wasn't that bad. I've seen much worse from others in feature films.
Dylan played a character who was sort of an interloper who got caught up in the events of the movie, who was in way over his head, and who was treated with kid gloves when he should have ended up on the floor during his very first scene. So he was basically playing Bob Dylan who wandered onto the set of this Sam Peckinpah film, and found himself in the movie—perfect.
solid review
The random number generator movie-picker landed on Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, from 1973, so I watched it.
James Coburn played Pat Garrett, real-life outlaw turned lawman and killer of Billy "The Kid" Bonney. Coburn was one of those men with the manly voices from the Greatest Generation...
...although he was technically born into the very beginning of the subsequent Silent Generation, and his daughter-in-law claimed that his real sympathies fell in with the Hippies.
In addition to a
I’m actually not a big Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid fan but the Slim Pickens death scene with Bob Dylan’s Knocking On Heaven’s Door was amazing.
The whole concept of the Bob Dylan’s character was sort of us the moviegoer who’s along for the ride and rooting for the Kid. Seen this in other movies but this is the earliest example I can think of it being done.
Thanks, REDeYeS00!
The whole concept of the Bob Dylan’s character was sort of us the moviegoer who’s along for the ride and rooting for the Kid. Seen this in other movies but this is the earliest example I can think of it being done.
I can see that.
You can also see him as a VIP tourist/contest winner. Give him something fun to do, like read off the labels in the pantry (beans, beans, spinach, beefsteak, beans) while the big boys have their standoff.
The plan was to get up early and do my taxes (MA residents have until 4/17 due to a state holiday on Monday), then head off to the casino.
Last night at midnight, a fun-looking turbo $0.55, $50 gtd NLO8 tournament popped up on ACR, and I said, "Ah, what the hell; it's a turbo."
Every time I think that an Omaha tournament looks like fun, it's not. It's never been fun. This "turbo" finished up at 5:30AM after a 45-minute heads up battle, and I took 2nd place for a measly $8.97.
Needless to say I did not get up early. Taxes took forever. I usually hand them over to somebody who knows what they're doing, but I procrastinated this year and it took me forever. I had to google everything, as well as pay Turbotax a premium for the privilege of reporting gambling income; that was basically one of their several versions of DLC.
So, no poker today. Back tomorrow.
By no poker I meant no live poker.
Yesterday was a long, slightly losing day. I felt fresh after the long break, but I'm going to need more than a fresh feeling to put food on the table. I need to book a lot of hours over the next 11 days, and I also need to run well for a change.
Back at it today.
MGM Springfield $1/$2 poker: 8 hours
(-$20.00)
MGM Springfield Slots: 3 hours
(-$0.10)
2024 Running Poker Total: 229 hours, +$1520.00
2024 Running Slot Total: 120 hours, +$5491.19
2024 Grand Total: 349 hours, +$7011.19
Another bad day at the tables. I ragequit after losing $300+ with AA vs KQo all-in preflop...a fairly standard beat, but I had been down for the entire day, and that hand would have put me back even. Instead, it tilted me.
No, I'll change that from passive tense to active and say that I tilted, in accordance with the Stoics, where nothing has meaning outside of the exact meaning that one ascribes to it. If I could go back in time and respond to that, I might ask those ancient Greek and Roman sages to jump off a cliff and scream me their positive spins re: their situations on their way down.
Gambelina gave me the wisest advice for this spot. I can go ahead and wallow in self-pity, as long as I set a firm expiration date on that process.
That date will be late tonight/early tomorrow, when I head out on a wee hour slot run, in search of some good plays and a big score.
Also, I did take 10th in another small online tournament for $120, so it's not all bad poker news.
MGM Springfield $1/$2 poker: 6.5 hours
(-$297.00)
MGM Springfield Slots: 3 hours
+$55.94
2024 Running Poker Total: 235.5 hours, +$1223.00
2024 Running Slot Total: 123 hours, +$5547.13
2024 Grand Total: 358.5 hours, +$6770.13
I’m in for you finding some juicy slot plays on your late night run.
Hitchcock and Fellini
On the leisure front: I watched two more movies from my list. The first was Hitchcock's Notorious from 1946. It's one of Hitch's earlier works, in black and white. The plot involves American and German-American spies played respectively by Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman infiltrating a post-WW2 Nazi enclave in Brazil and attempting to thwart their plan to smuggle uranium, ostensibly for a nuke.
Bergman appears to have dirty blond or light brown hair in the film, instead of being one of Hitchcock's platinum blondies, but she has all of the director's other typical leading lady attributes: being lovely, strong, mysterious, apt at dissembling, and not exactly a prude.
Not that there's anything wrong with that.
Now that I've seen Cary Grant and Humphrey Bogart in back-to-back Hitchcock films, I'm noticing that his leading men might also be of a type:
Tall, dark and handsome. Or just dark and handsome in Bogart's case, as he was 5'8" (1.73 m), just a bit shorter than his leading lady Bergman.
I enjoyed Notorious. The acting was very good, the plot was tight, and the pacing and accumulating suspense were near-perfect. But I still prefer North By Northwest. That may have something to do with my preference for color over black and white film, but also I like that North By Northwest took more chances, and they happened to pay off: chances like staging a throwing-knife murder at the UN and framing the hero for it, like attacking the hero with a crop-duster airplane, and arranging for a big fight on Mt. Rushmore.
It feels like the director thought he had to prove himself to the studios with Notorious before he could play a little bit looser and more expansive later in North By Northwest. Then again, it could have been a matter of budget sizes. Still, Notorious is worth a watch as an exemplar in plot and pacing.
The second movie was Federico Fellini's 8 1/2 from 1963. I didn't know what to expect from this film, but I loved it almost right away. I'll watch it again sometime, as I'm sure that I missed a lot; the movie is long and dense and heavy on symbolism and dreamlike sequences.
Also, Fellini has made me take back what I've written about black and white films. The director proves himself a master of the two colors in 8 1/2.
Here's a snippet at the beginning that's pretty representative of the film. The scene takes place near the beginning, at a Catholic Church-sanctioned spa/healing water retreat, and a few of the actors glance directly at the camera—normally a no no—and I don't think that it's a POV shot from one of the characters' perspectives. It seems to me that some of the people recognize us as the audience, and that they're glad to see us, and slyly inviting us into their film.
Fellini was one of Francis Ford Coppola's favorite directors, so it's possible that his Flight of the Valkyries music sequence in Apocalypse Now was an homage to the scene above.
Speaking of which: there's a dance sequence in 8 1/2 that makes me think of the one in Pulp Fiction.
Tarantino is a movie scholar, so that's another possible homage, though on second glance the two sequences aren't extermely similar.
More similar in tone and spirit than in movement, maybe.
As for the plot of 8 1/2: not really. No. It's a character piece centered around a famous and successful director in his middle-age who is busy making a hash out of both his personal life and his new movie, while he's supposed to be taking a quiet cure alone at a spa.
Everyone follows Guido Anselmi, the director—played by Marcello Mastroianni as a dashing but aging womanizer—to the spa and pesters him constantly, vying with one another for small snippets of his wandering attention.
This constant, rolling, needy chaos doesn't vex Guido; he seems to thrive on all the attention. He even invites his wife to the spa when his mistress is already present, knowing that the two will see each other and that sparks will fly in some direction.
Whenever Guido is left alone for short intervals, he seeks the dream solace of company in the form of family or old Catholic schoolmates or, in one sequence, all of the women in his life, past and present, organized into a semi-rebellious harem living for his pleasure and diversion.
As for the movie he's trying to make: it's a mess. Every time he reveals any details of his film to anyone, whether it's his producer, set designer, his actresses, his mistress, his wife, or his writing partner, they universally let him know that they hate it.
Guido's writing partner is especially prominent with his opinions, as he viciously deconstructs and belittles every idea, theme, character trait, plot item, metaphor, simile and analogy in the movie, from start to finish, and then the writer moves on to insult Guido's intelligence, personality, creativity, culture and integrity.
The thing about the writer is that his criticisms seem to apply not just to Guido's movie but to Fellini's 8 1/2, and that's when it's implied that the movie within the movie is meta. It's about Fellini, the famous middle-aged director, trying to make a movie, i.e. 8 1/2. I take the nasty writer character to be Fellini's own interior critic, because I know how horrible and deflating mine can be. The symbolism, though, is vague enough that your mileage may vary on that interpretation.
In any case, I would recommend 8 1/2. It is a beautiful film to look at, with some surprising and unique images. There's plenty of pithy commentary on the cost of prior success, and on art and creativity and the fine line between genius and failure, all of which could be interpreted in several ways depending on the viewer. And there's some unexpected humor where the movie doesn't take itself too seriously. I laughed out loud in a few spots.
I might just add another Fellini movie to the list. Coppola's favorite is I Vitelloni, from 1953.
I've had some trouble lately with hauling my carcass out of my apartment and to work. I have not been posting here, and with me that always means that I haven't been playing.
Typically this would also mean that I've been on another bender, drinking my way up from a few craft beers, on to the cheaper, stronger malt liquors, then to the same lineup but with an added canned cocktail or two, then on to a daily pint of whiskey, and on to the endgame of an ever more forgotten series of cheap 1.75 liter whisky handles.
This is not the case.
The Dry 2024 Challenge Update
January: ✓
February: ✓
March: ✓
April: ✓
May: UNLOCKED
Sober, however, does not mean well. For the addict, sobriety is necessary, but not sufficient for wellness.
I am around 600 pages into Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace (henceforth DFW), with a few hundred pages left to go. A good chunk of the book has to do with the hopeless horrors of addiction and the somewhat more hopeful horrors of recovery, inlayed throughout with an exquisitely-tuned black humor that has often been imitated but has never been surpassed.
DFW had been to a psychiatric hospital due to alcohol and drug addiction 10 years before he wrote Infinite Jest, and he was very familiar with the AA style 12-step process, and he weaved it densely into his masterpiece.
Between this book and Stephen King's Doctor Sleep, also chock full of 12-step speak, I feel as if I've been to a dozen or more AA meetings, so why bother going...actually, I did go to one meeting, years ago. It wasn't for me.
And so yeah but anyway (to steal a sentence-opening quirk from DFW), one of the issues his recovering characters have to confront is the presence of God as they know Him in 6 out of the 12 Steps.
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
A few of his recovering characters are either atheists or skeptical agnostics, so they understandably have trouble with a full 50% of the 12-step program. Their colleagues in the program tell them that it's fine if they don't believe in a conventional God, they just have to do the steps. Doing is the only important part. Pick a Higher Power and find some way to do it. Don't question. Don't consider. Just do the steps. Of course, one of his characters chooses Satan as his Higher Power and becomes insufferable about it, but his decision is accepted by his colleagues in the program.
If you've read this thread, you might have guessed that I had some thoughts on this Higher Power business. I've already written a lot of speculation in here about religion and its function in evolutionary and societal terms.
In my head, those thoughts became a post, which became a pamphlet, which grew into a treatise, which could have easily grown into a book's worth of insufficiently researched rantings and musings and postulations.
But no.
Instead, I swallowed my pride and I got down on my knees; I addressed a generic Higher Power, admitted that I was powerless on my own against my own addiction. I thanked the Higher Power for the help with keeping me sober thus far, and I asked for more and continued help going forward.
I did it. It was all right. It was fine.
The problem is: you're supposed to do that praying **** every day. That's not something that I can do. I think that it would be appropriate for me to do it once a month, when I do my little sobriety recap here in this thread, so I'm going with that.
