Suitedjustice's Ongoing Mid-life Crisis

Today I worked at my old office to give the owners a couple of days off, namely today and tomorrow.

They run a small business, and they can't seem to find anyone whom they trust to replace me, so I don't mind working a few days every year to give them a few vacation days and to make some guaranteed money.

By mid-afternoon I was extremely stressed out and cursing the job once again, as if I'd never left it. I have a good thing going in comparison with the poker and the slots, if I could just remember that that's the case and put in the proper hours.

I'll be back at the office tomorrow, and then it's back to the casino.

Do you at least get to pick the music?

Yes! At least in the office area. The shipping and receiving dock is still playing that inventory-starved "variety" station, and 8 of the same 9 songs that they were playing on endless repeat last year, and the year before.

I have the office radio set at a station out of Northampton that's also corporately owned, but where it seems like they let the deejays play whatever they want; at least I can't detect any rhyme or reason to the playlists.

I finished up the office stint today. I sold a big ticket item that's been gathering dust on the warehouse floor since I ordered it early last year, not long before I quit.

When I ordered the Big Ticket Item, I told the owners that it would sell if they pitched it to the right customer, so I pitched it today.

The Dry 2024 Challenge Update

January: ✓
February: ✓
March: ✓
April: ✓
May: ✓
June: UNLOCKED

Another month in the books...and speaking of books, finishing Infinite Jest meant that I found myself with no recovery-adjacent literature. Almost at random, I started reading Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky, but the vast majority of his characters are either high-strung and high maintenance, or they're hopeless drunks and/or gambling degenerates.

One of Dostoevsky's big ideas is that God especially loves the abject wretches, and He grants them a moment of grace at the lowest point of their lives. Good stuff, but still not helpful for this particular leg of my journey.

I'm going to pick up Doctor Sleep, Stephen King's 2019 sequel to The Shining. I used to own a copy of Doctor Sleep, but I donated it. It's not King's best work, but it has a lot of recovery stuff in it, so it's the right book for me right now.

Why not just buy one of the thousands of great nonfiction recovery books out there? I don't like 'em. I've tried a few, and they've all seemed like homework, no fun at all. It's not their fault; it's just the way that I'm wired. Give me fiction with its story line and analogy and allegory and metaphor and simile, and those things seem to wedge themselves into my brain better than just trying to tell me what to do.

Speaking of no fun: I got down on my knees again and thanked the Higher Power and yada yada. It's just once a month, but it's still a damn battle every time to swallow my pride and admit powerlessness...but I did it.

One of the bromides of AA is "my best thinking got me here." I don't think they mean that my best thinking got me into recovery; rather, it led me all the way down to a low point which then necessitated a recovery. Getting down on my knees might be a method for letting the air out of my pride in my own intellectual skills, i.e. my so-called best thinking.

One last thing and then I'll leave off the recovery talk for another month: coming back from the MGM a while back at 2AM, I ran across a State Police sobriety checkpoint. This was the third such checkpoint I've been through in my lifetime. The first two times, I had been drinking, and I had to lie about it to the cops and try to appear sober. The second time, in fact, I had a quarter pound of magic mushrooms stuffed into my console, so that would have been quite the disaster, had I not gotten away with it.

This time, though, there was no sweat going through the checkpoint. And that was so very nice.

Infinite Jest review top notch. Write more.

Train in Vain top notch. More Clash will solve all the world's problems.

Congratulations on another month, SJ!

Thanks Phat Mack! Telling someone on the Internet to write more is a huge compliment. I appreciate that.

You know, it just occurred to me that with DFW having 216 boys play the train-jumping game on a regular basis, it never seemed to cross his mind that a girl may have wanted to play. Obviously, stupid thrill seeking and risk taking skews heavily male, but is it entirely exclusive?

Thanks golddog!

it really was and he should

that was also the only song i recognized

Thanks brother!

Today the slots were fairly well picked-over, so I took a chance on a marginal play with a low positive EV and a high variance, and it paid off.

As the machine was paying off, I found two of the regular slot grinders behind me, watching with confounded looks on their faces, as if they were wondering if they'd missed out on a good play that only I'd known about.

They hadn't. I just got lucky.

MGM Springfield $1/$2 poker: 3 hours
+$89.00
MGM Springfield Slots: 2 hours
+$364.79

2024 Running Poker Total: 254 hours, +$2361.00
2024 Running Slot Total: 139 hours, +$6083.96

2024 Grand Total: 393 hours, +$8444.96

Old enough to know better, I would guess. He should be retired by now and on some beach in Baja sipping Singapore slings with a bunch of bikini clad young sluts with big tits. Hanging out in casinos forever is for losers actually.

If we had been living our lives like we're supposed to, it's unlikely we had ever become a significant part of this forum, so there's that. Singapore slings are supersweet, at least I don't know of a place that makes them differently. The amount of sugar in it is almost as unhealthy as the alc

Thank you for the kind words, TheOneWhoYawns! You have brought some joy into my life.

I am in my mid-50s. I am immature for my age. I would rate my maturity level as being on par with The Dude from The Big Lebowski. I've certainly downed my share of White Russians and other cocktails during the daytime hours, and I have explored various inexpensive leisure pursuits over other, more practical activities.

At one time, in my early 30s, I was prepared to settle down and marry and have children and a career and the whole shebang. That time is gone. Outside of a few good friends, I am alone, but I'm not lonely. Lately I've been enjoying checking out various masterpieces and near-masterpieces in film and books and albums and TV and video games. I hope that you are also enjoying your days.

My traps are a bit low on retirement grease, but I don't like to work, and I don't want to commit crimes, so it's the casino for the foreseeable future. I'd also like to lose some weight and start rocking a wardrobe of velour track suits, and the casino is the ideal place for that type of display.

Another day at the office. I've put "showing up" back into play, now I just need to keep that going and work on staying around for longer.

MGM Springfield $1/$2 poker: 4 hours
+$155.00
MGM Springfield Slots: 2 hours
+$62.23

2024 Running Poker Total: 258 hours, +$2516.00
2024 Running Slot Total: 141 hours, +$6146.19

2024 Grand Total: 399 hours, +$8662.19

I don't think I've ever had a Singapore Sling. I'm not biased against sweet and fruit-based "girl drinks", though. If it tastes good, bring it. If instead all you have is whiskey, pour me a double, neat or on the rocks.

I wouldn't exactly describe it as a girls drink cos, at least the variants I had usually have a lot of alc in it, but it's very sweet also, which neatly hides the alc you're consuming. You can look up the recipe on the web, I think it's mainly gin and cointreau or whatever that's spelled. That's prolly the other reason I was never too much into it, not a big fan of gin, that's some pretty trashy alc. Yeah it's also in my preferred BS. Suited might know, maybe some other peeps, not sure, many HK bartenders know, I can tell you that much, one of my preferred ways to walk into the abyss is named after a place not too far away from suited

There's also a variant called Texas... Suited might like that one

Anyways, carry on, I'm just a lost alcoholic in a lost world. I applaud your efforts Mr. suited tough....

1nd, gin is an excellent alcohol, not trashy at all.
2st, a "standard" long island iced tea is not made with gin as far as I know.

I stand corrected, there's apparently gin in a LIIT (Long Island Iced Tea). Along with 3 other alcohols: tequila, vodka, rhum.
😊

Yes, the magic of the Long Island Iced Tea is that it has a handful of different hard liquors in it, but if it's been made correctly, then it still tastes almost exactly like sweet iced tea.

It would be counterproductive to the theme of the drink if the extra shot in the Texas version gave it a liquor aftertaste, imo.

Rolling Stone's 468th Greatest Album of All Time: Some Girls by The Rolling Stones (1978)

Here we have a short and very solid late-70s gem from the Stones, packed with a handful of enduring hits. Radio staples "Miss You", "When the Whip Comes Down", "Faraway Eyes", "Beast of Burden" and "Shattered" make up half of the album's tracks.

Mick Jagger and Keith Richards co-wrote most of the Rolling Stones' mid-period songs, billing themselves as the Glimmer Twins, but Keef was in legal trouble for heroin for most of 1977, so Mick penned the lion's share of Some Girls; and given where Mick's ever-bopping head was during that era, it all but guaranteed that dance music would be involved.

Dance music in the late-70s typically meant one thing:

Spoiler

Show

I don't think that there was anything inherently wrong with disco. The genre was extraordinarily popular for a time, and pop music has always carried a high chaff-to-wheat ratio, due to so many people from every creative medium wanting to get a piece of the fantastic proceeds.

"Miss You" is the wheat of disco, separated out for its excellent low-key harmonica from James "Sugar Blue" Whiting, and for Bill Wyman's intricate, funky baseline, and for drummer Charlie Watts making sure that it has a good beat and you can dance to it.

The other song I love on Some Girls is "Shattered". Keith's guitar line is chunky and, if sped up, could pass for punk, and Mick's sing-shouting across the track never gets old for me, and his combined love for and despair about 70s New York City in all its tarnished glory seems spot on.

Listening to great albums from the 70s from bands like the Stones, Zep, Pink Floyd and The Who always makes me wistful about what The Beatles might have sounded like in that decade, if they'd somehow stayed together.

McCartney had Wings, George Harrison and John Lennon made several good solo albums, and even Ringo had some hits, but I still can't help but wonder about those alternate worlds where there are Beatles albums from '71 to '80 and beyond.

Rolling Stone says:

The Stones sounded revitalized on Some Girls, with Mick at his bitchiest, reveling in the NYC sleaze of “Shattered,” “Beast of Burden,” and the disco hit “Miss You.” It became their all-time biggest seller. Keith was in rough shape at the time — as Mick fumed, “Christ, Keith ****in’ gets busted every year” — but he stands unrepentant in his outlaw theme song, “Before They Make Me Run.”

According to the wiki, Keith could have easily done hard time in Canada on those heroin charges, if not for president Jimmy Carter helping to get him released on bail and into detox in the USA. Also it came to the judge's attention that Richards had befriended a blind fan, and the guitarist had often taken steps to see that the woman got to and from Rolling Stones concerts safely, so the judge gave him probation instead of jail and ordered Richards to play a benefit for Canadian National Institute for the Blind.

I remember this album well. The original album cover was different and was involved in some legal dispute with some whiny baby bitches that hated The Stones. In the end the whip came down and the bitches won, so the album cover was changed. But it wasn’t a victory, the dispute propelled the album to even better sales. Screaming Bitches always make things worse for themselves and everyone else.

In Texas, a LIIT was all the clear liquor you had in the well: gin, vodka, rum, tequila, triple sec -- then a splash of coke. As mentioned, whiskey would ruin it. So would sour mix. I haven't served one since 1980, so I doubt I'm current on this.

My wife sent all my velour track suits to Goodwill. They were on MY SIDE OF THE CLOSET, dry cleaned, in moth-proof bags, but she said "we" needed the space. I was waiting for the day that they would be so far out of fashion that I could start wearing them again. I had a dark-lime-green Izod that belonged in the Smithsonian. I am no longer married.

Some Girls review is fine writing. Far Away Eyes as run 50 red lights in you honor.