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.
twenty bucks an hour is nothing to sneeze at
and perhaps i'm wrong but guessing suitedjustice has been drinking from the social tap for additional security every month
All those green numbers make me happy. Sober and winning, that's the Suited we want to see. 👍
Coincidentally, I own a book with 3D Magic Eye™ puzzles from the 90s, which I retrieved from a box recently. Some of the 3D shapes are quite advanced, and I'm not always able to see them to their full extent. But I usually see something, at least.
Thanks Sheep!
I wonder what makes some Magic Eye™ puzzles tougher than others? What's the difficulty algorithm? I did some quick looking into that on the Internet, but I didn't immediately find an answer, so I gave up, having gotten spoiled by instant relevant answers from the old Google to the point that my research muscles have atrophied and become all but useless under the newer, much crappier Google.
twenty bucks an hour is nothing to sneeze at
and perhaps i'm wrong but guessing suitedjustice has been drinking from the social tap for additional security every month
I've never sought help from the gummint; NTTAWWT. I started this journey with some savings and no credit card debt. Those two nouns have since swapped their adjectives.
I've had the sniffles and the coughing all day, so I stayed home, even though I wanted to play.
On Tuesday, some jerk sitting on my left at the poker table was coughing and sniffling in almost exactly the same way that I am now. I didn't want to douche it forward and give this cold to someone else, so here I am at home, today and probably tomorrow, unless I have a particularly healing night of sleep.
Take a massive dose of multiple drugs and get your ass out the door; life is short, don’t waste it sleeping!
I'm healthy again, and I'll be back at the tables later today. During my convalescence I finished Caliban's War, the second book in James S.A. Corey's space opera series The Expanse, which is also a great television series.
The Expanse is set around 300 years from now, when humanity has colonized the solar system, but hasn't quite made it out to the stars. As per usual, we apes have divided ourselves into squabbling factions: starting with a tired Earth of 30 billion people, and its highly-developed moon, aka Luna.
Versus 4 billion colonists busy with terraforming a heavily militarized Mars.
Versus a new strain of humanity who have grown tall and thin in the microgravity of the asteroid belt and the moons of the gas giants.
As with our current situation, all three factions have enough nuclear weapons on hand to destroy nearly every last vestige of humanity.
The series is about these three factions—all of them having elements of good and evil within their power structures—being faced with an ancient and terrifyingly existential alien menace that they've woken up, one that seems to have been lying around for us for an indeterminable number of eons, in sort of an imperiled twist on Arthur C. Clarke's 2001 series.
It's really good stuff, so far.
James S.A. Corey is the shared pen name of the two actual authors of The Expanse Series, Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck. I've always wondered what it takes to be a good writing collaborator, and if I could ever find someone to click with in that endeavor.
These guys really kill it, and I think that their strongest suit lies in the pacing of the story. The first two books of the series are jam-packed with action, and action defines and refines the characters. You know these people without having to be told anything about them, because you've see them making choice after choice after choice, all of which serve to check off the boxes that define their personalities, moralities and mental states.
Show, don't tell is the maxim, and it's done exceedingly well in the books, as well as in the TV show.
In between the action sequences, there is a bit of world-building and diplomatic maneuvering, along with betrayal and skullduggery, and a little light touch of romance, and it's all just enough to keep the story moving along without bogging it down in the weeds.
Some writers will get caught up in exposition, description, back stories, family secrets, and whatever cool adjacent stuff has come to mind, and then they'll try to rescue the storyline by shoehorning in a cliffhanger at the end of the chapter, but the James S.A. Corey guys always manage keep the pedal down thrillingly throughout the chapters.
It took me less than two weeks to burn through the 600 pages of Caliban's War, and when I finished I wanted to run out and grab the next one in the series (there are eight), but first I have Neal Stephenson's and Ursula Le Guin's books to get through, and I'll also watch the episodes of The Expanse show that correspond with Caliban's War, and then I'll grab the third book for sure.
Do they explain in the books why the belters sound like Jamaicans?
On which platform can we see the show "The Expanse"?
Nah. They just write that the poorer Belters speak in a nigh-unintelligible patois or creole. The showrunners probably borrowed from the existing Haitian and West Indian versions as a model.
Amazon Prime or Apple TV
I briefly tried to watch the tv show, but didn't really get into it, despite being a BIG sci-fi fan... Should I give it another go!?!
I briefly tried to watch the tv show, but didn't really get into it, despite being a BIG sci-fi fan... Should I give it another go!?!
No.
Life is short, and we are just now emerging from a quarter-century-long golden age of television. Plenty of series are still out there for you to love right away, without potentially wasting your time on stuff that you don't favor on the first go-round.
Same for me with The Expanse. I watched most of the first season but gave up at some point. Not sure why, it was not terrible, but at the same time there was nothing that really kept me watching it. Different folks, different strokes, I suppose....
Same for me with The Expanse. I watched most of the first season but gave up at some point. Not sure why, it was not terrible, but at the same time there was nothing that really kept me watching it. Different folks, different strokes, I suppose....
The pace of the TV series is a little off-kilter, I think, due to the first book not ending until halfway through the second season. That may have thrown off the first season finale, which I don't remember, so maybe it wasn't particularly great.
In any case, art is subjective and there's a lot of it out there, so we don't have to spend our time on stuff that we don't enjoy.
He makes a good point, but I'm still never going to play poker while I'm contagious. It's not the right thing to do, given how conducive the design of the poker table—with its cramped seating, shared cards and chips, and automatic shuffler—is for spreading colds and flus.
Here I am again, at 4AM, with my sleep cycle gone completely off the rails.
I woke up at 1AM on Tuesday, after sleeping on and off for most of Monday, recovering from my cold, and I decided to stay up and play a Tuesday afternoon and evening session at the casino. I got home from that around 11PM, and I couldn't fall asleep until almost 3AM, having been awake for more than 24 hours. I woke up around 7AM on Wednesday, stayed up until 10AM, then fell asleep until 2:30 PM.
Then when did I fall asleep last night? I don't remember, but I woke up at 1AM again and here I am on Thursday in the wee hours. I will try to stay up and play an early session, and hope that the sleeping works out better than the last try.
I couldn't stay up. I went back to bed and slept on and off until around 5 PM, then I started my day and headed to the casino. I finished up around 3:30 AM, drove home, finished the last hour of 1955's East of Eden (James Dean was a major ham and tore up the scenery with more abandon than Nicolas Cage), and I went to bed around 7 AM.
Here I am up at 10:20 AM, looking to do a session on short sleep and to try to get to bed at a reasonable hour. Fortunately, there's free coffee, tea and soda at work.
My results over the last two workdays are below, and they're lackluster, to be sure, but at one point I was down more than $250 at both the poker and the slots, so grinding back to breakeven felt good, in contrast to say, being up $500 and then losing it all back, which would have resulted in the same tally but a different mindset. even though it shouldn't have.
MGM Springfield $1/$2 poker: 14 hours
+$11.00
MGM Springfield Slots: 7 hour
(-$14.60)
2024 Running Poker Total: 372 hours, +$4743.00
2024 Running Slot Total: 184 hours, +$6294.67
2024 Grand Total: 556 hours, +$11037.67
Don't play tired. Your reserves of patience are depleted and need to be restored with rest.
Signed,
The World's Worst Poker Player
Are you ok @suitedjustice?
One more day to complete July and unlock August.
Let's goooooo!!!
Are you ok @suitedjustice?
One more day to complete July and unlock August.
Let's goooooo!!!
I'm okay, uberkuber. Thank you for asking!
I had another short, bad poker session. That and no high hands capped out another bad month, financially. But the fault, as always, was mine for not putting in enough hours.
All I can do is to try to make this month different.
My car failed its annual inspection a few days ago. Bad ball joint, apparently. I'm not supposed to drive it until I get it fixed, but the earliest I can get it fixed is this Monday.
I'm driving it. I need to put in some hours and book some wins.
I'll post my monthly update on the booze thing in a few minutes...
Spoiler
MGM Springfield $1/$2 poker: 4.5 hours
(-$415.00)
MGM Springfield Slots: 2 hours
+$4.54
2024 Running Poker Total: 376.5 hours, +$4328.00
2024 Running Slot Total: 186 hours, +$6299.21
2024 Grand Total: 562.5 hours, +$10627.21
The Dry 2024 Challenge Update
January: ✓
February: ✓
March: ✓
April: ✓
May: ✓
June: ✓
July: ✓
August: UNLOCKED
I did it. Once again I forgot about the getting down on my knees + higher power + yada yada, and I had to do all that just now. It's obvious by now that my "forgetting" every month is a passive-aggressive protest, but against whom? I had a moment where I thought you know, I don't have to do this prayer, nobody will know if I don't, but I did it anyway, for the same reason that I stay on the wagon. I would know, and this exercise is for me.
I ended the prayer to the higher power with "Okaythanksbuhbuy," just like I would end a quick phone sales conversation with an occasional vendor or customer.
Edit: I just tried to change "occasional" out with "low-tier", but I shelved that edit because I didn't want to denigrate the higher power. Lol.
Other than that, I find that I don't have anything new and pithy this month to report about my recovery journey.
Well, there is one thing. It has to do with the fact that I'm down three belt notches since the beginning of the year, almost four notches if I suck in the gut. What I'm going to talk about is quite disgusting, so I'll put it in a spoiler.
You've been warned. Don't come crying to me if you hit the spoiler and leave grossed out.
Spoiler
At the beginning of this year, I had grown so fat that I was starting to have trouble wiping my ass.
Spoiler
I could reach the spot, just barely, but the resulting contortions caused me searing pains up and down my left torso. I believe that one of my ribs was stabbing into one of my vital organs. The pain seemed to be of the serious type that ones body puts out when in direct existential peril. It got me wondering about Elvis, like maybe he didn't die at 42 while "straining at the stool," his official cause of death. Maybe he stabbed himself to death while trying to wipe.
I'm vaguely aware that there are extensions that fat people can buy in order to wipe themselves, similar to Fat Bart's Rag On a Stick, and just this week I read on the Internet that some people actually stand up to wipe. I'd never even considered that option.
Both of those options might have solved my stabbing pains problem, but both of them, I'm sure, contain downsides. And choosing either would have been admitting a defeat of sorts—as in, all right, I'm officially fat, and I'm not going to do anything about it.
Instead, I quit the booze, in part, because of this—along with the fact that I was an alcoholic and rife for many more health problems—knowing that dumping 1200 fewer Calories per day down my throat should reliably reduce my bulk.
The upshot was that I wiped myself very carefully for the first month, but since then I've been able to reach just fine.
Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk™.
^Thats some good **** right there.
The thread that keeps on giving.
First, congratulations on July! Keep it going.
On the ball joint: Be really careful. There's a good reason you're told not to drive it.
If it breaks, the tire folds under your car, and you take an immediate and uncontrolled turn into oncoming traffic, or off the road, depending which side. If it seizes, that tire quits turning while the rest of them continue; nearly as bad results.
Of course, I'm not an expert, just a long-time listener to Car Talk.
Spoiler of the month and we're only the 1st!
#goodsh*t
