Double Digits

As of six minutes ago I reached 10 days of gambling abstinence.  It's nice getting into double digits.  It's progress. 

Yesterday while napping I dreamed I capitulated and sat down to play poker and won a few dollars but felt shitty for succumbing to temptation so soon when I have felt confident I could hold out for much longer.  But the nice thing about a rotten dream like that is the euphoric realization afterward that it was only a dream.  And ultimately it motivates me more.

When I quit ten days ago I said to myself... I'm not just trying to break my record this time.  I'm not merely attempting to go an entire year gambling free... this time is forever... I want to look back at 2011 as the year I quit for good.  But already I'm finding this a difficult resolve to embrace.

I wonder how much better I could be as a gambler if I could get my tilt under control.  Tilting is.. basically when you are unhappy with your luck and you let your emotions dictate your decisions rather than controlling yourself with impersonal logic and proven principles.  I have entertained notions of how I could practice subduing my emotional responses so that after a year or so I can return to gambling... and be better at it. 

Additionally I recently met a beautiful young woman and learned she works at a local casino and so there's the temptation of wandering in there one day and playing cards and... you know... putting myself in a situation where I can get to know her.  Easy enough to put it off for now... but forever?

Tricky.

Just being honest with myself... if I'm slaying this dragon... I like to acknowledge it's one fat son of a bitch dragon I'm slaying.

Prelapsarian Peregrinations

I've made it three days (and 6.5 hours) without gambling and doing well.  Life does not suck... which almost puzzles me.  I should wake up sick each day about how much money I wasted so recently... but the pitiful actuality is that I've done this so many times I'm nearly immune to it.  Desensitized. 

When I was attending MTSU I bought a beautiful Bible with the Scofield Study System published by Oxford.  Even though I'm a skeptic of religion, I wanted a superior text with which to do my research.  I knew I would be marking it up with notes and underlining and so I commenced a search for a pen that would serve this purpose effectually.  What I found was the uni-ball gel pen and I've been using them fanatically ever since... about twelve years now.  I use them for everything.  I don't even want to make a bank deposit unless I have one with me.  I don't want to use the pen they provide with my check at a restaurant or barista... I want to use my pen.  It just flows smoother... and my handwriting comes out more confident.  Anyway on Sunday... less than one day into my current effort at gambling abstinence... while I walked around the poker room half monitoring customers who might need more chips and half monitoring the demolition of my NY Jets at the hands of their hated rivals, the Patriots, as it was broadcast on five flat screen televisions, the cap to my pen snapped off... Only I didn't realize it for a few moments and by the time I discovered the caplessness of said pen... I didn't know where I might have been when the decapitation occurred... so I retraced my steps.  This is by no means the first time this has happened... and I liken it to the sensation you might endure if you were to show up at work one day and suddenly realize you were naked.  Very disconcerting and it's hard to concentrate  on anything work-related until your personal dilemma is resolved.  Well.. a few minutes later when I'd almost given up I did spot the cap laying unharmed near table 4 Seat 6 at the front of the room... And relieved at its reunion with pen I realized that indeed... my life would continue and there would be happiness once more.  That's all it took.

And I'm demonstrating greater self-control with my dieting... Saying things to myself like... on my next break I'm only going to eat one banana and one other fruit... and then following through on it... to the letter.  This is unusual to me.  I lost three pounds in three days... that was before last night when I accidentally ate a banana with peanut butter, two waffles, half a can of Blue Diamond BBQ roasted almonds, and a bowl of pears just minutes before going to bed.  But still.. in general... doing better... like yesterday at my favorite restaurant... Chili Thai... I ate half of my dinner and boxed up the other half for later.  How difficult is that to do when you're eating something delicious?  For me it's a challenge.

And I'm doing housework each day... it's so easy for me to say I'm going to wash dishes or vacume or clean the sink... but when I actually follow through... I become ridiculously proud of myself.

But most importantly... I've been writing in my novel frequently... not a lot... but often.  The working title is Lilith's Lament, but a repetitious tendency in the writing has occurred to me.  Near the beginning a character named Lance is relating to a young student named Ryan the events that occurred in Eden before the creation of Adam and Eve.  One thing that happens is that Lucifer is banished for a while and with there being nothing much better to do... he goes walking across the face of the Earth and back.  Then after Adam is created Lucifer and Gabriel go searching for him... so I felt compelled to decorate their search with dialogue.  Then they found him and are escorting him back to Eden... and once more I must relate what they talk about on the way... but to interrupt the monotony... I decide to have the present day narrators... Lance and Ryan... consider how late it is getting... so Lance offers to accompany Ryan on the way back to his neighborhood... ughh... more walking!  Anyway... that's when I jokingly came up with a new title for my novel... Prelapsarian Peregrinations.  Wich means walking on foot before the fall of mankind.

One Forever at a Time

November 13th I sat down to play Texas Holdem to kill some time before the end of my shift.  I work in a poker room and am allowed to play on the clock if in the estimation of management, my playing will contribute to sustaining the game.  I bought in for $500 and won my first hand, but then began losing and had to buy another $400 in chips... and then another $400... in less than two hours I dropped $1600 and realized this whole gambling thing needs to stop.  Problem is it's addictive. 

I have plenty of horror stories about losing money to this vice.  One time I had won about $250 while playing Spanish 21 with my girlfriend... we enjoyed a free dinner in the restaurant and were going home when she persuaded me it would be fun to play the slot machines for a little while... we were positively losing back all the money we'd won and unable to accept this... found a roulette wheel where I lost the remainder of my winnings along with another $1000.  I told my girlfriend I was going to the restroom but instead went and processed a cash advance on my credit card for $2000 thinking this way my girlfriend wouldn't have to realize I'd lost all my money... but then before rejoining her I found another roulette wheel and lost the entire $2000 too.

Eventually I was forced to file for bankruptcy and saved up about $800 for the lawyer... but the day before my appointment I stopped at a casino and lost it all.  Had to beg my girlfriend to loan me the money. Admitting how stupid I'd been was becoming painfully familiar.

I've found that I'm capable of staying away from it for long periods of time... always keeping track and trying to eclipse previous records... 86 days of abstinence... 142 days, 152 days, 172 days, and most recently 243 days....

I've tried everything to motivate myself... I've written a daily blog, I've attended one Gamblers Anonymous meeting... I've set up a savings account that deducts $10 automatically from my checking account each day that I don't gamble.  I've designed a timetable for rewards... things I can buy if I make it a predetermined number of days without straying.... I've written time~stamped assurances that I would not transgress.  I've tried telling everyone about my struggles... I've tried telling no one...

All I know to do is to keep trying.

The Gospel According to Gotchya

Last night at work I petitioned Glen, the bartender, to make a list of his five favorite comedy films of all time. This is a game we play to pass the time during the slow hours of the early morning; we take turns naming categories and then after a few minutes compare our respective selections. In this case my list looked like this:


Monty Python’s Life of Brian


Year One


Idiocracy


Dodge Ball


Napolean Dynamite


But when I approached Glen with my results I saw he was conversing with a customer and in the briefest of moments realized the topic had to do with the Son of God. The customer used the expression, “his only begotten son.” And unable as I was to restrain myself, I blurted out the text in which that phrase appears , John 3:16. The fellow acknowledged this but then emphasized the difference between this reference and the one in Genesis that mentions the pluralized “sons of God.”


“Oh, you mean in chapter 6 where it says that the sons of God knew the daughters of men!” I exclaimed. This chapter fascinates me personally inasmuch as mythology has dubbed the offspring of these copulations as the nephilim. Interpretations vary regarding all of these characters… some have the sons of God being angels… some have the offspring being giants… and in my own epic novel (a work in progress) I have the daughters of men being vampiresses.


The fellow seemed slightly unsure about what I was saying… possibly disconcerted that I had twice cited the texts he was borrowing from… but I was just getting started… I went on to contribute a third scripture in which a son of God was mentioned… this time having to do with the story of Daniel in which his three appellatively famous friends, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego were unharmed in the fiery furnace and the Babylonian King descried a fourth person resembling the Son of God.


Then I asked our customer if he was a Trinitarian. He said no, he was just a Christian. Not a Baptist or a Methodist or anything like that. I explained that Trinitarianism is not a denomination, but rather a theological philosophy. “Do you believe in the Trinity?” I asked and he confirmed that he certainly did. “Most Christians do” I reassured him.


This is a topic with which I am somewhat familiar mostly because my father is of the radical persuasion that the concept of the Trinity is an invention of Satan to corrupt the faithful into believing in a confused version of God. Whereas there is only one true God, Trinitarians, the argument goes, kind of believe that the Holy Spirit is God too and that Jesus is God along with God the Father. It occurred to me that this customer may have been pondering just such a debate with his attention to the Son and/or sons of God.


Having shown off that much I was obliged to attend to some of the responsibilities in the poker room for which I am employed, but when I came back to the bar where the conversationalists were still engaged, Glen said the gentleman had a question for me which turned out to be this, “Why did you read the Bible if you don’t believe in it?” Apparently Glen had apprised the customer in my absence of my skepticism toward religion. And I was happy to answer, “I believed in it when I read it. I began when I was seven years old and finished when I was 14. I didn’t quit believing until I was 17.


And this is where the discussion became blog~worthy in my opinion. Usually a person would have followed up by asking what happened when I was 17 to influence such a drastic change. But instead this fellow inquired if I had read Nietzsche which I hadn’t, but of course I blurted out what little I did know about him… something about the super man and something about “Thus spake Zarathustra.” But my audience was not impressed in the least and exhorted me to read Nietzsche, “He was an atheist, you know.”


“Was he a Nihilist?” I asked innocently.


“No, he was a German philosopher” I was told. “Of course, he went insane.”


This is when it became clear to me why our customer had no interest in why I’d become an atheist myself. He already had a perfect conclusion to our argument… the only point he wished to make was that a famous atheist had gone insane. By extension I imagine it’s fairly safe to assume I shall meet with a similar fate. I wouldn’t be surprised if studies support the notion that nearly every case of insanity on record probably began with someone questioning God’s existence (sarcasm).


This fellow upon learning of my deficiency in faith, had pretty much no inclination to witness to me with Christian love or kindness. The prospect of dialogically ambushing me with this loaded feint of recommending a notorious atheist was far more tempting for him than any sincere demonstration of Christianity could ever have been.


His final parting shot was the remark that “they love Nietzsche in all those atheist colleges.” What atheist colleges? What constitutes an atheist college? Is it a college for atheists? A college run by atheists? A college featuring a board of trustees the majority of which profess atheism? Is it at all possible that there really isn’t any such thing as an atheist college in the United States?


Any way… the communication between us, while amusing, was not especially worthwhile. Here he was supposing… almost hoping that I’d based my skepticism upon Nietzshe whose writings I am basically unacquainted with, while I think I had provided a far more relevant indication that my doubts about God have more to do with the Bible than any other literary feat.

Related links:

Does God Have Hormones?

How I became an Atheist

Destination: Life

Yesterday I watched A Few Good Men again and it kind of caught me by surprise to realize it is now 19 years since the movie was first released.  It got me to thinking about the way life passes by seemingly with increasing velocity. 

My reflection took me back to a summer afternoon in North Carolina 1983.  We had been to the beach with the Skeltons, close family friends.  On the way back we kids rode in the back of a pickup truck and enjoyed the thrill of warm wind rushing past us as we sped along the roads and highways.  And for some reason my mind latched onto the concern that it was taking me entirely too long to grow up.  When you're twelve years old it takes forever to become thirteen.

So today I did a little math.  If you dismiss the first three years of my life as being irrelevant because I can hardly remember them... then at age twelve, a year constituted about 11% of my life.  But now at age 40 a year constitutes about 3% of my life.  That's why a year seems so long when you're a kid and so short when you're an adult.  In 1983 I could remember celebrating eight birthdays.... now I've forgotten about 20 or 25 of them.

How many times has someone told me they've been married for 40 years and I've exclaimed, "Wow, I haven't even been alive that long!"  Not so anymore.  Now I have been alive that long.  I now have a fairly decent grasp on how much time must elapse for 40 years of life to be recorded.
So on I walked pondering life and the rapidity of its consumption, as it were.  And I asked myself... should I be driving instead?  I mean if life is so short... I could get where I'm going much sooner if I drove.  But that begs the question what is more important... my destination?  Or the manner in which I get there?  Because today I was going to my favorite Thai restaurant in order to devour some tasty fried rice with tofu and to read from a couple books, Ulysses and Outlander, but it was a nice day and I wanted to enjoy it... so I went on foot.

I wonder if I'll eventually reach the point where I panic so much about the limitations to life, that I'll actually drive more often and walk less so as to save time.  Preserving more time to do whatever I plan to do when I get wherever I'm going.  And it occurs to me I might ought to upgrade the things I'm planning to do at the other end of my traversings.  Beftter to write a book when I get there than to read one.

Should Anyone Ever Wonder

Sandwich in hand I went outdoors and around the corner of the house, heading for a big stack of lumber recently deposited in the driveway.  While the purpose for this lumber eludes memory, it certainly promised an excellent location for eating sandwiches, but then something effectively changed my mind.  A buzzing bee spastically harassed me and threatened the tenuous balance of the precious sandwich I meant to protect.  I deftly executed an about face and returned hastily to the safety of the indoors.

Why do I remember the bee?  How many bees have lived and died since that day in 1974 when I was little more than three years old?  And yet this one is immortalized, though nameless, in these opening lines of my autobiblography (how carefully that word was just invented).  I was infant.  I’m guessing the bee was even younger.  But today I turn 40.  Bear with me while, for the sake of acclimation, I say that again.  Today I turn 40.  Almost one third of the way to my goal, January 29^th, 2092 at which time I would have broken the record for the oldest man to ever live according to the Guinness Book of World Records, except that they recently decided that Shigechiyo Izumi had been using an older brother’s birth certificate and name and that he died when he was a scant 105 years old rather than the 120 he professed.  So the true record for a man is 115 years held by Christian Mortensen (1882-1998), but I digress (something I hope you see a lot of as you read on).  Anyway… so my original plan was to break the record in 2092, but apparently I will have to break it five years earlier than that, but I’m still going to go on kicking and breathing (no necessarily in that order) until 2092 because in all of my morbid artwork depicting my eventual grave marker, that is the year inscribed… what can I do?  It’s set in stone.

I met the bee in Norridgewock, Maine, home of my earliest memories.  I had a dream while living there in which I was pulling my cousin Melanie up a hill in a red wagon and stopped at a service station for gas, but once I’d paid inside the attendant motioned me to leave through a different door designated for the exit.  This second door was not made of shiny glass like the first, this other door was dark and ominous… very much what you expect to see in a haunted house and just as I pushed it open I realized there were, stuck in the door, long bony fingers with claws protruding where fingernails might ought to have , and when it was opened they belonged to the Devil who grasped me by the throat and pulled me into a dungeon-like room and threw me onto an altar where there roared a savage lion… I scrambled to the edge of this sinister construction and dove headfirst off the side and into a barrel of orange goo in which I would surely have suffocated were it not for the discovery of my beloved pillow in the bottom of this receptacle signifying a return to consciousness. 

I don’t mind remarking as humbly as possible that it’s a rare case for someone to remember so vividly the details of a dream from infancy.  But there’s a reason for it.  I was lying awake one night a couple years later and was troubled because I couldn’t remember the house we lived in when I was born.  Couldn’t remember the one my little brother was born in either.  So I initiated the practice at bedtime of reminiscing about everything I could still remember from my earliest years including the bee and the dream.  And Easter when my dad hid jelly beans all over the house and then carried me piggyback to find them.  To my older siblings this represented an unfair advantage because my transportation knew exactly where they were hidden, but I didn’t seem to mind.  My dad made Easter magically fun for me that Sunday morning just as my mother has always had an incredible talent for making Christmas feel magical.  Remembering such moments makes me wish to have children of my own. 

To celebrate my 40^th birthday I am submitting a timeline of my life so far:

1971     Born in Jamestown, New York

1974     Earliest memories of Norridgewock, Maine

1975     Moved into the basement of my Uncle Bob’s house in Blue Mountain Lake, New York where my cousin Becky became my first best friend.

1976     Parents divorced.  Mother remarried and moved to Clinton, North Carolina with her two youngest (including me).

1978     Began reading the Bible and was baptized a Seventh Day Adventist.  Also watched Gone With the Wind for the first time which became my favorite movie until 1992.

1979     Moved to West Virginia to live with my father and older siblings and new mother and sister (Connie).  My first girlfriend was Julie Jacobson.

1980     Moved back to Garland, North Carolina and went to school in Clarkton.

1981     Developed an obsessive crush on 8^th grader Julia Kinlaw and wrote on the inside of my Bible that I would love her forever.  My mother removed the oath explaining it had no place in God’s Word.

See how the left page is slanted at the top?

1982     Became an avid stamp collector.  Took home school.

1983     Moved to West Alexander, Pennsylvania and on the last day of school before Spring Break got lost and had to walk home about twelve miles.  Before the week was over I had also survived a tornado and developed chicken pox.  Also developed fanatic enthusiasm for NFL football.

1984     Fell into a deep case of puppy love with Tammy (Kitty Cat Eyes) Coon in Fletcher, North Carolina. 

1985     Back in Garland again taking school at home.  Got a kitten that I meant to name Touchdown, but all the way home he kept falling off the seat so his name quickly became Fumble instead.

1986     Moved to Nashville, Tennessee so my mother could be closer to her high school sweetheart who resided in the Tennessee State Penitentiary.  Pet Shop Boys become my favorite music act.

1987     Obsessed with Song Baek at Madison Academy.

1988     Became an atheist on March 12^th while praying.  Dropped out of high school.

1989     Went to the movies for the first time and saw Rain Man.  Passed my GED.  Moved to Elmhurst Illinois and began journaling the next day which practice I have maintained ever since.

1990     Convicted of a misdemeanor while working for Blockbuster Video and assumed it was the end of my life.

1991     Living in Addison, Illinois and fell helplessly in love with Maggie Bashqawi while working at Ken’s World of Video.  Went to school at EIU for two semesters in Charleston, Illinois.

1992     Moved to Madison, Tennessee and became infatuated with dear friend from high school, Ivy Dawn Farler.  Platonic friendship with Tricey (she is to friendship what cheesecake is to food) officially commenced on April 11^th.  Unforgiven becomes my new favorite movie.

1995     Moved to Murfreesboro and went to school at MTSU where I met Mercedes and Pauli (My best and most devout friend).

1998     Procured a bachelors degree in English and Literature with a GPA of 3.86 which I think is respectable for a high school dropout.  While studying for the GRE I begin compiling what I refer to as $5 words (prestidigitation, ubiquitous, floccinaucinihilipilification).  Also decided to read every classic and to assemble them in the order that I read them.

1999     Returned to United States from vacation in Europe and developed obsession with chat rooms for atheists.

2000     Arrived in Washington on the first day of the new millennium without a job or a home or any acquaintances.  Began dating Carolyn Marbas in November.

2001     Developing a movie project which prescribes watching movies in the order in which they are set… so for example you would begin with movies like Ice Age and 10,000BC and end with movies like Planet of the Apes and Star Trek.           

2002     Become commissioner of the End of the World fantasy baseball league which is still thriving.

2003     Problem gambling.  Began working at Muckleshoot Indian Casino.

2005     Coldplay becomes my new favorite music act.  Perform my first amateur comedy routine.  Perfect first date with Wendy.

2006     Wendy and I break up which takes several years to recover from because there’s simply no one else like her.  But I don’t think everyone is meant to be in a relationship and I’m determined to prove I can be happy on my own.  Well not completely on my own... there are amazing friends like Lindsay to help me along.

2007     Broke up a fight in the Poker Room between two drunks by throwing one of them over a side table.  Found an enchanting friend on MySpace.  She uses the alias Alyssa Shane.



Nocturnal Desperado and Alyssa Shane Halloween 2008



2010     Completed 243 days of gambling abstinence and, thanks to the world's awesomest brother, have a cool TV mounted on my wall.    

2011     Working slowly but surely on a novel about Lilith and the origin of vampires.  40^th birthday.

It's happening again...

If you've followed my blogs at all.. you know I have an uncanny way of talking about famous people just hours before they die.  Today my mother asked me if I've seen Invictus and made me promise I would watch it in the next week or so.  It's about time to call it a night so I logged onto Amazon and found the movie which is on sale for just under $11 and added it to my shopping cart... then I thought... what the heck... might just as well check msnbc.com to see what the stock market finished at today... while there what do you think I found... Nelson Mandella hospitalized.  Here's hoping he makes a full recovery, but no matter what... they can't touch his soul.