I've been reading a very scary book: Harrington on Hold 'em — Expert Strategy For No-Limit Tournaments — Volume II: The Endgame. Will it scare you if you read it? Probably not. Unless you're really into poker, it'll bore you. And unless you're really into poker, you won't even try to read it: It's highly esoteric and technical, it's written in poker jargon, it costs thirty dollars, it's the second volume of a trilogy, and it's four hundred forty-four pages long (yes, the second volume alone).

Why do I find it scary? It brings into focus the desperate situation in which so many of us now find ourselves, or soon will. The world economy has degenerated into one big endgame. Some aspects are obvious, and have been obvious for a while. Oil. The polar ecosystems. The Ponzi scheme known in the United States as Social Security. Much of it is less obvious. _wind_spirit_ and I have had our difficulties of late, described at least partially in this journal. I've read the stories of others, whether in their online journals, or in personal correspondence, or in the news media. The stories vary, but there are an awful lot of them, and taken in the aggregate, they add up to a collapsing economy and a lot of misery. Jobs are evaporating, financial institutions are failing, money is losing value. And the picture of how things play out is very much like the picture of the later stages of a poker tournament. Which, again, is why I find the book so scary. Reading the book makes it all too clear what's going on. Those of us who don't know can live in a fool's paradise until the end. I can't, even if I'm realtively comfortable today. As the song says, "I have seen the writing on the wall." Conditions are going to get much worse.

_wind_spirit_ seems to have a job offer. It arrived by phone yesterday morning, just thirty-eight hours after she left the hair sample at the lab. Could her new employer have jumped the gun? Unlikely. They would have made the offer before she took the test, and made it explicitly conditional on the results. Maybe the test was a sink test. Maybe Toxin Wash® shampoo really works. It should: it's vicious stuff! Maybe _wind_spirt_ never used any drugs. The reality, of course, is a superposition of states, though I'd imagine that only a few of my readers are comfortable with the idea that superposed states are part of the everyday world, and even fewer are comfortable with the idea of superposed states in the past.

Events unfold according to God's will, and I've been seeing more of the workings than I ever hoped. I knew that _wind_spirit_ would pass the drug test when a maintenance man appeared at our door for the purpose of copying down the serial numbers of all the appliances we're using that are owned by the slumlord. And if you yourself don't hear the voice of God in that event, you need to smoke more dope.

Consenting to a drug test is an attempt to compromise with evil. I don't like it, but that doesn't imply that I condemn _wind_spirit_ for doing it, or even that there was any disagreement between us. We hope that the result of our compromise is that we'll both be able to continue doing a great deal of good, somehow still untainted. We'll see how it actually goes. There's an excellent movie, by the way, called Sling Blade, that tells us that there can be no compromise with evil. That's the lesson the protagonist learns as the story unfolds, and the difference between the first scene and the last makes it perfectly clear that that's the whole point. If you've never seen it, I recommend it, though the lesson does make me a bit uneasy at this particular point in my life, considering.

I knew I was depressed while working on the job search, but I didn't realize how depressed — probably because I was so busy. Yesterday I changed the filters in the heating and air conditioning system in our apartment. I normally do that once a month. This time, they were unusually dirty. I checked my records, which I would have done anyway (incidental to updating them), and I found I hadn't changed the filters in seventy days. I just started looking at my music projects again. I hadn't done that since June. For most of the past ten weeks, I haven't even been able to bring myself to listen to music. With the economy as it is, there are a lot of people living in the state from which I hope I'm now recovering. There are a lot of people living in states that are considerably worse. _wind_spirit_ has been dealing with that awareness continuously for the past nineteen years, if not longer: it's been part of her daily reality, because even in the best of times, most of her clients have been poor and downtrodden. Now I'm obliged to deal with that awareness too. I've known about that obligation for a long time: that's why the song, On the Turning Away, is included in my music compilation 100 Years of Solitude — the last song of the three that I used to listen to, in sequence, over and over, a dozen years ago, before I even had a computer on which to compile music. Where will I actually go with this awareness? I'll have to see. Events will unfold according to the will of God. Experience tells me that the unfolding events will incorporate material that's already part of my life.

Now that I've got the computer running again, I'm printing maps so _wind_spirit_ can more easily find the job interview she's got scheduled. When I printed the first page I wanted to print, I discovered that the paper tray in the printer was empty. The last sheet I used before the video card failed had been the last sheet in the tray.

My video card went total failure at ten o'clock yesterday morning. I checked my mail drop for the replacement a bit before eleven this morning, after _wind_spirit_ and I were done meeting with an agent of the Public Employees Retirement System and I'd walked her to the bus stop so she could go to work for the rest of the day. The new video card was waiting for me, so I took it home and installed it. Unlike the old one, it has no digital output (I was in fact using the digital output), and it didn't fit in the slot on the motherboard from which I'd removed the old one, but there was another slot nearby in which it did fit, and it works.

All told, I was offline for twenty-six hours. It was like the old joke, "I quit smoking once. Roughest ten minutes of my life!" I did a lot of processing of the nature of attachment and its relation to the cycle of reincarnation. I place a high value on the understanding I gain from that sort of processing, though I wish I could say my newfound understanding is encouraging. It isn't.

About three days ago the video card on this ancient computer of mine started flaking out. I've turned off all its advanced features, and that seems to have increased the time between failures to more than a day, but I still have to hit the power button occasionally to get it back. It's difficult to guess which of the video cards now on the market might serve as a suitable and compatible replacement, but I have a pretty good track record for such guesses, and I've done the best I could, and now I'm expecting delivery of a new video card on Tuesday afternoon. Of course it's possible that the old video card will go total failure today, and it's possible that the new one won't work and that the computer will never recover from my attempt to install it. If I seem to go missing this week, that's the reason.

As I've written repeatedly, I'm playing poker on the Internet. Suddenly, since yesterday afternoon, my DSL signal has gone intermittent. It cuts out for up to fifteen minutes at a time, then comes back. In fact, it's out as I type this, though it must have come back eventually, or you wouldn't be reading it. After several attempts involving long periods on terminal hold, I was finally permitted to speak with a second-level technical support specialist who works for my Internet service provider. He told me that the underlying network technology has been upgraded, and though my modem should be compatible with the network as it exists now, it's kind of iffy. He promised to send me the latest model modem, which should arrive by Wednesday afternoon. If installing the new modem doesn't give me a solid connection, they'll troubleshoot further (though I'm sure that making the arrangements will involve several more stretches on terminal hold). I have a pretty good feel for technology, and I'm highly skeptical of his belief that replacing the modem will do any good.

Fortunately I've been playing limit poker rather than pot-limit or no-limit, so if I'm disconnected while playing a hand, the software treats me as all in, and I can't get too badly hurt. The big-bet games don't have that sort of protection, because if they did, a player facing a tough decision for a lot of money would just pull his phone plug. I'm scheduled to play a no-limit holdem freeroll that offers considerable value on Wednesday evening, and I'd really like my Internet connection to work. But at least it's a freeroll, and I'm not putting any of my own money into it.

God is efficient in that ordinary reality is dense with function: it's rare that an event serves only one purpose, if indeed an event ever serves only one purpose. On one level, I'm playing poker to get money. Poker specifically, because in ordinary terms, it's something I know how to do and to which I have ready access. From the perspective of my spiritual path (a concurrent reality), I'm playing poker because doing so requires me to develop perfect discipline. My skill is already excellent, and enables me to win when I play against recreational players. There are times, though, when I have to play against players who are as skilled as I am (sooner or later, one or two of them will quit and a recreational player will be next on the waiting list). It's a truism of poker that in a game among players of equal skill, the most disciplined will win. My discipline has always been good, at least since I took up the game a quarter century ago, and that discipline has spread into all aspects of my life. But good discipline isn't enough. If I'm to beat experts (as I'm doing as I write this), I must play with perfect discipline. After all, they have good discipline.

So one of the functions that poker serves on this portion of my spiritual path is to give me a karmic momentum of discipline that will carry into my next lifetime. It'll go well with the karmic momentum of faith that's so unpleasantly obvious to the atheists among my friends. The reason faith and discipline will be such a good match is that I'm going to be reincarnated as an autistic Moslem somewhere in the Middle East, and a propensity for faith and discipline will make it possible for me to find a comfortable niche in the society in which I'll have to live.

What I'm most definitely not saying is that everyone ought to cultivate faith and discipline as necessary components of a program of spiritual advancement. That's not the case. I don't even expect that every one of my own future lifetimes will be characterised by a high degree of faith and discipline — just the next one. Lurkuu is in my life as a role model, to show me how a young autistic maintains a high degree of faith and discipline without antagonizing the people around him. It isn't easy! Of course Lurkuu is a Christian rather than a Moslem, but no matter.

I've been doing the Internet poker thing for just over a week now — putting in way too much time, neglecting my other responsibilities, neglecting to do things I like. Perhaps most notably, neglecting work on my next music compilation. I'm not making enough money at poker — maybe half of what _wind_spirit_ and I need — but on the other hand, I haven't yet had even one losing day, and my win rate should improve as I plug the leaks in my play. I'm working on that, unlike the poor devils who are giving me their money but who are nevertheless sure they already know everything there is to know about the game.

I'm on the forward path (to borrow a phrase from Dylan's My Back Pages). So are we all, all the time. Where does my forward path lead? God told me I've got to help River grow up. We had that conversation even before River was born. River is in Berkeley. I don't like to move. I'm fond of quoting Ben Franklin's line, "Three removals are as bad as a fire" (there — I just quoted it again). So the question is, How big a crow bar am I going to make God take to me? Or, to credit Her with greater benevolence, What are the next couple of years of my forward path going to look like? (Joan Osborne has a great little song called One of Us, in which she asks, among other questions, "If God had a name, what would it be?" According to the theology of many folks, the answer ought to be Smith, because He's always smiting people.)

I've got to live modestly — even more modestly than I've been living, here in this barrio. Living extravagantly is disrespectful to the poor desperate souls who are now paying me to play poker with them, and it's disrespectful to the downtrodden and homeless to whom _wind_spirit_ has been ministering all these years. I've got to quit driving. I have a strong aversion to it, it's spiritually debilitating, and it's intrinsically extravagant. It's always been intrinsically extravagant, but in recent times the extravagance has become obvious to everyone but the likes of Rush Limbaugh. Berkeley seems a good place to live without driving.

If Internet poker works out, I can do it from anywhere. Well, maybe not anywhere — it's a felony in Washington, even though Washington licenses public card rooms. But I can certainly do it from Berkeley. I'll have to see how things develop. It would be better not to need to play poker, seeing as how it's such a miserable and unwholesome endeavor in and of itself. Perhaps if I ever actually do get settled in Berkeley, I'll stumble across a better opportunity. Maybe I'll wind up running a hash parlor.

Yesterday afternoon Kiki, Lurkuu and Sarai stopped in to see us. Lurkuu suggested that we paint the walls of our apartment, expecting that we'd be here for the rest of our lives. I told him we might someday move to Berkeley. He seemed really disappointed that we'd consider such a thing, seeing as how he's here in the Paradise Valley. So it goes. There are an awful lot of people who made nickykaa's acquaintance while he was living back east, who now live in Berkeley. Some of them hate him, but they're in Berkeley anyway. Perhaps Lurkuu will wind up there too.

For a long time now, when people have asked me what I do for a living, I've told them I'm a professional gambler. There's some truth to that. I sometimes play video poker machines that offer a positive expectation, and over the long term, I come out ahead. I sometimes go to a public card room (usually part of a casino here in Las Vegas) and play poker. I usually leave with more money than I came in with, and my wins over time exceed my losses. I file schedules C and SE as part of the federal income tax return on which _wind_spirit_ and I collaborate, and we send about thirty percent of my profits to the United States government to fund the atrocities at Guantánamo Bay.

But I haven't been making nearly enough to live on. The reason for that is that I haven't been gambling very much, and the reason for that is that I don't like to gamble. To the extent that I have free time, I like to use it for things that I enjoy, or that do some good. Gambling isn't on the list of things I enjoy and, being a form of gladiatorial combat, does no good at all. Since the winter of 1990, _wind_spirit_ has been supporting us with her work as a clinical social worker. From August of 1989 until February of 1992, she worked in the state mental health system. Then there was a shortfall in projected tax revenues, and the governor singlehandedly abolished the state mental health system. Eventually a new legislature was elected, and constituted itself, and funded a new mental health system. _wind_spirit_ went to work for that system in May of 1996, and she's been there ever since. She was planning to retire in February of 2014.

Unfortunately, things aren't going to work out that way. _wind_spirit_, too good and innocent to see what was coming, has fallen victim to a sinister plot to force her out of the system prematurely, and she's going to have to retire on October third. Maybe she'll be able to find a similar job with a private agency, even in today's collapsing economy. Or maybe she'll be able to grow her private practice (which she's been maintaining at a low level as insurance against just such an eventuality as this) to where it was when she left the group practice in which she was working in early 1996. Then again, maybe neither of those things will happen.

Until we're sure she can continue to support us, I've got to start bringing in some money. Toward that end, I set up an account on one of the Internet poker sites and started playing. That was on Saturday, right after the bad guys pulled off their smiley-face masks at the mental health clinic. I've been at it for four days now, but not quite full time, because I still have to keep house. I've been playing limit poker for small stakes — structured games with a five and ten dollar limit. Saturday I played all day and won $289.50. Sunday I played all day and won $138.75. Sunday night I had a deep insight into the play of my game of choice, and on Monday evening I played for about three hours and won $321.75. (For those readers who are interested in such things — and I'm thinking specifically of nickykaa, who's been watching River's cognitive development — it was a fairly painful process, and I didn't know what was happening until it was done, though I knew my discomfort was associated with the game of poker.) Tuesday evening I played another three hours and my insight didn't help, because no one was playing except a few experts who play all the time, which makes for an impossibly tough game. I won $21.00, which was about as great as an accomplishment as my win of the previous evening, but which still does very little good. (I've long explained to people who are curious about the factors a professional poker player has to consider, that one can make a lot more money playing competently against terrible players than playing brilliantly against competent players.)

I doubt that I can support us as well as _wind_spirit_ has been doing, but I expect I can help, and I'm going to keep doing this at least until we see that it isn't necessary, if that ever happens. I don't plan on playing this evening. The game is going to be as bad as it was yesterday, and I could even lose. I've already told _wind_spirit_ that if she can get a nonstandard work week, she should aim for Tuesday and Wednesday evenings to be part of our weekend. I'm sure there are a lot of people who would be happy to see their shrink on Saturday or Sunday.

I dread having to play poker five days a week, for what will probably be a total of about thirty hours. I see that it's God's will, and I don't argue with God, but I still don't like it. I don't like the game itself, and I don't like the pressure. True, I play better under pressure — not something to brag about, because a professional gambler should always play his best game, but I do play better under pressure.

If _wind_spirit_ does find a job with a private agency, we probably won't be able to take our usual vacation to see nickykaa, Dragon Lady and River this coming Christmas. Most employers won't let newcomers take vacation during their first half year on the job, and _wind_spirit_, lacking seniority, will probably be saddled with a pager and be required to make emergency call-backs to clients who come down with the holiday blues.

It's all so ugly, and perpetrated with such malice against a true saint. But as the saying goes, "When a pickpocket meets a saint, all he sees are pockets."

I just got a piece of promotional mail from a chain of local casinos, intended to lure me in. It's chemically treated to smell like freshly-printed United States currency. I suppose it's intended to work subliminally, but to my senses, it's glaringly obvious what they've done.

Forty-two years, and we still like one another. We commemorated it by saying, "Happy anniversary!" when we woke up. That's all we ever do. It's part of why we still like one another.

My karma with machines keeps developing. My computer monitor died this morning. I now have a new one: Twenty-two diagonal inches with a wide aspect ratio instead of nineteen diagonal inches with a more old-fashioned aspect ratio; TFT instead of LCD. It looks weird: brightness, color and contrast change with angle of view, and the screen is large enough that the angle of view inevitably varies by quite a bit from one part of the surface to another. Half the pictures of Lurkuu's birthday party will have been edited on the old moniter and half on the new.

That makes the hard drive, the mouse and the monitor in the space of two weeks. Unnatural by any standards except those of the most die-hard Objectivist. And I'm taking the truck in for servicing tomorrow. The dome lights stopped working. And the cigarette lighter. And the radio, including its clock. Except that there's power to the radio: if I turn it on, I hear static, and it gets louder or softer according to how I adjust the volume control. In addition, the driver's door lock won't open if one closes the door while it's locked. Actually, I can open it, but it isn't easy, and _wind_spirit_ can't. Gremlins. Gremlins as agents of karmic imbalance. I don't like it — of course! But God's will be done.

At noon Monday, the hard drive in my computer crashed. I bought a new one, put it in, and restored the system to it. I expected to lose four days of work, records and correspondence, including a heap of editing I did Friday on photographs I took at Lurkuu's tenth birthday party. That was going to be bad enough. Unfortunately the restored system wouldn't boot.

I have an interesting karmic relationship with machines. The current ordeal follows fast on a series of vehicle maintenance problems and plumbing disasters. In at least one future lifetime, I'm going to be heavily involved in the design of the Machine that Stops in the Forster story. And in at least one lifetime beyond that, I'm going to be a renegade against that machine and the society built around it.

I didn't sleep but a couple of hours Tuesday morning, for working on the problem. I'd like to salvage the music projects I was working on for nickykaa, my address book, my appointment calendar, and other things of like nature. I expect that I will: I'm a computer genius. But it's taking a lot of work, and sometime during the process my optical mouse started failing. Obviously I've got enough of a system that I'm able to post this, but I'm leaving my Live Journal communities to the other moderators for now, and I'm not reading my email.

I promised Lurkuu and Sarai that I'd visit them Saturday, and I will. Saturday also, García blows into town again, and I promised him that I'd join him in making the rounds of the gambling halls. I'll do that too, and hope we don't both wind up in jail. He does have an entertaining way of making the rounds.

Somehow I'll get through it all, and I'll even learn a few things and have some fun along the way. But this ordeal sure does help me remember why I don't want to be a computer professional anymore.

Oh yeah!... Happy birthday, sharrainchains! I generally don't do birthdays — not even my own — but seeing as how it comes around only every four years, it seems worth mentioning.

Nirvana rarely, if ever, occurs in the context of linear time. It is, as nickykaa once commented, the hub of the wheel. Opportunities for nirvana, though, do occur, and in fact serve as attractors that shape the story. What's an opportunity for nirvana? It's a situation like the one in which Teddy actually reached nirvana in the story, Teddy. According to Teddy's diary entry of October 28, 1952, another opportunity for nirvana would have come along on February 14, 1955, if he somehow missed the one that was to come the day of the entry. People generally let opportunities for nirvana go by because they're attached to living. Only an enlightened being would seize such an opportunity. And though I suspect that enlightenment isn't all that rare, God doesn't allow it to occur contemporaneously with an opportunity for nirvana. To elaborate, though opportunities for nirvana serve as attractors that shape the story, they don't occur with great or regular frequency. The interval given in Teddy is uncommonly short. But while opportunities for nirvana may not occur often, their shaping function is enhanced because God's art is such that situations will arise in the trajectory of any given soul that have many of the qualities of its opportunities for nirvana without actually being such opportunities themselves.

I don't often answer my land line, because it rarely turns out that I want to talk to the person who's calling. A few minutes ago, I tried it. This is how it went:

old_cutter_john:   Hello!
Crank:                      Hello?
old_cutter_john:   Hello!
Crank (louder):           Hello?
old_cutter_john:   Hello?
Crank (louder still):      Hello?
old_cutter_john:   Hello?
Crank (louder again):   Hello?
old_cutter_john:  That's enough! Bye-bye!

For the past several hours, none of the messages sent to me at lightkink@hotmail.com by Live Journal was delivered. Of the messages sent to that address by other senders, some were delivered and some were not. For now, at least, I've changed the address in my Live Journal profile to oldcutterjohn@gmail.com. If you sent me a message at lightkink@hotmail.com today, I didn't receive it. Unless the reason for the failure was that God was saving you from a terrible mistake, please send it again.

PrintWorks, the company that makes the CD labels I've been using, has quit. Probably has something to do with a design defect in their labeling software that I'm sure would make it incompatible with Windows Vista. And the software looks like it was cobbled together like Frankenstein's monster by a contractor that's long gone, so I guess it was easier for PrintWorks to get out of what must have been a fringe market than to upgrade the software.

I'll have to switch over to Memorex labels. Memorex lays out their labels on the page differently from the way PrintWorks did, but the PrintWorks software can be made to adapt. I'll also try the Memorex software. The PrintWorks software is hard to use, but it can be made to do most anything I want. I'd expect the Memorex software to be easier to use but more restrictive. Of course I don't have to use the Memorex software to make labels unless and until I get a new computer and start running Windows Vista, but that'll happen, sooner or later.

I have the feeling that this is a phenomenon that's found on many levels of ordinary reality: A space of apparent stillness in which is encoded a large amount of information that must inevitably give rise to a pattern of activity, perhaps frenzied. There's no common word for the phenomenon, so it hasn't been much discussed. To the extent that such a space exists in all four dimensions, with patterns of activity on more than one side, it would look like a singularity from within a pattern of activity that's approaching it.

Thanks for the music, nickykaa! This is where it's taken me today.

I came across the following in a news story about the mayor of Atlantic City, New Jersey:

"Councilman William 'Speedy' Marsh met with his lawyer Tuesday and prepared to take office 'immediately' should Levy's office become vacant..."

Fitting nickname, I suppose.

While waiting in line at the post office today, I read the first nineteen pages of the civil suit that will probably become known as Evans v. Durham. It's beautiful writing, considering the constraints of the form. Or perhaps, at least in part, because of the constraints of the form.