Childhood, Cartoons, Memories, Faces and Awareness...

Poker.

When I was in my early twenties, I used to be told quite frequently that I was too young to be as cynical or jaded as I was.  I don't know.  I guess child abuse, homelessness and death can have that effect on people.  I was never quite sure how to respond when people said that?  Don't worry, I'll grow into it?  Because really, at what age are you allowed to be cynical.

I play quite a bit of poker.  I could probably play for 16 hours a day and not get sick of it.  It's one of the few areas of life where you being cynical is not seen as a handicap (let's not confuse cynicism with timidity).  Think about it...

If you're at work and your boss starts touting some bullshit, what do you do?  In all likelihood, you mutter under your breath and go back to your desk.  Say yes, sir, will do.  Some flake says "Let's do lunch."  And you say, "Oh, of course, lunch would be wonderful."

What would happen if you told your boss he was full of shit?  There's a pretty good chance you'd be out of a job.  In all likelihood, your boss doesn't feel that he to follow the rules.  He makes the rules.  If the rules don't suit his hand, he might change them so he wins.

That person that you know you won't see for another nine months, if ever?  You have to play the game their way, or you're rude.  Doesn't matter that both of you know that means nothing. 

I'd posted in quite a few tournaments today.  Lost every single one of them.  Not even remotely close to hitting a bubble.  But the thing is, on all but one of the hands I bust on, I knew that I had the edge.  Even if my hands don't hold, I can look and see that I played well.  Playing good poker and losing money?  Is that frustrating?  Can be.  Not so much, though. 

With poker, it doesn't matter who you are when you sit at the table.  The rules are the same for everyone.  If you want to see the showdown, there's a good chance you might have to pay to do it.  The choice is up to you.  But at the end of the hand, that decision is up to you.  And at the end of the hand, all of the cards need to be on the table if you want to a chance to take the pot.  There's a directness about it.  There's not going to be anyone telling you that a straight now beats a flush because they happen to be holding one.  And if you really think someone is full of shit, you can call them out on it.

It's funny, but a lot of people think about poker and and the first thing that comes to mind is bluffing. 

The bluff is overrated.

I've been getting my ass kicked today.  Lost just about every coin toss.  Had a few pretty ugly beats on insane draws.  And you know what?  I really don't care.  I know my money's been going in when the odds are good.

Conversations.

I spent the better part of my early twenties wondering why people speak.  In a literal sense.  It was a question that I'd put directly to people.  "Why do people speak?"  I still spend an inordinate amount of time with the question.  But there's a certain type of conversation that I seem to have repeatedly that sums up a lot about NT behavior for me.  I'm really not sure how to go about explaining this, so I'll just offer an example.
 
When I worked at Bix in San Francisco, there was one server there who fancied himself a bit of a player.  He came into work one night talking about the girl he had taken out of his local watering hole right before it closed the night before.  Was talking about how hot she was.  Seems he'd struck up a conversation with her right before the bar had been about to close and decided to take her back to his place.  Had a great night, he said.  One of my coworkers asked him whether or not he'd gotten the girl's number.  You going to try to keep it going, Jon asked?

No, this guy replied, I don't want to know her.  I don't have any respect for the sort of person that would go to bed with someone that they've known for only twenty minutes.

What sort of respect do you have for yourself, then, I asked.

This is the sort of shit that trips me up on a regular basis.  

It's kind of like going to Vegas.  You walk down the strip in Vegas and they advertise losing odds.  Our slots pay out $0.97 on the dollar.  You know that $0.90 of that is going to one winner.  You know that it's a losing proposition, yet you play anyway.  And they make assloads off of those machines.  Vegas wouldn't exist but for the fact that if you're playing against the house, the odds are stacked against you.

There are exactly two games that one can play in Vegas where the player can have edge.  Poker and Blackjack.

In Blackjack, you can gain edge by counting cards.  The casinos will do everything in their power to make sure that you can't do that.  They do it by running six shoe decks.  And reshuffling when there are two decks left.  Even after that, if the casino suspects that you are still able to count the shoe, you are politely told that you are not welcome to be there or welcome to come back later.

In Poker, the only reason you can gain edge is because you are never playing against the house.  The house merely rents the table to you and provides a dealer.  They don't care who wins, because they make money on every hand.  You gain edge only if you have edge over the other players.


Despite this, do you know where the casinos generate their revenues?  Slots.

This idea (hope) that the standard rules don't apply to oneself is almost a defining characteristic of NT behavior for me.  The idea that I am exempt from my own standards (respect someone that goes home with someone after 15 minutes?)   But quite a few NT narratives seem to violate themselves.  And that's not something I'm very good at losing myself in.

Authority.

Around the time I was 10 or 12, I started to do poorly in school. My father, being my father, decided that the reason behind my poor performance in school was a general lack of discipline, respect for authority and self-control.

To counteract this, my father decided that he was enrolling me in a home-school boot camp. Basically, the idea was that for everything I did wrong, my father would effect some sort of punishment. Miss a question on a test? Do twenty push-ups. Talk back? Five lashes with a belt. Fail to turn in a homework assignment? 10 laps up and down the stairs of our house. I think you get the general idea.

This went on for about a month or so, when one day during my room inspection (bed made, floor vacuumed, no dust on shelves, etc.) my father pointed to a ruler that was sitting on my bookshelf. As the edge of the ruler was not perfectly parallel to the edge of the bookshelf, my father told me that I was to give him twenty push-ups. I thought that this was rather absurd. It had never been explained to me that the ruler was supposed to be parallel to the book case. He could offer me no clear reason as to how I should have known this, or why it should be the way it was. And I told him that. I told him it was absurd.

The purpose of this, my father explained, was so that I would learn that authority is absolute. Authority need not explain itself. Need not have a reason for doing what it was doing. My job was to submit to authority. Not to question authority, not to offer my take on what was going on. He then told me that I owed him forty, rather than twenty push-ups.

I believe that this is when I told him to go fuck himself. If I recall correctly, this is the point at which he removed his belt. (I'm not going to lie to you, my father used to say, this is going to hurt you more than it will hurt me.)

Our house at the time was a basic four-square set up. Four on the bottom floor, four on the second. The rooms on the ground floor each had a door leading in to either of the adjoining rooms. The second floor simply had a small hallway, mayhap six feet long, from which one could access any of the four rooms on the second floor.

My father's belt came off. I bolted.

There was a pretty good twenty to thirty minute period where my father chased me around the house (I mean this literally, we made quite a few laps around the ground floor.) You've got to bear in mind while reading this that my father was about thirty-six at the time. About sixty pounds overweight. Drank until he passed out whereever he happened to be four to five nights a week (and was probably pretty well inebriated as this was happening). Smoked a pack or two a day.

I'd been doing wind sprints on our stairs daily for the previous month.

Eventually, after a good half hour or so, I'd ended up in my parent's room. Entering their room, one directly faced the side of their bed. There was a small opening on the far side of the bed where the bed was separated from the wall by a night stand. Unlike the dining room, where I could simply run clockwise or counterclockwise around the table depending on which way my father came at me (You're going that way, I guess I'm obviously going the other way.  There was a nice Keystone Cops atmostphere to the dining room), once I was on the far side of my father's bed, I was pretty much hemmed in. We stood and faced off for a couple of minutes. Every time that he'd make a move to come around the bed I'd feint as if I were going to go over it. If he made to go over it, I'd start back around.

He finally commited to going around the bed. I scrambled over my mother who was in bed, reading. At this point, my mother finally opened her mouth and told my father to cut it out. Which pretty much ended boot camp.

My father and I had many disagreements while I was growing up. Most of them did not end nearly so luckily for me. It's kind of funny, though. We'd argue a lot. He'd beat the shit out of me. But for all of the arguments, and for all of the times I'd bleed myself to sleep at night, I never became any more convinced that my father was right, nor any less convinced that he was merely an asshole.

In the years since, I've told this story to a few people.  People have often asked me why I didn't just leave the house.  I'm not sure where an 11 year old would have gone.  Walk out the door and get picked up by the cops five hours or five days later?  I pretty much just bode my time and made a move.  I figured when the time was right, I'd get out of the house and into the real world.

As I see more of the real world, I tend to believe that my father was right, in some respects.  Most people view power as a form of authority.  They deserve respect for their ability to harm.  Regardless of how correct what they are saying is.  I still don't really think that's any more right or those people are any less of assholes.

Humor.

A FaceBook friend sent me this link yesterday.  I'd responded that the home page and second page strike me as pretty purely dead-on.  My friend's response to that was that "Certainly made me feel uncomfortable, which is probably the point. :)"

It's an interesting statement which can be read from a couple of angles.  

Do I think that the makers of this film intend to make you uncomfortable?  Are they rudely trying to take you to a place where you are made to feel that you don't belong?  No.


Are they trying to show you something of the daily discomfort faced by people who live their lives with ASD every day?  Yes.  Does that make you uncomfortable?  Welcome to my world.  Let's talk about empathy.


Tom Stoppard, in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, says -

"All your life you live so close to truth it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye. And when something nudges it into outline, it's like being ambushed by a grotesque."

That's about as NT as NT gets in my book.  Truth?  Let's shove that to the corner of our eye.  We'll gloss it over.  Throw it to the periphery.  Do what we can to avoid facing it.  That woman with her face in the mashed potatoes?  What woman?  (Face is an interesting concept, on multiple levels.)

Oscar Wilde has said -

"If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you."

I've mentioned before that I think that he has this just about completely backwards.  As far as I can tell, if you want to make people laugh, you can simply tell them the truth.  Most people spend so much time avoiding the truth that if you put it in front of them, make them face it, nudge it into outline, they'll assume you must be joking.  I guess it's easier to make a joke of suffering than it is to face it.

One of my first encounters with the idea of ASD behaviors came in the mid-90's via a New York Times article.  In the article, there was mention of a man that was having workplace difficulties because of his Asperger's.  The article went on to relate an anecdote about the time the guy was in a meeting at work.  His boss put forth some numbers which were incorrect.  The guy corrected his boss.  This didn't go down too well.

After the meeting, it was said, the gentleman's co-workers took him aside, explained that he was correct, but told him not to do that in the future.  As a work around to the guy's disability, they'd worked out a simple set of clear signals (kick his foot under the table, something like that) to let the guy know when the truth is inappropriate.

That?  That's nuts.

Trust.

Still in a bit of a stupor, but I've been reading up a bit on the WikiLeaks release of U.S. Diplomatic cables.

It's a pretty fascinating story.  I think it highlights almost two entirely differing conceptions of the word "trust."  And I'm not sure how well I'll be able to articulate this, but I'll take a stab at it.

Is there a difference between placing information in trust (ie. I place this information in your trust, please use it wisely and judiciously) and placing trust in information (ie. We are speaking and I know that what I get from you is what there is.)?

They are both essentially ways in which you offer someone your trust.  But they're almost at perpendiculars.  What do you mean when you trust someone?  Do you trust them to be forthright and honest?  Or do you trust them to be sensitive and discreet?

Am I making any sense?  Or is this too much DayQuil talking?

Music.

Tends to be a very large part of my life.  I'm still in a NyQuil induced idiocy.  Once I resume my baseline, non-sick idiocy, I want to find a way to start throwing tracks up here.  Anyone have any familiarity with how one goes about doing that on a day-to-day basis? 

It appears that blogger allows me to upload videos, but it doesn't allow me to upload music files.  Is this all tied to pesky copyright laws?  For now, I think I'm just going to throw a link to a clip on YouTube.

I had some fun at the bar the other night.  You're much more likely to hear some Toby Keith, Social Distortion or Johnny Cash at Shooters than anything else.  If I never hear another Kid Rock song, I may wet myself with joy.  That Tenacious D song about how he wants to fuck you, I'll admit, I thought was kind of funny the first time I'd heard it five years ago.  Not so much on the fifth time in one night, though.  Buckcherry's "Crazy Bitch?"  It can be kind of like watching Beavis and Butthead with Beavis and Butthead.

I'll occasionally try to break the pace.  Throw out anything.  Anything to change it up.  Chuck Mangione.  Archie Bell and the Drells.  Gil Scott-Heron.  Nina Simone.  Alison Kraus.  P.I.L. Gang of Four.  The Pixies.  Whatever.

I threw about five dollars in the jukebox the other night and started with a house remix.  I was mocked.  Maxwell went over only slightly better.  It took about three to four songs before the comments about "fag music" ended.  Around the time Sheila E. and Chaka Khan made it in, they started moving.  By the time we made it to Eddie Grant's "Electric Avenue," they were rocking it.  Pop?  Trash?

I enjoyed myself.

It's funny, but the older I get the less I understand the concept of obscurity with respect to music.  Does that make sense?   Obscure?  Obscure to whom?