Thou Shalt Not Fold: Poker Tourney Part I

I ROLLED SOUTH UNDER a grey late-February sky that, local weather-watchers claimed, would entomb the region that evening in snow and ice. With any luck, I would drive home through it, after hours of masterful poker play, flush with my winnings from the tournament awaiting me at a south Bergen County Jewish community center. The snow was the easiest barrier I might face that night. Seventy-five other players, all vying for the chance to make that final table and maybe even the top prize, proved to be a more formidable obstacle.

This new venue for the regular tournament was considerably larger. The old place was just a single synagogue, albeit with a finished basement. This complex housed at least three prayer halls, a basketball court, and two large basement activity rooms. Both were to be used today. I entered one of them with a confident stride to my step, noting with approval the 10 or 11 tables all set up, each with a hefty bowl of bagels and spreads as a centerpiece. One of the few folks already there noticed me counting the tables and chairs, as I calculated how many players we might have, and thus how large the prize pool would be. When I expressed satisfaction over this to her, she said, "This is children's ceramics. Poker is down the hall." It was then that I noticed she was spreading newspaper on one of the tables. Oops. I backed out and went one door down.

There, standing next to a table full of neatly stacked poker chips, I immediately spotted the player from my home poker game who had inaugurated this tournament. He had sold his chips and supplies to a tourney regular, because he found running the game and playing too burdensome. Now he was content to enjoy a solid streak of making the final pay spots and socialize between hands. I, on the other hand, sought contentment from the 6-foot submarine sandwich being unwrapped on the buffet table. After watching three women debate the proper order in which the dishes of salads should be placed, I ended the debate by grabbing a plate and a big wedge of sandwich, slathering it with Russian dressing, and scampering back to my assigned table with a Diet Pepsi (the horrors!).

In time, my table filled in, as folks slowly drifted from their cliques, to the food, and finally to their assigned seats. The demographic skews older than myself in this group by at least 20 years. I noticed a few of my peers, along with two college-age kids, one of whom had been bought into the tourney as an 18th-birthday present from his father. They sat at my table for a while, discussing Blazing Saddles, which they had seen, along with the 1968 Producers, that weekend for the first time. I thought back to when I had first seen both of these films, and I know it was because my parents, having introduced me to Woody Allen's early comedies, knew I would also love these. It is difficult to imagine a time when I didn't have these cultural signifiers as part of my DNA.

The 18-year-old remained at my table as the hostess called for folks to take their seats for a read-through of the rules. Aside from myself, my table had seven other players. Going clockwise:

Jack: Stereotypical balding, slight-framed, retirement-age Jewish man, not unlike Lee Strasberg in The Godfather Part II. Friendly guy who expressed, along with some others at my table, a preference for seven-card stud, now somewhat overshadowed by hold'em, but once the poker game. Enjoyed TV poker, and joked that he was tempted to wear a hooded sweatshirt so he could hide like the Unabomber, Phil Laak.

AC Player: Twentysomething man in a faded Itchy & Scratchy T-shirt. I mention Atlantic City because he mentioned a procedure on misdeals as being the way things were done in AC. I made a mental note to take this guy's actions a little more seriously.

Fat Guy: Outweighed my by at least 150 lbs., which is saying something, this guy appeared to know what he was doing with a deck of cards. (Side note: There were some morbidly obese people at this game. Not merely fat like myself, but guys who, when viewed from the side, appeared to have little flipper arms, and women who would never be able to sit in coach. I did 50 minutes of cardio-machine work before I came over b/c I figured the deli noshing would kibosh my nutrition for the day, and a look at this crowd made me unique in that activity. One younger guy of normal weight for his height looked, by comparison, to have survived a hunger strike.)

18-Year-Old: Carried on a conversation before the game about his college costs and course selections while fiddling with a knockoff MP3 player, which he claimed was cheaper and better than the iPod. Ah, the vain beliefs of youth. Said he played $5 tournaments with his friends, but that he went on tilt very easily.

Club Player: I call him this because he was the one who provoked AC Player's commentary when he accidentally flipped up a card during the deal. He replied that in his experience playing in clubs, the procedure he followed (it was after the first two blind cards, so became the burn card) was standard, and continued the deal. By "clubs," I interpreted this as possibly being the underground Manhattan card parlors that quietly schooled such future legends as Erik Seidel, Howard Lederer, and Stu Ungar, such as the Mayfair and the Diamond Club. Another player to keep an eye on.

Filipina: Mind-numbingly hot American-bred Filipina nursing student. Knew the AC Player, and had a better-than-beginner's understanding of the game. Still got hung up on advanced-beginner stuff like figuring the winner when two players paired the high board card and handling blinds when someone was busted out. I graded these slight gaffes on a curve, usually one of her own.

Mohegan: Taciturn player to my right who wore a Mohegan Sun pullover. I tried to crack the ice by commenting that the casino was finally reversing its mistake of eliminating the poker room, but aside from expressing a preference, as did Jack, for stud, I didn't get to know him all that well. Too bad, as I like to know my neighbors' style of play somewhat before making the plunge into a big pot with them.

And, out of fairness . . .

Me: Seasoned no-limit ring-game specialist who trails his regular home game in skill but can ably bring home the bacon against the fish now flooding into casino $1/$2 no-limit games. Tournament newbie, especially among loose, no-fold'em hold'em players like these. Kept things light and chatty, despite my Binions visor and Caesars Palace T-shirt.

Would I hold my ground against these strangers and take their chips to the final table? Tomorrow's pulse-pounding conclusion will tell all. . . .

See You in Poker Shul

SUCCESSFULLY SUPPRESSED AN URGE to visit one of our local casino emporia this weekend. I was in the mood for some hold'em, possibly at Foxwoods, where the maximum $1/$2 no-limit game finally has been raised to match that in Atlantic City ($300). Foxwoods takes a time charge per half hour at this game, instead of a rake from each pot as is typical in Vegas or AC, and when the max buy-in was $100, throwing $10 to the house each hour took a big chunk out of your stack. Plus, many of the dealers are slow to get the cards out and do little to quicken the pace of the game. However, combine this with the generally craptacular skill level of the $1/$2 NL players there, and it now has the potential to be quite tasty.

My reason for restraining myself is that I am returning, after a long hiatus, to a regular tournament offered at a Bergen County synagogue. One of the earliest regulars in my poker game had started running this tourney sometime before joining my crowd, and he extended an invitation to those playing. I tried it for the first time in September 2004, and I have returned a few times since. I'm not a strong tournament player, but I alternated for a couple of years between this one and a private home tourney in Wyckoff that, to my regret, broke off sometime early last year. I prefer low-entry-fee tournaments, because I'm not the best tourney player in the world. Aside from a couple of low-priced matches at the Plaza Las Vegas, my meager experience has been amateur-run events among folks who mostly know one another.

And I have to admit I prefer it this way. In a casino, I would be playing against a roomful of strangers. Playing tournament hold'em correctly, at which the wrong move can send all of your chips to another player and your ass back to the parking lot, can be a lonely, tiring experience. In the early stages, you are playing only the best starting hands, which inevitably will be separated by long minutes of tossing crappy cards in the muck, scrutinizing the play styles of your tablemates, and ignoring the many distractions casinos have to offer. And you're doing this among folks who have no reason to extend you any good will or even to recognize your existence past being a possible source of tournament chips.

The amateur matches in which I've played are quite different. They emerged as part of the great flowering of home games in 2003 with Chris Moneymaker's win at the WSOP and the debut of the World Poker Tour. Existing poker games began dealing hold'em, and groups of friends new to poker wanted to give the "TV poker" a try. The more enterprising among them tried the tournament format, and guides for running such games began to appear on the Internet. Soon, you couldn't play in a home game without one of the players mentioning an upcoming tourney with a few open seats. Most folks knew one another at these tournaments, so you could at least have some fun and not entirely feel like a ribeye in a shark tank.

The tournament I will play in tomorrow had the added unity of featuring folks belonging to or friends/related to members of the same synagogue. If they don't already see one another socially, they at least meet up once a week for services. So it's more like playing in a club full of folks out to have fun and, maybe, make a little poker money. Although there were a number of nonmembers there to play, few stood out as outsiders, just because this was such a congenial bunch. One or two went the whole sunglasses-and-hat routine and played the tourney like poker robots, and in turn wasted the chance to have a good time.

I haven't won yet in this series of tournaments. The players are, on average, not skilled at this style of poker. A few of them who have played some form of poker for decades are repeat winners. The majority are calling stations, to use the poker lingo for a player who will call any reasonable bet and who are difficult to chase out of pots with raises. When you have a strong but vulnerable hand, like Jacks, you want to get those dealt a single, higher court card out, because you could be behind a single Queen on the flop. Some of the folks I will see tomorrow will simply call, and each successive call represents further odds justification for the next person to stay in. This is how I've been busted out sometimes. If the occasion weren't so much fun to attend, it would be vexing. Still, when you have to reraise with Queens because nobody folded to the first player's raise, and your reraise gets four calls, you kinda cross your fingers and toes before the flop comes down.

I hadn't played for some months because the local no-limit ring game was kicking my ass through the late summer, and I was questioning whether I was playing this game remotely correctly. Through fall and the beginning of winter, however, I made a huge comeback, beating both the local game and tables I've raided at Atlantic City. It's been ages since I played any tournament at all, so when I got word the event was on again, I registered. Last time I played, they got 64 players, each of whom paid $25 into the prize pool. I believe first place gets 40% or 50%. So at minimum, the winner got $640. If the new hall can hold even more people, that grand prize will be sweeter still.

So we'll see how well I make out tomorrow. I can't claim to be the best player in the room, but I intend to have the most fun. After these past couple of weeks, it will be welcome.

Weekends Were Made for Job Hunting

Note: Written longhand earlier tonight, on my train ride home from work.

CRAWLING BACK TO MY corner at the end of a long, if chronologically short, week, I'm reminded of how boxers feel between rounds late in a fight. I'm slumped on my stool after the bell has rung, punch drunk, vaguely following the exhortations of my trainer, hearing the dim echo of my opponent's name coursing out from thousands of spectators' mouths. Five more weeks of this current workplace will feel like five more rounds with Ali in his prime. I'm either gonna end face down on the canvas or face up in the morgue.

Well, not that dire, certainly. Still, it's getting extremely hectic at work. My job hunt has ground to a halt during the unending chaos of these past two weeks. Previously, even right after our two junior designers left, I had a lot of dead time in which I could work on my resume, search for jobs, or study training options. Not this past fortnight. If anything, ever since the Super Bowl, my boss and I have barely had a chance to breathe. I can now legitimately add the skill of trafficker to my resume. My boss and I spend much of the day trying to figure out exactly where certain jobs sit in the production cycle. The folks doing our work in Outsourcistan don't seem to share what tips for efficient design, image specifications, and color handling we share with them. So the same problems will crop up from one job to the next, depending on who is laying them out. Untangling all of these difficulties is a job on its own, and I fully intend to list this as a marketable skill on whatever finally coalesces into the form of a resume on my computer.

Not that I get much of a chance to work on it. I need to shift my job-hunting efforts to weekends. By the time I leave the salt mine, I am so mentally fried from the trafficking gymnastics that any career work is half hearted at best. Not a good way to be five weeks from being on the street. The inbound commute might be a good time, but outbound I spend trying to fight off sleep so I don't wake up in Spring Valley and have to hibernate in a fucking storm drain until the southbound trains resume the next morning. Instituting a highly productive and regimented weekend routine would break this logjam. I recall this as one of the goals I set at the beginning of the year. I also recognize it as being critical for long-term development and discipline if I am ever to become a freelance worker or sole business proprietor.

All is not hopeless, however. As frazzled and pessimistic as I may be when interacting with select coworkers who sympathize with my plight and that of my boss, I am always optimistic in my words and goals about my future when I speak with them. I had a good chat today with one of the folks who offered some ideas right after I got the layoff news. She speculated that I might have a greater facility for learning and excelling in HTML and XML than I give myself credit for, especially if I were to take formal courses in them. We also discussed how having contacts at various companies can mean a lot more than answering a Web or, even less likely, a newspaper ad. This connected with another discussion I had at the beginning of the day, who was impressed that I also had editorial skills as well as design. He told me to give him a copy of my resume when I had it set, so he could forward it to a friend of his at one of the larger NYC publishing houses. Though I may grumble at current conditions, about my future, I always address it in hopeful terms, because nobody will want to help a crank who bitches about being fired. Which I've never really done. Hell, now that I see how things will be handled there, I'm happy to go.

Other environmental signifiers of possible futures have manifested. I found a stack of flyers in the company lunchroom for the Editorial Freelancers Association, apparently left there by one of our word-mashers. I'd never heard of the group before, but the flyer, which came with an application, caught my interest. Later in the week, I noticed in the Hoboken PATH station a poster for the Freelancers Union. This one I have heard of, though not in depth. Both groups offer health insurance options, however, a topic of keen interest to me with the bug of forming my own business in the back of my head. Insurance would be the biggest barrier to becoming a solo act. So this weekend, I'll check both of these sites out to see just what reputations they enjoy and whether they would be worth joining.

For now, though, I'm content to roll along the rails, watching the magenta dusk glow its last through the black naked trees and distant Newark office towers to the west, home to a warm bed and a weekend away from the Brazil-like absurdity of my final weeks of work.

Democratic Dogfight or Darwinistic Demonstration?

MANY INNOCENT KEYBOARDS ACROSS this great land are now being pounded in anger as the blogosphere weighs in on the Great Obama–Clinton Flap. Harnessing this energy might prove a better solution than the Great Biofuel Revolution also much in the news, if only it didn’t generate unbelievable amounts of hot air.

When I first read about this, I got upset. Why are the candidates wasting time on this? Why do they retain goons on their payroll who insist on fanning the flames of picayune distractions offered by over-moneyed sybarites? If even a hundredth of the energy being expended on this ridiculous internecine sniping were directed toward (a) correcting society’s ills, (b) grooming a dynamic new generation of progressive-minded leaders, or (c) restoring our status as a trusted ally with those nations we’ve needlessly antagonized over the past 6 years, this would be looked on as the beginning of a golden age.

Some of the criticism has been ridiculous and merely points out the obvious. I take particular amusement from complaints that Hilary Clinton is “ambitious.” Folks, it takes a larger-than-normal ego merely to declare one’s run for the White House. Actually campaigning, raising money, appearing on 60 Minutes — these are the hallmarks of deep-seated ambition. To level this accusation betrays grievous historical ignorance. Thomas Jefferson, one of our most highly regarded Americans, was an inveterate political infighter and not shy about using the press to attack his enemies. He embodied ambition at each ascending step of his career.

I was also pissed because this sort of distraction gives the Republican operatives a chance to rebuild their strength and find new ways to target the nascent Democratic candidates. We need to look at the Congressional elections of 2006 as the end of the Second Age. Sauron was dispelled, but not destroyed. For there is an Eye that never sleeps in Washington, that of the Dark Lord, Karl Rove, even now setting into motion plans designed to continue Republican leadership in the executive and recapture as many Congressional seats as can be won, finagled, or stolen in 2008. It’s not that the Democrats won’t also hire soulless political ronin to groom and package their heir designate. It just always seems like that party dithers internally and cedes critical time and talking points to the Repubs, then squanders even more time before the election defending itself against meaningless charges. Witness Senator Kerry’s too-little, too-late reply to the Swift Boat critics. (Can’t recall it? No surprise.)

Yet there’s still part of me that feels this early strife is the only chance we as an electorate have to find a truly virtuous candidate. Some of these goons should be weeded out. Let them attack one another. Let America identify the opportunists and support the truly impassioned. Let their true ethics finally emerge past the stage-managed listening tours and the focus-group-tested campaign platforms. Let the Democrats shun the kingmaking charade and find someone who is not merely electable, but inspirational.

Until that person appears, keep well in mind the advice of arch-cynic newspaperman H. L. Mencken: “The only way to look at a politician is down.”

Kid Without a Candy Store

I JUST RETURNED FROM a much-needed dinner at my parents' house, to discover a distressing fact: My town candy store is closing. I spotted a huge realty sign beneath the name of the joint as I drove by. And I was just in there last week for Valentine's Day.

I don't know yet whether the owner is retiring, or if this is the sad result of a downturn in business, but either way, it diminishes a chunk of my town's past by one. Grump that I am, I'm against it.

I'm not sure precisely when this shop opened. I believe they moved to my town from one of the Paramus malls, which would put it in the early 80s or so. That would put their lifespan at 25 years, which today seems like a lifetime, given the fugitive nature of establishments like cellphone stores and Chinese food joints.

One of the greatest traitors to my waistline has been the humble Gummi raspberry/blackberry blend. Alone among the Gummis, I am powerless to resist them. Sure, they turn your tongue a weird brown, and I prefer not to speculate on where the gelatin comes from, or for how long it remains in my system. But ever since I stumbled across these damn things in high school, sold in bulk at the local Shop Rite, I've been a virtual William S. Burroughs, haunting the mall or supermarket candy pits for a fix, weighing out the hookup and gauging whether my meager earnings would cover it, and then dashing off to my car to sample them. I can recall grinding my way through some particularly stale batches of Gummis, wondering why the hell I ever got these things in the first place . . . and then figuring whether I had time to hit the candy store at the Garden State Plaza before meeting up with my friends at the Triplex for, say, Robocop.

Access to these Gummis grew scarce at college, where I instead fixated on the Harmony Snacks brand of jellybeans, sold at the snack shop in the commons. It seemed I was hooked on hand-to-mouth-style candy. On and off through the Nineties, I kicked the habit, steering my intake to healthier fare, only to be sabotaged by breakup misery, or the rise of the PC computer game as graphics cards grew ever stronger. I recall spending many Saturday nights in the summer of 1996, while my roommate the mighty Felix was violating Jersey Shore noise and open-container ordinances, commandeering his PC to explore the depths of Quake, Master of Magic, and Hexen, with a brimming bag of Gummi candy sitting next to the monitor. Autofire, glucose, and Nine Inch Nails.

When I moved to this town, I noticed the local candy shop had later hours during the summer on Thursday nights. I began a ritual: hop off the bus from NYC each Thursday, grab a half-pound of Gummi berries, and catch up on Web surfing while listening to Dave the Spazz on WFMU. Depending on how trying a week it had been, sometimes I would goose that purchase up to three quarters, or even a full pound if I had movie plans that weekend. (I never once bought that overpriced candy from the theatre 'round the corner!) I was a "regular," in that the owner and counter-folks knew to reach for the jar of Gummi berries when I jingled their door. Often, from my expression or walk, they would correctly guess my required dosage.

I visited less frequently in the past year and change. I consciously tried to reduce my sugar intake and, with a switch to during-the-week vegetarianism, I also cut out the gelatin. To quell the sugar jones when it becomes irresistible, I seek out a brand of organic vegetarian jellybeans at Whole Foods. Still, I do visit this candy store for my mom's birthday, Valentine's Day, and once for my boss, when she was some years back. And when I hit the place last week, I grabbed some Gummi berries for myself, just as a VD present.

I had no inkling that they might be near closure.

So of course I will have to hit the candy store this weekend, find out the scoop, either sympathize at the closure or congratulate them on retirement, as warranted, and snag one last bag of Gummis. I hope the next tenant is a unique business like this one, unlike the Starbucks that Borged the formerly indie coffeehouse, or the overpriced Cold Stone Creamery that replaced the departed Baskin-Robbins where I used to get my birthday cones about a zillion years ago. We already have the gentrified brick-paved crosswalks and the vintage streetlights like every other New Jersey town center. Would it be so much to ask to attract a local merchant who might keep the profits somewhere in the community and not in some Barad-Dûr–like corporate tower half a continent away?

Partitioning Resources

IN DISCUSSING THE UPCOMING WFMU fundraising Marathon with my mother yesterday, she inquired how much I planned to give. I gave her the figure I tend to write in the pledge-amount box each year, and she reacted with surprise. "Don't give that much! You're going to be out of a job!" she said.

It is advice I intend to ignore. My check to WFMU is the one check I enjoy writing all year. The amount for my annual pledge will be equivalent to what my parents pay for 4 months of cable TV service and AOL. They get a million channels they never even watch. By contrast, I listen to WFMU constantly. I don't usually place my pledge money in such terms, but dollar for dollar, I get unparalleled value.

Although nobody truly wants to be without a steady employment income, I have never been in as good shape as I am now to weather joblessness. Last year, I ruminated about reshuffling my 401(k) money into my current employer's account and redistributing it for better diversification. I did both. I also put my smallish cash hoard to work with fixed-income investments to earn a bit more than the cent per month my checking account pulls in. I was already maxing out my contribution to the 401(k) fund before I got the layoff news. Once that hit, I opened a new Excel table in my finance file to track my spending and eliminate any waste. I found there was little and minimized the rest. I am in no debt, I have a functional car, and I don't intend to move just yet.

At this point, I envision being at the job until the bitter end, taking my severance and retention bonus, and concentrating on the job hunt at home, where I won't be bailing water out of the sinking ship with my boss and craving the train ride home. Unemployment will offset my COBRA, and I'll bank as much of the severance as I can until I snag a job. Our mutual nightmare is that they ask us to stay later, say through April. (I have a couple of plans in mind to thwart this, most notably approaching those who would make such a decision and telling them, on March 15, I wish to sign the severance agreement then and there.) They've already tried to send my boss to the outsourcing firm in India so she can attempt to unfuck their problems firsthand. She refused, to her eternal credit, having her March and April occupied more with her graduate thesis than any desire to extricate the department from the quagmire it's already in. Dipping into unemployment is worth my escaping the dead-end, head-against-brick-wall frustration of training these fools in the basics of typesetting and print preflighting.

The last thing I am worried about is running through my savings during my job hunt. My parents are sweet people, and justly worry about my welfare, but as expenditures go, my investment in WFMU's future is an investment in my own present. From few aspects in my life do I derive as much enjoyment as I do from its programming, its voluminous archives, and its exemplary, widely linked blog. What money I devote to this cause comes back to me manifold. Unless I become a successful freelancer, nothing so directly "pays" me. That's a potential point of overlap; in describing my Wednesday visit to the station to volunteer, my boss and I agreed that contact with such a diverse pool of talented minds could also provide business opportunities. You never know who might need some Photoshop work or proofreading done.

I simply need to pick a direction and move there with power and confidence. If I can weather downturns in said confidence, especially once I'm out from under the cloud hanging over the tattered remnants of my department, I will eventually find something worth doing that generates income, both retirement and fluid. Regardless of when that happens, WFMU is welcome to a chunk of it in just a couple of weeks.

Vitamin S and the Other Vitamin E

I INDULGED IN THE first-listed nutrient above in greedy excess this morning. Or perhaps not so excessively. While talking to my supervisor recently, I referred to sleep as Vitamin S. She takes graduate courses in addition to a full week of work, so she has been deficient in this particular tonic for some time now. With Wednesday off to help WFMU stuff envelopes ahead of its annual fundraising Marathon, and poker night this Thursday, I too fell off my usual dosage schedule of Vitamin S.

This deficiency, combined with the continuing frigid siege of winter, found me nestled beneath three layers in bed this morning well past my usual rising time. With an extra day off this Monday and few chores that could only be done today, I saw no reason to rise before the temperature outside did. And rise it did, well past freezing for the first time in a while, so that my exit was accompanied by a chorus of drips and trickles off the roof of my building. Like glacial ice, the skies shone in piercing blue, and sun glinted from cars finally shaking themselves free of imprisoning frost.

I took a spin down to Men's Wearhouse to pick up three pairs of slacks I had purchased last month. Dad gave me two gift cards for the place last Christmas, and I had received a discount coupon in the mail, so I decided to stack my bonuses like a good ex-roleplayer and grab some work clothing. (Turned out they were also running a sale, so my plunder only deepened.) Alterations on the slacks took a few weeks, probably because every other man in Bergen County who received gift cards and the bonus coupon did the same thing as me after the holidays. These new clothes, along with my existing work duds, will be used on interviews and at the next job. I don't see the need to pay dry cleaning for clothes at the current salt mine. I could compromise and launder/iron the shirts here, as I do most of my work pants (which are cotton), but frankly, my time investment can be made elsewhere. At New Year's, I made the decision that T-shirts and Dockers are just fine for the final 2 months.

That resolved, I turned to another neglected nutrient, the other Vitamin E, exercise. With the foul midweek weather, I deviated from the usual regimen. Shoveling my car out actually didn't provide much of a workout. When I began attacking the frozen mound of plowed snow behind my car on Thursday night, the plow driver actually returned to tidy up the lot. I asked him to destroy the mound, which he did as only a multi-ton vehicle with a bladed hunk of steel can. Once I had backed out and headed to the poker game, the driver cleaned my spot completely. Today's sun made short work of any remaining chunks.

Seeing as I didn't have the privilege of bending my back in the service of snow removal, I resumed my exercise at the gym this afternoon. Lately, I've been hitting the gym on a solid schedule, to good results. On weekends, I can get cardio and lifting in on the same day, rather than choosing one or the other during the limited pre-work time I have on weekdays.

So today I went nuts. Thirty minutes on the elliptical trainer, while watching part of the Hitler Network's presidential biography marathon. I was pleased to catch Teddy Roosevelt's section. I wish there were more Republicans like him today. It bewilders me that he and the current crew of jokers can share that party name. (Hell, even TR picked a new one for his third run at the White House.) They easily could have done 2 hours on this great American polymath. As it was, during my 30 minutes, I caught the tail end of William McKinley, and the beginning of our most rotund president, William Howard Taft.

After my briefing on turn-of-the-century chief executives, I took a trip into the sauna, a luxury that, again, the weekday rush usually denies me. Too bad; I might have shaken the cold I got at the beginning of the year more swiftly had I availed myself of the steam room or the sauna more often. Scandinavians swear by them for that purpose. I took a small timer in so I could mark a 15-minute stay more accurately (the sauna lacks an inside timer or clock), and brought some poker reading, Sklansky and Malmuth's essential text, Hold'Em Poker for Advanced Players, and a bottle of water, to indulge in while I baked out the toxins. I usually play no-limit hold'em when I go to casinos, like my home game, but I like the limit form of the game as a relaxing change of pace and tactics.

Fifteen minutes zipped by swiftly, and the alarm jarred me out of a dissertation on how to handle synchronized flops when holding a single hole pair. Today's lifting schedule held back, chest, and biceps. The upstairs weight floor was fairly depopulated, and I was able to strain and grunt with few observers and minimal waiting. It has crossed my mind that my impending joblessness, however brief, will offer me the chance to become more of a gym rat, in time spent there if not in physique. Perhaps if my next job requires less of a commute, I can continue such an intensified schedule. If nothing else, I can at least guarantee that I can fit into my suit for the interviews.

That's more or less all that has transpired so far today. With the Monday holiday, I am granted some leisure in when chores get done. Frankly, after assisting my absent boss two days last week, filling the time with either constructive hobbies, job hunting (which is surprisingly difficult in the demoralizing atmosphere of the office), or fitness is its own reward. A trip to one of the casino emporia is tempting, as witnessed by my recent reading material. Not tonight; I've still got some Vitamin S to catch up on. I have the evening to decide if I'll do it at all. An evening of reading, in fact, is looking quite sweet as an option right about now.

Dystopian Speculation in an Ethanol Future

LET'S SEE WHAT ONE possible future might hold if we began to derive a substantial percentage of our automotive fuel from agricultural biomass.

1. Issues relating to mass production, storage, and transportation of ethanol are resolved.
2. Automotive and marine engine designers produce models better able to exploit ethanol blends.
3. As with hybrid vehicles, the Federal Government and some states with poor air quality offer tax incentives to buyers of vehicles optimized for ethanol.
   
4. Ethanol is adopted in all 48 contiguous states, slowly at first, then more swiftly as stations adapt (again, perhaps with Federal tax incentives) to handle the fuel.
5. Over the next few years, petroleum drops in value by 50%. Smaller OPEC powers collapse, devouring themselves in riots.
6. The larger OPEC countries take note and conspire to engineer a biological weapon — a fungus, a gene-ripping virus, something — capable of destroying ethanol-biomass crops.
7. Overly focused on security theater, the U.S. government continues to fight the most recent threat and fails to authorize protection for future ones. As with 9/11, foreign operatives take flight lessons, this time for light, crop-dusting aircraft.
8. Land is purchased around the now-massive grain- and switchgrass-producing regions of America, hangars are discreetly built, and planes are purchased with OPEC money.
9. Those in the know buy oil futures.
10. One clear day, scores of Cessnas take wing and crisscross a complacent nation. . . .

Why yes, both The Road Warrior and Car Wars were both part of my teen diet. If anyone needs me, I'll be somewhere in the Republic of Texas. Just look for the pimplicious purple station wagon with the axially mounted blast cannon.

Brief Pause for Real Life in the ER

A SLIGHT HEALTH SCARE is unfolding as I ride home on the train. My dad, who has a pacemaker to regulate an irregular heartbeat, had his blood pressure spike to 190/120 just this afternoon. (They have a BP cuff at home to keep tabs when he's feeling a bit off.) I got a call from my mother just as I was leaving the office, in which she told me they were taking the entirely prudent step of heading over to the emergency room. I agreed. You don't second-guess a 70-year-old heart already getting an assist on its rhythm section.

I had to pick up from context that my father was feeling well enough to drive over himself. I asked my mother how he was feeling, but she really wanted to get on the road, so I had to remain in suspense until I got to Hoboken and onto the NJ Transit line I take. There, I called them on their cellphone, and was happy to hear my father answer. He feels well, and was waiting to be admitted. I was hopeful that this would be a swift process, this being a weeknight and only about halfway through the evening rush. He wasn't overly worried. This is typical of him: the strong, silent type. I also spoke to my mother, who was also hanging in, though with an assist from two Xanax. They suggested I call before picking a destination (their house or the ER) so I didn't make a needless trip. Not wanting to deliver a mini-thesis on how no trip I make for them is ever needless, I agreed, gave them my love, and signed off.

One never likes to think about one's parents' mortality, but I've forced myself to address it in recent years. Better to do it now, than in the emotional thick of the event. Granted, no amount of planning will make it any less painful, not even the past funerals for other family members or for a friend lost far too soon. Still, I have witnessed couple of end-life legal steps they have taken, so they know I think about such matters. My dad is less open about discussing these sorts of preparations, but they still must be made. If nothing else, I have to assure them both that I will be there to support them in their pain . . . because I know that as devastating as losing one of them will be for me, it will be nothing compared to what my surviving parent will feel.

For now, I am trying to follow my father's lead in knowing he is in the right place in case anything else develops from this, and until he gets a solid word on what may have caused this high pressure, to try not to drive himself crazy speculating about it. Getting him on the phone was a tremendous relief, I have to admit. I'll still feel a lot better when I see him and have the chance to keep my mother company to in turn ease her anxiety. If need be, I will take off tomorrow to assist with whatever — transport comes to mind most saliently. It's been some time since my mom has driven extensively for herself, and with a husband in the hospital, if he is admitted, is no time to take an impromptu remedial course. Work can go fuck itself where my parents are concerned, layoff or no.

So as we pull into the North Hackensack station and draw ever nearer to the Pascack Valley, that's where things stand. I'll do what I can to support them both and take tomorrow as it comes. I'm not to the Xanax stage yet. I'm more the pound-of-jellybeans or Doritos type. Eh, at least I can get 'em on a plane without getting sent to Gitmo or some shit.

UPDATE: All is well. By the time I stepped off the train, Dad had been admitted to the ER with a normal blood pressure. After I arrived at the hospital, my mother and I got the news that his EKG was likewise normal. The three of us spent an hour or so at his bedside, chatting normally, Dad feeling fine — if hungry, as this had hit before dinner — while we awaited the bloodwork. More good news: a slight imbalance in one of his medications, but other than that, and the admonition to call his cardiologist, he was free to go. I knocked heartily on wood, my head serving as some ersatz oak in this case, walked them to the car, and headed on home. I have one stoic SOB for a dad, but I know he was happy not to have to stay the night, necessary as it might have been. Altogether, an alarm that we are all happy to report as, thus far, false.

Taking (Down) Notes

ABOVE MY LAPTOP, I have four 3" × 5" cards with advice written on them. They date back to around this time last year, when I first signed onto Full Tilt Poker as a cash-game player. They read:

Curiosity killed the bankroll!

Why are you putting chips into the pot?

Is there a reason to fold?

Shitty opponents don't justify shitty play on your part!

I intended for these cards to restrain my urge to treat online poker as a video game. Granted, I was playing in very small games — $1/$2 seven-card stud was just about the most expensive game I played, for a buy-in of $60 — and barely ever played in no-limit ring games. Even so, I wanted there to be some reminders to focus on improving my game, making the best decisions I could, and not just say "screw it" and begin throwing good money after bad.

I only played online poker for 4 months, the amount of time I was given to earn my sign-up bonus. (Poker sites offer cash bonuses for extended play, and Full Tilt's was one of the most generous.) Once that time expired, it was June, and close to my visit to Las Vegas that summer. So I withdrew my cash and flew off to the great poker Mecca in the Southwest.

I left the cards up, however. Aside from moving the PG-13 one out of the view of some children over for my Christmas party last year, they have observed my nonpoker noodlings since last summer. Two things come to mind in reading them now.

First, my urge to play online poker rose after it was practically banned via legislation ceasing money flow between Americans and the poker sites. I played every other night or so for an hour when I was working off my bonus, but I would also lapse for a week or so too. It wasn't remotely my primary source of income (we're talking $3 pots here, people), so I didn't need to play to eat. After I withdrew my deposit, my weekly real-life poker game sated my urge to gamboooooool. Yet when those craven pricks in Congress attached the antigambling rider to the Safe Ports Act last fall, I felt like firing up a sit 'n' go or taking a half hour to play a little 25¢/50¢ limit hold'em. Prohibition taught us nothing.

Second, and more important, the index cards suggest a passivity of approach to me now. Yes, it is important to think logically about one's plays, to invest money wisely in pots, to accept defeat when it is obvious, and to play one's best despite being surrounded by crummy players. My regular game is not an easy one. If you can win there, you are playing better than many of the casual players, and even some of the self-styled pros, in Atlantic City or Las Vegas. For me to have any money left after hunkering down with my regulars, I must be doing something right. Against players who haven't got the benefit of watching me play week in and week out, my style of play can be very lucrative.

I feel like the cards have outlived their use. I need to take confidence in my achievements now. I spoke with my boss for a good 90 minutes today, and we both realized how much we really do know about our jobs and publishing in general. All we need is the self-assurance to put our plans into action. When I think about what our bosses have done, with a lot less in-the-trenches experience and with a knack for fast-talking away their bosses' doubt, I marvel at what actual competent people could achieve if they overcame their doubts.

Great endeavors have been born when people of confidence have said, "I can do this myself" or "I can do this better." I suspect the notes these folks had amid the tools and wires on their workbenches, in their lockers next to their batting gloves, crowning their Smith-Coronas amid a tangle of crumpled drafts, or scrawled in grease pencil on the walls of their garages next to their prototype computers or printers built on this theme. These notes reassured them after failures and confirmed their hunches when they succeeded.

I need some notes that will guide me into my first failure. The sooner I survive it, and the ones that follow, the closer I will be to finding my purpose. It beats hiding and never striving to find it. Wayne Gretzky's wisdom comes to mind here: "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take." Maybe that's my first note.

Burnt Ends

I PACE THROUGH THE marble-and-concrete caverns of Grand Central Station. Like some seafaring speculator of old, I come in search of spices, seeking the rumored Penzey's shop new to the terminal. My expedition proves fruitless; although the Website declared the spice counter to be open, signs throughout the station list it as an future addition to its retail offerings.

Disappointed, I turn instead to lunch. Grand Central boasts a wide range of dining options, and my nose is lured to a fragrant lower-level arcade of food counters and sit-down restaurants. When I find myself reading the menu — and greedily inhaling the fragrance — of a barbecue joint for the third time, I surrender to my urges and step up to order. Many BBQ joints will offer a dish or sandwich of the dark, chewy bits of trimmed brisket that the cook sent back to the pit for a second smoke. True to form, this place sported such a sandwich or platter under the popular name for the delicacy: burnt ends.

I order a burnt-ends sandwich along with cornbread and a Diet Coke. After a few minutes, in which I wonder what sort of licensing and regulatory hoops they might have had to jump through to get a smoker approved in this landmark building, the package is ready. I take a place at a stand-up counter nearby and unwrap my prize.

On a dense but soft roll, a generous mound of deep-brown brisket lies amid a dollop of intoxicating sauce. Visually these morsels live up to their name; they had absorbed much more of the slow heat and delicious smoke than the brisket from which they had been trimmed. More sauce, thinner and intended as a dip or a topping, was provided in a small plastic cup. The cornbread comes in the form of two small muffins, whose scent and texture indicates they were not baked from meager commercial cornbread mix.

I lack the true national exposure to BBQ that might allow me to compare this spicy treasure accurately against 'cue hailing from Kansas City, the Carolinas, or Texas. This sample, however, muscles past the pallid offerings of the BBQ tourist traps in Midtown, and compares favorably to the brisket offered at the long-lost Fink's Funky Chicken & Ribs, and its descendant, Stickey's, once of Teaneck, now buried somewhere in Rockland County. The chewy cubes of brisket are fully impregnated with smoky flavor. The side sauce has a bright, hot tang of spice and vinegar, and I make a small mess swamping the sandwich with it. The cornbread is indeed of the more coarse, homestyle variety.

I stand in the corner of this legendary transit nexus, focus on the savory bouquet in my hands, but dimly aware of the network of tracks and trains radiating out from around me, stretching to dozens of destinations and carrying a thousand destinies through this hub each hour. I let the world swirl as it will, my own cosmos drawn down to the sadly disappearing portion of burnt ends before me, the secret treasure of many BBQ fans and the beneficiary of a pitmaster's conspiratorial care, burnt ends ending with each greedy bite.

MY BOSS WORKS THREE jobs in a single cubicle. She, like me, will be dismissed at the end of March, but she wishes that day were at hand. Though our active typesetting work has all but entirely passed to an Indian outsourcing agency, emergent duties have her in a constantly overtaxed state. Far from exercising her prodigious design talent, she is trapped in the roles of trafficker, ensuring that the outsourcing folks prepare and send the press-ready PDFs to our printer; trainer, as she schools a reluctant manager in a remote office in her purchase-order and traffic duties; and supervisor, now of a diminished staff of me, but also of spot requests from others in the company who want to get every barely relevant request in before we both depart.

Each of these duties comes in the form of a massive flood of email. In the space of a 15-minute break, she will get another 30 messages, of which perhaps a tenth will not require her to cope with the aftermath of our bosses' idiotic decisions. The customer "service" rep at our new printer, an in-house press chosen for budgetary reasons over the swift and unerringly competent shop we had been using for the better part of a decade, is a hostile and defensive shrew who carbons a dozen staffers and my boss's managers with each disputatious point. The outsourcing contact has to be led, like a squirming child, through each correction and detail, the hurdles of the time-zone distance and inexpert English making each additional email a drawn-out telegraphic affair of waiting and further explanation. And the managers of our editorial departments have reacted to recent changes with technophobia, finger-pointing, and yet more cc'ing of my boss's managers, who refuse to get involved with decisions they may secretly regret and with staff who will be gone in 8 weeks anyway. Each email falls into my supervisor's inbox like another lash across her dispirited back.

When she warns our bosses of possible complications as we switch the method by which the outsourcers will produce newsletters, she is told not to interfere or that her warnings mark her as opposing change. Yet when she tells our director that she cannot call up our database program to track the progress of our publications through the production cycle, she is asked, in all seriousness, why she would need this access. Our editors recoil in horror at the mistakes made by the outsourced typesetters and the needless delays they have inflicted on our fast-turnaround titles. One biweekly title required a full week and change to have a first pass of proofs made. Other manuscripts sit untouched on the FTP site, requiring my supervisor to prompt them repeatedly to do this work. This is how our firm saves money: Our typesetting is done late and amateurishly, and printed at a shop on the cheap where they never informed our scrimping bosses that they can't handle pubs over 32 pages or with covers printed on different paper stock. My boss has had the pleasure of discovering and resolving — often solo — each of these problems over the past couple of months, in addition to the light personal diversions of taking graduate courses in design and finding a new job.

I watch her smolder under this unending tide of absurdity. I envy her future coworkers who will see her true range of talents, those that our current managers miss, instead burdening her with additional labors as the days tick down. Our managers never saw it fit to educate me in her duties, so I have few ways to fight the myriad fires that spring up at her desk. All I can do is watch her fray under this pressure, each week of these redundant duties charring to insensibility, her Fridays mere burnt ends of stress.

I RETURN FROM GRAND CENTRAL, lunch the high point of my day. My daily typesetting work has been gone for a couple of weeks. I would like to say I concentrate on polishing my resume or locating the next job. But this office drains my optimism. I should be experimenting with Photoshop, researching the requirements of the next phase of my career and the rigors of freelance life, enacting my tentative plan in any way. Getting paid to stare at an empty inbox is more demoralizing than you might imagine. Watching my conscientious and diligent supervisor get ignored when she warns our higher-ups of possible pitfalls is incredibly discouraging. It makes me forget how lucky I was not to be dismissed on the spot during the layoff, sent onto the street with a box and the phone number of the unemployment office. I morbidly call into question my prior loyalty to this company and wonder how sheltered, how afraid of change I must have been to compromise to the point where staying there had any advantage over departure into the unknown.

I fear making the wrong move and getting stuck for another six or seven years in a job I will come to regret. I fear choosing another profession vulnerable to outsourcing and being interrupted by the needs of some board of directors drawing lines through boxes on an organization chart. I fear not having a supervisor who has been an inspiring, congenial guide, and the adaptations I would need to make to become responsibly self-employed. I fear the depression that might follow if such an experiment in freelancing ended in failure, and the negative parental input that would provoke. This saps my will to experiment, and makes me conscious of how far others at my age have gone, including some at my office, merely because they talk a good line of shit and don't care if their witless plans ruin the careers of others.

So I sit at my cube, listening to my boss pull her hair out, while I creep through the job-hunt process, halfway through my final sentence in this jail with a paycheck. Even after consigning much of the clutter at my desk to a Dumpster, a few back issues remain, reminding me of what I enjoyed doing for so long here, and haunting me with the injunction not to be so lost in such pleasure that I lose sight of my future. I know a world awaits me after I leave this place. Any world outside this office ought to be more attractive than sitting amid the burnt ends of a career, stirring the embers for some lingering warmth.

Thawing the Poker Cold War at the Venetian

MANY FOLKS VIEW POKER as a war, especially poker of the tournament or no-limit variety. Every player is an enemy general, every chip on the felt a soldier. Ground is ceded or conquered at the flip of a card. From a distance, a Vegas poker table can look like a hostile parley among several military strongmen, eyes walled off by mirrorshades and obscured by caps or visors, arms folded, the silence only split by terse pronouncements of bets and the crash of chips across the green field of battle, and your only ally an unbeatable hand.

The truth is far more complex. Given the right blend of players, game conditions, dealers, and alcohol, a poker table can rival in spirit even the most convivial craps game. Amid the forbidding silence of an all-in bet awaiting a call, and the reluctant creak of a player’s joints as he rises, chipless, from his seat, the anonymous bettors to one’s left and right can turn out to be comrades by the last deal of the night.

One night during my last trip to Las Vegas, I played at the regal poker room of the Venetian Hotel and Casino. This room was designed for serious, comfortable play: lush seats, gorgeous new chips and tables, cocktail waitresses both toothsome and swift with the firewater, and a highly skilled cadre of dealers. Without capturing the interest of the local Vegas players, no poker room will thrive, and the way to keep locals happy is to give them a comfortable space, a generous comp program, tableside food, and a constant flow of rich fish from the schools of tourists washing through the casino. In this, the Venetian comes up aces.

Players ringed most every table of this lush card palace, either battling it out in the daily tournament, or peering at one another across stacks of hard-won chips at the regular ring games. I had read that the Venetian’s regular no-limit Texas hold’em players ran to the shark end of the spectrum, so I shied away from those tables for my virgin expedition. I was also smarting from a beating at no-limit two days earlier, in which my pocket Aces — the strongest starting hand in hold’em — were shot out of the sky twice in the same day. Having restored my confidence with several hours of limit hold’em the day before, I decided to keep working out the cramps at one of the Venetian’s limit tables. With bets and raises in structured denominations, your money can last longer. Unlike no-limit, therefore, you won’t go broke on the first hand. You also have a better chance of finding a player who pre-dates the no-limit craze, a veteran from whom you can learn. Wide public interest in no-limit is only about 5 years old; players who survived the late-Nineties closure of Vegas poker rooms are likely to have a rich trove of wisdom and stories about the game. This can pay more, long term, than winning for just that one day.

I took a seat with a couple of racks of the peculiar $3 chips used at the Venetian’s $6/$12 game. I had a feeling this denomination would lead to a calmer game than the one the night before at the MGM Grand. There, the $6/$12 game used the more traditional $1 and $5 chips. For the first two betting rounds, folks tended to bet with six singles; they did the same at the turn and river for the double bets. This made average-value pots look far huger: massive seas of blue chips with the odd $5 leering out in alluring red. Players who otherwise might not call a raise on the flop took one look at the gargantuan pile of cashlicious clay and decided, sure, why not throw another $6 in? Add to this a maniacally loose player to my right who raised and reraised nearly every hand preflop — and got at least two calls per hand — the dealers had to push some of these pots to their winners in three or four sweeps.

My hunch about the pace of the game proved to be correct. I was looking for a change from the heart-pounding duel of no-limit, but this was almost too slow. A $36 pot looks a lot more impressive as 36 individual dollar chips, rather than as a wan clutch of 12 tokens in this game.

It did give me a chance to get acquainted with my tablemates. None seemed to be a stereotypical “rock,” a local player grinding out steady wins by raising rarely, folding frequently, and breaking his silence about once per evening, usually to complain about some young “World Poker tour punk” who dared to raise his blinds. I did recognize one local, an off-duty Venetian dealer in fact, who I had seen during my trip the previous summer at the Aladdin. By her chitchat to her neighbors, I identified at least two of them as fellow Venetian poker dealers. Some players salivate at the prospect of playing with a bunch of dealers, believing them to be weaker players or risk-happy gamblers, but the one I recognized had a fairly effective, if straightforward, game. She did make the mistake of tacitly broadcasting her strategy in her between-hand commentary. I filed this information away in case we got head to head at all.

I struck up a conversation with the guy to my right, with whom I shared a number of favorite classic animated cartoons, including a few that I could imitate. Skilled mimicry of Homer Simpson can get even a stiff table laughing. Even better, the aforementioned dealer was wearing an Aqua Teen Hunger Force T-shirt, marking her as a geek of quality.

Our attention was drawn to a loud player two tables away. In a Russian accent slowed by a few drinks, he called for more chips and fresh booze at regular intervals. I smiled. Russians have a special place in the hearts of many recent converts to hold’em. In the film Rounders, John Malkovich portrays the ruthless underground poker-club owner Teddy KGB. Log enough table time and you will inevitably hear someone drop such classic KGB lines as, “Is position bet. I call,” and “Pay him . . . pay that man his money” in their most menacing faux-Russian accents.

In real life, however, poker players love gambling it up with Russian nationals, because if they’ve got the scratch to vacation in Vegas, they likely will be cavalier about throwing more green into the game. Few gamblers are as enthusiastic as Russians when they are building a mini-Kremlin of chips . . . and win or lose, they absolutely will have a drink or three with you. If you’re not having fun with a Russian sitting at your table, you’re deader than Lenin.

“Cheeps! Cheeps!” bellowed the Russian, as I and my seatmate steepled our fingers in a Monty Burns–like pose of financial anticipation. Would the Poker Gods guide this wandering son of the tundra to our table? I watched him accept another rack of chips from a runner, then stand and head to the exit, slapping a fresh pack of Marlboros smartly against his palm. If you’ve ever seen From Russia With Love, our man at the Venetian closely resembled a suntanned Red Grant, with his blond hair cropped closer, and dressed for holiday in a striped T-shirt and khaki cargo shorts. No stereotypical, lumpy gray Muscovite this.

Over the course of the next hour, I kept an eye on him — who, for the sake of at least giving him a name, I shall call “Yuri” — as he burned through chips with a scorched-earth vengeance, guided hapless cocktail waitresses into an empty seat to harangue them on some point, and above all downed drink after drink with a lusty “Na Zdorov'ye!” . . . until a spilled tequila shot got him cut off. A grievous blow!

As if feeling jinxed by that incident, Yuri rose slowly with the remainder of his chips and sat down at a no-limit table adjacent to mine. This evidently proved costly, accelerating his donation of chips to a point where even this gamble-happy guy had had enough. With a bellowed “I do not like NO LEEMIT!”, he once again called for chips, rose again . . . and sat down to my immediate left. I nudged my neighbor and quietly issued a Quagmire-esque “Giggity giggity giggity giggity!”

Yuri seemed more sedate than his earlier self as he carefully unracked his new chips. Perhaps his losses at the no-limit table had finally reached his threshold of pain. When someone takes a licking but still has chips, or seems willing to buy more, you leave them along with their thoughts for a while. The worst thing you can do is to rub the player’s nose in it and induce them to leave. In poker parlance, the exhortation to keep a fish in play is, “Don’t tap on the glass.” So I let Yuri think, stack his chips, and bet when the action came to him.

A way of opening a connection presented itself in the form of my dinner. Earlier that evening, my neighbor had availed himself of the tableside dining option by selecting, from the leatherbound mini-menu of entrees, fish and chips. When the golden-battered fish arrived, nestled in a bed of green-leaf lettuce next to a fragrant sheaf of shoestring fries and enticing tubs of tartar sauce and cider vinegar, I pointed a quivering finger at it and all but commanded the waiter to clone it for me. I devoured the fish upon its arrival, but could only engulf about half of the fries. So I offered Yuri the chance to help me finish them. He graciously thanked me and set to work cleaning the plate.

I gently chatted with him about poker, thinking less of him now as a sheep to be sheared and more as a fellow player. He definitely preferred limit hold’em, not liking the dramatic swings of no-limit. I could see why, based on his style of play; he bet to the river with hands as small as a single pair and chased draws like a pitbull chasing a chicken-fried cat. I never got into a hand with him, my cards having gone dead-ass cold. I sympathized with him at getting cut off from the free-drink train, and suggested he ask the floorman to reconsider. All Yuri really did was knock over a glass onto the rolling drink stand next to the table. Hardly a bootable offense.

About an hour after Yuri sat down, I counted my own chip stack and decided the combination of good limit players and my growing drowsiness were not going to restore it to its starting size anytime soon. As I had guessed, the $3 chips made the pots visibly smaller, and thus less worth loose calls and raising wars, than the gargantuan pots buckling the MGM $6/$12 tables. And the only real fish I had encountered was the deep-fried kind I had engulfed earlier. Yuri was a steady, but not wild, donor, betting but rarely raising, more like someone playing a multistage blackjack hand. He fell short of being the true maniac every solid poker player covets.

In the area of courtesy, however, Yuri measured up strongly. I racked up my chips and offered him my hand and a parting “Do svidanya.” He smiled, rose, accepted my hand with both of his, and returned my valediction, adding a sincere “Good luck.” As I redeemed my chips at the poker room cage, I could still feel the warm impression of his handshake.

All told, I probably lost about $100 at the Venetian poker room. I returned to my hotel room less disappointed with losing than I might have been. With a few more days left to battle it out at the poker tables, I considered the loss no more than a new scar across my back from the most recent hand-to-hand melee with the enemy. Amid the press, however, Yuri distinguished himself as a welcome and friendly rival.

Far from my initial eagerness to loot him, I was now glad I hadn’t been at the no-limit table and in a position to take his whole stack. To paraphrase Hannibal Lecter’s reason for sparing Clarice Starling, the poker world was far more interesting with Yuri in it. He was worth more than a hundred grumpy rocks who bitch incessantly about the casino air conditioning or drink service. Give me a table full of Yuris each time I play poker, and I can retire, if not rich, then happy.

Meditation on My Progress

THE ENVELOPE OF GOALS — some of which I remember, some of which have slipped my mind — still sits on the ledge of my whiteboard. It greets me as I leave the apartment. Though I may not recall explicitly every single detail, I use it as an inspiration to improve something —to keep moving forward, to expand my boundaries or tighten my routines just a little bit each day, and to end unproductive or damaging habits that keep me from achieving my potential.

It's a long list, but some of them will have lasting effects, and will efface deeply engraved habits, so I am introducing them in digestible chunks to avoid being discouraged. I've continued noting my achievements in the Google Docs list. When the month ends, I'll make some notes for myself to see how I did and shift focus if I need to.

This may all sound basic, but I need to build this level of discipline if I pursue a freelance career. With the right boss, I thrive; but I may need that boss to be me. I need to have confidence in my ability to overcome a variety of disasters that I ordinarily would get an officemate or tech support person to resolve. I also need to fine-tune my recordkeeping. It's already quite good; I spent some time at work last week disposing of weekly records of work I did from the first day of work at my current job. If I am working for myself, however, I will need to maintain tax, billing, and accounting figures; file and manage warranties for hardware and licenses for software; execute regular software updates and disk backups; and regularly solicit new business. Even if I go the gradual route and ease into freelance work, these skills will be critical.

With the departure of my last couple of January 2007 newsletter titles, I will have lots of time on my hands at work. I will use this time to perfect my resume, engage the assistance of our outplacement firm, and post my data on the job-hunt sites. I will also do some work to see how much building a home computer system would cost, and maybe — if they don't fire me for all of this Internet browsing — check out the process of forming my own corporation.

I've also spent time writing at work. Some of my recent posts have begun in a work email, then have been sent home for completion and posting. One of my goals is to write daily. Not necessarily posts here, not even anything I would ever sell. I think one of my biggest mistakes is not fully cultivating my talent. It is far from too late, but I do regret not taking the advice 10 years ago, of someone I know, of writing daily. He recommended I wrote 3 hours per day. At the time, I copyedited freelance for my employer, so this was 15 hours per week (I excluded weekends) I could be earning risk-free money. So I scoffed at this, saying there was the issue of how I would earn a living at what I felt was going to be crappy writing anyway. I should note that my interlocutor is a fierce optimist who knows no shame in pursuit of success, and it has paid him well; he is the cofounder of a successful, NYSE-affiliated daytrading firm. If he was confident enough to take that sort of risk and endure through the dot-com crash and the market tumult after 9/11, surely I can rethink my resistance and, if nothing else, develop what I have long suspected is one of my greatest skills.

With nothing to do at work except watch the outsourcing initiative induce wailing and gnashing of teeth amid our editors, and the production-change initiative founder rudderless, I need these goals, long term and short, to feel useful, to feel like I am moving something forward in a torpid department. The last thing I am concerned about right now is money. It will come. I just have to trust myself to make decisions, to adjust my aim when I fail to hit my mark, and event to cut loose unrealistic goals when I find I'm just wasting effort on something unattainable. Forward motion.

Chips, Cards, and the Flat Tax

LAST NIGHT, OUR POKER game was the touchstone for a varied range of conversational topics. Some may make certain presuppositions about the tenor or content of the gab at the traditional Thursday night poker game. See if any of these match your stereotype of what 11 men crouched around a swatch of green felt, chips vying with beers for space, might discuss:

• Whether the progressive tax system favors the rich and/or unfairly burdens the poor
• The virtues of a flat tax
• The budget deficit vs. the national debt, and how we briefly ran a surplus before 9/11
• General consensus that elimination of wasteful government spending must precede any worthwhile revision of the tax code
• The cost of the Iraq war
• The recent hangings in Iraq and the practice of execution by hanging, in particular whether death is instant
  

Amid this, quite a lot of poker was played, including some dramatic all-ins. With time, however, the New York Giants returned to the table as a talking point, along with what the draft might bring, and from there, we did eventually debate the merits of such female luminaries as Rachel McAdams, the Jessicas Biel and Alba, and Scarlett Johansson.

Mood Swings and the Job Hunt

WHILE EMAILING A FRIEND and former coworker yesterday regarding a long-overdue get-together, I began writing about the possibility of freelance work, and inadvertently came up with a tentative plan for this year. I spent some time at work last week browsing the jobs available in my field on Monster and mediabistro, but found myself discouraged. Many of them wanted a portfolio, because they were closer to full graphic-design positions than my current one. I am ashamed to say I have done very little that might be of interest to these sorts of employers. I never achieved my goal of designing an incoming newsletter from the ground up, which would have been as close as one in my job might get to doing some creative work.

True, the accounting title I worked on for 3 years involved tight deadlines, tables and graphs created under pressure with ill-suited software, and reflow of copy when stories went stale or changed fundamentally. But there is very little to show for it. I will yank some representative PDFs for my book, but that leaves it very thin.

If I were to advise students at my alma mater, I would exhort them to watch very carefully for signs that they will not have the chance to add to their skill sets in their jobs. If they go for longer than 3 months without an opportunity to learn, to secure a new certification, or to crosstrain on another aspect of their profession, they should lobby their employers for these chances, take classes on their own, or quit for a position that will grant them all of this. In waiting for 2+ years for this new workflow to be implemented at my job, I took no classes or cert courses, figuring the launch was just around the corner. It kept me less marketable, and I regret the gap and its unproductive expanse.

This is not to say that nothing can be done about it. Far from it. While writing to my friend about my current choices, and mentioning my deficiencies in areas like Photoshop and Web design, I came up with the following, which I shall paraphrase so I'm not entirely revealing verbatim private correspondence:

1. Find a fulltime job that increases my skill with areas of the Adobe Creative Suite where I am weak. (Or at least offers the chance to train, perhaps with tuition reimbursement. If not, pay it myself and see if it's tax deductible.)
2. Begin copyediting, proofreading, and/or writing freelance.
3. Learn new editing stylebooks — I adhered to American Psychological Association style at my first job, occasionally used AMA there, and got my feet wet with Blue Book during my first year as an editor/typesetter at my current place.
4. With more developed design skills, and a regular roster of editing work, begin offering freelance design work as well.
5. Find myself 2 or 3 years down the line better able to do much of this on my own, and go fully freelance.
   

Granted, in the next month, I could find a compelling, spiritually nutritious full-time job where I gleefully spend the rest of my career. But I let my mind go through the freelance option, for the sake of example, and not without precedent. My Jedi master at my first workplace, who taught me how to copyedit, proofread, and use DTP software, left that company almost 5 years after I started, and 12 years after he had signed on, to form his own freelance business to do just about anything he did while employed, plus writing (he was a talented writer and often crafted every word in the company newsletter). So theoretically, it can be done. I need to get back in touch with him to see what his recent activities have been. He hasn't been using the same email as he did when he was freelancing, so I'm not sure if he's still in business. He may still have some wisdom to pass along on those lines, though. I do recall his saying that healthcare represented a huge nut to cover.

That I had come up with a sort of action plan didn't really sink in until this afternoon, during which I had been searching for jobs online again. The office was depopulated, and I had little work at my desk. Typically we get Martin Luther King, Jr. Day off, but for some reason, they needed a day to complete some holiday weekend that I won't be around to exploit, so we had to come in. Many folks took the day off anyway, because they knew our printers and other vendors would be shut down. So I did some more searching, and read through the materials our outplacement firm had provided.

I found myself getting discouraged again. Each ad required just a little something that put me way behind even the newest graduate from design school. I left today wondering how I could have felt so optimistic back in November after we met with the outplacement specialist. He had said some mood swings were natural, but I just wasn't feeling the initial euphoria of having new opportunities.

I had a date for dinner at my parents' place, where the discussion turned . . . to the situation at work. I had no real difficulty talking about the current state of affairs there, how the typesetters at the outsourcing firm are mangling schedules and offering subpar typeset results, and how there are so many aspects of the jobs being eliminated that our bosses, who have never viewed our roles from trench level, will only encounter when they become a problem.

Where I began to get a bit impatient was when my parents asked me how the job hunt was going. I had told them there were going to be days when I didn't want to discuss it, although I didn't say this immediately, because they didn't push. Eventually, though, after I mentioned that I was in need of some remedial education to better qualify for many graphic design positions, they began asking what I would do if I had to change careers — what else I would want to do. I told them nothing. They pushed the matter, asking if I had any other interests in jobs that weren't going to be sent offshore with everything else. I let their questions follow me to the fridge, where I got another soda, and then by way of answering, I fixed my mother's gaze and said, quietly, "Do we really need to discuss this?"

"No," she said, ceasing her inquiry.

I finished my dinner in relative silence. Later, I gently explained to her that I had had a demoralizing day, and that I had mentioned that there would be days on which I wasn't going to feel like answering a whole lot of questions about my search. She understood, though she did say that my father eventually was going to want to know how things stood. Her phrasing bordered on a suggestion that he was entitled to such updates. Considering I'm not paying him rent, car money, or tuition debt, I think he — along with my mom — will get regular updates as my morale dictates.

I wonder how they would have reacted had I given them the plan I outlined above. Probably they would doubt my ability to get it done, and absolutely they would worry about my health insurance costs. I think a time eventually comes where you realize that you are the best assessor of your own abilities, prospects, and goals, and you can distinguish between those that are truly best for you, and those that you inherited from parents as a product of their concerns. True, they are probably valid at the base, but if they keep you from realizing your best destiny, they are limits, and should be broken. And as I said in the email to my friend, I will be working for the next 30 years, if not more. If it takes a little more time right now, when I in the best financial and health condition I'll be before middle age crashes in, to find the right skills and career path, don't I owe that to myself?

I think the prospect of utter failure is underrated by some people and should not be seen as some sort of living death, but rather as part of the journey to boundless success. This country — its tax system, its unemployment laws. the easy flow of credit and loans — offers many opportunities to recover fully after bankruptcy, misfortune, or utter fuckups. If it takes some false starts, and maybe some gloomy or even hungry nights thereafter, to get where I really need to be in my life, won't those be the most critical and beneficial fuckups I can make?

Hearing the Moo of the Sacred Chao

BY YESTERDAY MIDAFTERNOON, I was steadily losing my will to live. My daily workflow has slowed down to a bare trickle; our January 2007 newsletter issues are the last that our design group will do before the outsourcing gnomes take over. Each printed advance that comes in puts us one step closer to the end, which could be hastened if it is perceived that we are filling no needed role here. Combine my barren inbox with a short stretch of sleep last night, and the afternoon becomes a deathmarch of futile combat against the opium-scented breath of Morpheus.

I decided to take a walk to wake up. The winter weather had eased somewhat since the morning, but I anticipated that the crisp breezes off the nearby Hudson would invigorate me. My default destination used to be a dog spa two blocks from my building, a storefront in which lazed around a dozen daycare-ditched dogs, draped over leather couches, curled in pools of afternoon sun, or eagerly accepting Liver Snaps from spectators who could buy them from a gumball machine near the entrance. As befalls many small businesses in Manhattan, this one succumbed to a rent hike, which I discovered while seeking refuge one crappy day last month.

At first, I figured I’d just walk along the Hudson for a while, but upon spotting the nearby Chelsea Piers complex, I chose to visit that instead. I’ve never visited this large sports conglomeration. When I noticed that it had a bowling alley, I grew curious. I foresee needing an escape if I am stuck here for the full term and I don’t find a job before the end. A couple of midday games on the lanes might be just the thing to shake loose the cobwebs between sending out interviews and building my experience at Photoshop.

The complex was depopulated. What patrons were there may have been at the gym, out of sight to a casual visitor like myself. Drifting around the grounds, looking for the entrance to the bowling alley, reminded me of a particular theme from some of my dreams. In these, I wander endlessly through a decades-old facility of some type — a high school, college, hospital, or asylum — searching for a way out, but finding locked exterior doors, bolted windows, or no stairwells or elevators in which to descend to ground level. Think of the set design in the institutional scenes of Conspiracy Theory or Jacob’s Ladder and you’ve got an idea of what I mean. I finally found my way to the wing that contained the bowling alley and entered, happy at least to break the connection to my dream-self.

As with the rest of the complex, the bowling alley was thinly patronized. Employees outnumbered bowlers. Bad, light hip-hop played on the house PA system. A young guy was decorating a table along one side, crafting large white napkins into careful sculptures with practiced ease. One of the front-desk crew explained that a birthday party had reserved the joint. Sounded like a fun time. I used to bowl in high school, and a couple of years ago, my gang got on a bowling kick and would roll a couple of games on weekends. This dried up, as will many casual attempts to reconnect with activities of our youth.

I lingered as long as I could stand with the truly crummy music in the background, then headed back the way I came. It was then that I thought about a connection this destination had with current (if comparatively obscure) events — specifically, the death of Robert Anton Wilson.

Wilson, the coauthor of the seminal Illuminatus! trilogy, author on his own of various pieces of conspiracy-nut and anti–control agency fiction and nonfiction, and living prophet of Operation Mind Fuck, died Thursday. Wilson and Illuminatus! collaborator Robert Shea based much of the trilogy on the Principia Discordia, the nongoverning noncanon of the religion of Discordianism. If you ever played the Steve Jackson Games offerings Illuminati or its collectible cousin, Illuminati: New World Order, you owe a debt to the Principia and the aforementioned trilogy. The authors of the Principia, Greg Hill and Kerry Wendell Thornley, first crafted the precepts of this faith in a Whittier, CA bowling alley.

If I had to believe in a religion, I would certainly like to believe in one in which I had been guided to this Chelsea Piers bowling alley by the unconscious Brownian ministrations of Erisian forces.

Very Brief Poker Hiatus

ONCE AGAIN TAKING A break from the usual Thursday poker game, this time due to recovery from my cold. I did go to work today, but following that up with a 2:30 a.m. bedtime is not the way to get the old immune system up and humming. I also would hate to pass this cold along to the 9 or 10 folks who would be crunched in around the table with me. It's actually more of a courtesy that some of the younger, more shortsighted players extend. Some of them would play with seeping surgical wounds rather than miss the action.

Breaks in the game have their virtue. It gives one the chance to review recent performance, good or bad, and eliminate what's not working in favor of what is. You have to take some down time to study strategy guides or posts on such forums as the one on Two Plus Two. It's the only way to stay current; you'd be surprised sometimes, upon rereading a text you thought you might have absorbed, how much you may have been neglecting or taking for granted. Or you might discover that one of your guiding reference works is no longer suited to the style of the home game or poker room in which you play. Alternately, the refresher course might prod you to change games when you realize how slim the pickings have become.

It may be some time before they get slim in my current game. A typical full table offers a range of player types, each with their potential for profit, each with pitfalls to avoid when necessary. Each week, I look at the lineup of players in the host's email, and try to imagine what the night will be like. It's always a little different. Recently, we have had two maniacs at the same table: two rich, reckless gamblers who will raise preflop without looking at their cards and will go all in at the slightest sense of weakness in an opponent, regardless of whether their own hand has a chance of winning. One of these guys at a table can make for some nice wins if you get a well-concealed good hand at the right time. Two of them playing at the same game . . . well, bring a few extra buy-ins. It can get wild.

Another guy has been going on fairly serious tilt recently. He will get desperate, make a large, irrational-seeming raise at some point, often for all of his chips, and rely on superstition about his reputation for making crappy starting cards hit big to push out opponents. The problem is that he often fails to take into account the folks who almost never get past the flop without premium cards, or who are willing to bet strong with powerful drawing hands (e.g., two pair with four flush cards). Opponents like this are getting their money in there with the best odds, and someone playing 9 5 offsuit because it's "his hand" is not going to shit miracles forever.

Add to this the many players we have in our group with a firm grasp of poker math and good reads on what hands other players might be holding, and it makes for a very stimulating intellectual evening. Winning never hurts. What I consider almost more of a reward, though, is when an opponent needs several minutes to call one of my all-in bets. I'd hate to think I have become predictable or transparent in terms of the range of hands I play. If someone actually has to break down the consequences of multiple potential holdings of mine before calling such a bet, then I can go home satisfied, with the pot or not.

Day Two of Our Continuing Health Coverage

SICK DAYS WERE SO much better when we were kids.

Seriously. Think of what a sick day meant when you were a child. Seventy-five percent of the time, it was going to hit during the academic year, so you got to stay home from school. Other than school, what did you really have going on? Scouting? Swim lessons? Music practice? Nothing that couldn't wait. At most, a class chum might bring over some homework. Aside from that, however, you had nothing to do except convalesce and soak up some parental attention. What could you do? You were a kid?

Now, a day off from work means something so much different than a sick day during one's school days. If I'm taking off from work, I don't want to sit around the house doing nothing but screwing around on the Internet and watching TV. I want to sit in the park and catch up on some reading with fresh air in my lungs. I want to go to Atlantic City and throw some chips around on the felt. I want to use my train ticket to ride into NYC as a tourist, and revel in the many charms that great metropolis offers its visitors. I want to clean, improve, or move out of my apartment. I want to sit by the Hudson and watch the sun warm the Palisades or run its sweltering gaze down the brick balustrades of the Upper West Side. Add a companion or significant other and the opportunities increase exponentially.

Short of "sick days" taken to avoid mental collapse or physical assault on my smoother-brained coworkers, the real deal — hours spent on the couch waiting for symptoms to abate or in doctors' offices — profoundly sucks. I woke up early this morning, 4:00 to be exact, and not because I was catching an early flight to Vegas. My fever had come back, and I spent the next 2 hours tossing in an agitated state. I finally calmed down enough around 6:30, shortly after I called into work to let them know I was not going to come in. Based on how I felt at that point, I wasn't planning to do much besides fall back to sleep, bestir at some point, and cough my way through the day.

This is eventually how it turned out. The highlight of the day was getting regular mail service again. No sign of my goals list yet. I look forward to going to work tomorrow, as maddening as it may be, because if I can get to work, I can get to the gym, and make some real progress on the health aspect of my goals. I do recall one of them is to visit the gym at least four times per week. This level of activity will reinforce my immune system, which will help me avoid these nagging stops in the head-cold pitstop.

Goals for 2007: Posted and Mailed

I DECIDED TO FOLLOW the strategy of Marketwatch.com columnist Chuck Jaffe in setting goals for this year. In this article, he describes how he writes up 30 or so goals for the upcoming year, mails them to himself, and then — without retaining a copy to consult over the course of the year or memorizing the list before posting it — tries to fulfill as many as he can. At the end of the year, he tears open the envelope and compares his list to what he actually achieved. "A good year," he writes, "is one in which I nail half of my targets and get close to the bull's-eye on about half of what is left."

On Monday morning, I typed up around 30 goals, with a wide variety of life areas. I printed this before going to my parents, did not revise it, and mailed it out. Concurrently, I set up a shared Google Docs page on which I will record what I consider to be achievements for the day. I went with this format so I could update or consult the list from any browser, and not have to trust to memory for an end-of-day recap. I know a few of these were on the goals list I mailed out — including writing up the list itself — but I felt I should get an early start on recording just what I could show for the year, to make the 12/31/07 review all the more useful.

I don't intend to list every little twitch here in the same detail as I use on the list. Naturally, anything blogworthy will show up here. Just to show you the sorts of things I care about, here's the first 2 days:


ACHIEVEMENTS 2007
1/1/07: Composed list of 2007 goals; dropped into mail. No copy retained.

1/2/07: Fully funded 2007 Roth IRA for $4,000.

1/2/07: Opened fixed-income ladder: 3- and 6-month T-bills, 9- and 12-month CDs. Also opened first 4-week bill for year (these will be opened as long as the rate > that of FDRXX).

1/2/07: Blogged (twice).

1/2/07: Began a spending record.

1/2/07: Set up Gmail acct under true name.

Doesn't seem like much, but considering the main goals of interest on my sheet are to find a new job and to define the next stretch of my career, having a detailed record of achievement should, if nothing else, help me refocus unproductive efforts and take pride in effective ones.

So I have a mystery list of aspirations floating around out there, soon to be affixed onto my wall, there to remind me to expand, if not fulfill, my potential for this year and beyond.

Inadvertently Suspicious Sick Day

AN IGNOBLE BEGINNING TO 2007, with me home with a cold. Too bad, as the weather outside my window looks quite gorgeous, if breezy. And of course there's also the shoegazing tone your voice inevitably takes when you call in the day after New Year's, no matter how congested you sound, no matter how accurate the reading you give from the thermometer. Short of faxing a blood test with an elevated white-cell count, it just doesn't look good.

Of course, with my layoff looming in 3 months, how guilty can I really feel?

The New Year's weekend went calmly. I prefer an evening with friends for celebrating the passage of the year to anything more elaborate. I don't like large, drunk crowds, so I've never gone to Times Square for the occasion. Las Vegas is supposed to put on quite a show, which I would no doubt end up celebrating from my hotel room and watching the fireworks add light to the already sparkling skyline. Preferably with someone special, if I ever do it.

In this case, I met up with Amy and Ratatosk at their place on the 30th for a night of food and boardgaming. I was feeling a bit mopey at the end of this year, as sometimes happens, perhaps a little rocked back on my heels at the responsibilities ahead in '07, and a night with friends was just the bracer I felt I needed. In this, it did not disappoint.

We feasted on barbecued ribs from the Market Basket, along with coleslaw I procured at the town deli, beans, rolls, and apple pie. The ribs were dry-rubbed with a fine blend of spices; I prefer the dry style to the heavily gloppy sauced style for ribs. Brisket sandwiches I can go with either approach. The meat in rack o' ribs was robust in flavor without being too hot in spice, a delicate blend. Once more, I had the passing regret that I don't own a backyard in which I could set up a smoker. Although I don't eat meat during the week, I would love to summon forth a mighty mass of smoked meats for my mates some day.

After dinner, and while we were waiting for the final member of our party, I sat with Amy and discussed a unique editing project she is undertaking. I'm still not sure in which direction my career will go next — now that the holidays are done, I can intensively research that — but it was very helpful and interesting to peer into the details of another realm of my profession. I have to begin presenting myself to employers as possessing a range of abilities, and this sort of cross-pollination is useful for seeing what I can offer.

Once our final member manifested, we played a fast-moving card-based game called Citadel. The goal is to assemble a city of eight different cards, each representing various urban features. The trick in this game is that the role one plays changes from turn to turn, via the distribution of character cards that lend certain powers or allow one to go at specific phases of the turn. This can grant one the ability to knock another player out for a turn, gain more currency (which allows purchase of properties, or destruction of others' properties to keep them from reaching the magic eight) based on the type of cards one has down, or steal another player's currency. This was our first time playing this specific game, so we went a little more slowly than usual, but Rat's description of the game as a quickie looks to be accurate. (We tend to play a quick card or boardgame before the main course of the night, usually a military sprawl like Samurai Swords or Risk 2210).

All in all, it was a most pleasant night spent with friends, gaming, and fine food. Just the ticket.

I elected to spend New Year's Eve in. The Travel Channel was running a World Poker Tour marathon, ESPN was replaying the 2006 World Series of Poker Main Event, the Packers were taking on the Bears, and Comedy Central was blasting a clutch of music-themed South Park episodes. Bill had originally planned to have folks over, but when most of the potential invites turned out to have plans (including Matt and his girlfriend with the enviable destination of First Night Boston, much more suited to my temperament than the Times Square crowds), he decided to skip it. With a brief flick over to one of the broadcast networks for the ball drop, I spent my evening on the above list of stimuli, then teetered off to bed at a fairly late hour.

This cost me. On Saturday, I had returned to the gym after a week's hiatus. I did the first of the two-part weight training program I usually do, and I felt a little sore over the course of Sunday as a result. The problem is that when I return to this discipline after a lapse, if it happens amid a sleep deficit, I usually get sick. So on New Year's Monday, when I was coughing fitfully and felt a deep pain in my legs, I knew it wasn't the workout. I hoped that I wasn't communicable yet, because I had a dinner date over at my parents' house, and they, being 70ish, do not easily shake off colds.

By the time I headed back home, I was feeling chills. I crawled into bed after placing a quick Happy New Year call to Felix, drank some water, and . . . lay there for 4 hours. If I dropped off at all, I don't recall it. I was going from hot flashes to chills, alternately tossing off and shuddering under my sheets. I could feel my dinner just sitting there in my stomach, but it stayed down, so I could rule out food poisoning. I began sweating around midnight; although I wasn't hallucinating the way I do when my fever spikes, I sensed it was high enough to register on a thermometer. A quick consultation with that instrument showed a 102.5º fever. I teetered over to the cupboard for Aleve and my cellphone, so I could call into work the next morning.

The Aleve worked. My fever dropped by half a degree in the next 20 minutes, and the restlessness borne from the chills and hot flashes eased to the point where I could sleep dreamlessly (I have wildly exotic dreams when my fever is high). I set my alarm for 6:00 so I could call in without encountering my department head, who arrives around 7:00 some days. With that done, I dropped off again, this time until a healthy 10:00.

For now, my fever has leveled out at 100.2º, so I've concentrated on rehydrating and sticking close to home. I dodged any number of sick train passengers and coworkers since the fall, an especially nifty trick with the warm weather tempting the ill to venture forth before becoming incommunicable. Each one of my teammates has been home with a cold so far, so perhaps I simply eroded my immune system to the point where the bug in my system could sally forth. Still, the benefit of being sick first thing in the year is that it can only get better from here.

So here's hoping for a considerably healthier, prosperous, and bountiful 2007 for all who stumble upon this entry. I'll see you when I stop coughing!