You’ve Got to Know When to Hold Them

I try to use Las Vegas the way it was designed to be used. Several years ago I spent a weekend there for a wedding. The wedding was a very neat little affair for a couple of very beautiful people. This story isn’t about that wedding though, nor is it about Las Vegas. But I think Vegas makes a pretty good backdrop for a story, don’t you? And weddings are nice. I think starting a story with a weekend in Las Vegas sets just the right kind of tone for the rest of the story. I hope you agree. 

I initially had a date arranged for this wedding. This story isn’t about her either. We were going to fly there together and spend the weekend playing together but as the wedding date approached I had a change of heart and ended up going to Vegas alone for my friends’ wedding. It was a great weekend. I drank and mingled with old friends. I drank and mingled with new friends. I drank and gambled. I drank some more. I spent way too much money on a nice room I barely saw. By Sunday I had become particularly close friends with one particular machine in a back corner of the casino floor of the MGM Grand. 

This past weekend my sister was telling me about a new guy she is seeing. This might be what this story is really about. She had a bad breakup a little over a year ago. It had been a very long and serious relationship she thought would last the rest of her life. That’s a devastating breakup. She has been on her own all this time doing a fairly remarkable job recovering but still suffering more than you like to see a person suffer, particularly family. 

But there is this new guy now. I don’t know him but by all accounts (her’s) he sounds like the most incredible human being who ever lived. I interpret that to mean he is probably a decent guy. That’s good news. But more importantly she really likes him. I mean she really likes him. She hasn’t known him that long. But they really really like each other. She was genuinely happy talking about him. I don’t always see my sister so happy. It’s nice to see. 

But she is worried, and she probably should be. 

When dealing with a breakup, human beings generally have two options. The first option is to deal with all the hurt and its associated cocktail of emotions directly by feeling them. This is the painful option and no one likes it. The second option is to mask and/or avoid all of those emotions. This we all prefer to do in various ways.  

I have always been a believer in the theory of rebound relationships. Hell I once famously advertised for one, and that moment for me has been preserved on this very blog. The idea of a rebound relationship, for those of you who might be new to the world, is that while you are dealing with a breakup with one person you quickly get involved with a new person. In this way the hurt of the breakup is theoretically masked or avoided by the thrill of the new relationship. It seems simple enough, except everyone knows that rebound relationships are doomed. The reason rebound relationships are doomed, according to the theory, is that all that those negative emotions from the breakup were never dealt with, and they will invariably resurface and cause problems for the new relationship. 

This was my sister’s concern. Before she really got involved with this guy she wondered if she should. I told her to go for it because she was about ready for a rebound guy. So she did. And now she really likes this guy and she is worried about him being the rebound guy. She doesn’t want him to just be the rebound guy. This is a dilemma. 

At the time I went to Las Vegas for my friends’ wedding I was recently divorced, and I was having a hard time with it. I chose to mask my emotions. I was having some difficulty avoiding them altogether. So I drank. I always tell people that sometimes shit happens in life and the only way to deal with it is to drink for a year. I don’t mean have a couple glasses of wine with dinner drinking. I mean spend a year where the first thing you think about every day is how many hours you need to waste before you can get numb again. That was the year I was having when I went to Las Vegas that weekend. 

I never have any friends on Sunday morning. This is a fact. And it was true in Las Vegas as well. By Sunday morning the wedding crowd had thinned, the bride and groom were off to the Grand Canyon, but I had some time to kill. I killed it in a dark corner of the casino in front of a slot machine. Specifically, I found myself highly amused by a Kenny Rogers themed machine called The Gambler. It seemed quaint and trite all at the same time and in 2008 it was just too kitschy not to try. It also turned out to be located in just the right location, heavily trafficked by cocktail waitresses. 

There were actually two of them. Identical machines right next to each other. There was already a woman at one of them so I sat down at the other. I fed the machine a $20 bill and the woman started talking to me. She told me she had been at that machine all night. She said she originally fed it $100, and that at one point she had been up to six hundred, but that was a few hours ago. She said she didn’t want to stop because she knew the machine was going to hit again any moment, but that she needed to go get some sleep soon. She looked like she had been up all night. By the time she finished telling me this the cocktail waitress arrived with the beer I had ordered. I took it and ordered a second one. I tipped her a five on that first one and asked her to keep them coming. She did. I thought about how everyone in Las Vegas is always sure they are about to hit it big. I put another $20 in my machine. I consider myself too practical a gambler to completely forget how probability works. 

By the time I killed $40 the woman next to me was gone. She hadn’t won another cent. She played right up until she was completely bust. I never saw her again. 

There are times in life when the safe bet is the good bet. And there are times in life when you shouldn’t be betting at all. Sometimes you just need to make a decision and go with it. My sister was at one of those points when she asked me for advice about her rebound guy. I can see she genuinely likes him, and she is genuinely worried that he won’t last, and that she might get hurt again, because he is squarely in that rebound position.  

Years before she asked me for my advice I had cancelled a weekend date to a friend’s wedding in Las Vegas. Instead of spending time with someone new I found myself drinking alone in a dark corner of the most well-lighted city in the world. 

My sister was thinking about meeting her guy in Reno, coincidentally, on her way home later that day. He had booked a room for them to use for just a few hours before they each needed to get back to their individually busy lives before they could see each other alone again.  

I spent the day sitting at that damn machine. It did hit. By the time I caught a cab to the airport I was ahead $600, and considering I drank $800 worth of beer, that was a pretty good day. I had successfully avoided the hurt and managed to find a thrill. 

It occurs to me now that a hotel room in Reno might be a better way. I told her to go for it but be careful. The danger is real. But how can you tell someone a connection isn’t real? You know it when you feel it. And none of us feels it often enough to be able to ignore it based on superstition. 

Because, what if I have been wrong? I know it seems unlikely to me also. But maybe everything isn’t a dichotomy. Maybe there is another way. Maybe a simple connection between two people at the right time is all that matters. Maybe the hurt doesn’t always just pile up. Maybe in the right situation with the right people it just becomes unimportant. 

I am sure now that taking the chance is worth the risk. Like spending the day drinking in front of an old machine in a Las Vegas casino it is going to be a good time no matter what, and you still might come out ahead. 

Enlightenment Has Probably Never Been What We Think it is, Nor as Fragile

If I were called to frame a story

it would be about people

and I would drag it from the earth

call out the ghosts of human history

as far back as memories can remember

before the fall

before the flood

before we even invented god

I’d tell how sex was always the reason

and how mothers loved their children

before anyone told them they should.

The Subtle Movements of Plagues and Waves

When all the plagues in heaps have come

and all the world is said and done 

I like to think ideas 

will still be out there 

moving as degrading waves 

across the vast expanse of space

however dim their signal wanes

searching 

patiently
for antennae.

There’s No Sadness in Not Caring Anymore

You tried and failed

lied, cried, wailed

controlled for as long as you could

tried to let go

began moving on

again, and again, and again  

there is no sadness in not caring anymore, child

there’s no glory to be gained

all options have been exhausted

you have felt all the pain

don’t punish yourself, anymore

there’s no one to blame.

A True and Accurate History of the Greatest Tool Ever Used to Control Us

This morning a friend sent me a piece of literature purportedly prepared for schoolchildren in North Korea. I have no idea the authenticity of the document. It appeared to me to be an internet hoax, or if it has some legitimacy it might be a particularly sensationalistic English translation of the original Korean, with English words and phrases carefully chosen to make it sound as batshit as possible. My favorite part was the description of Kim Jong Il’s birth, where following the prophecy of a hummingbird he apparently simply walked out of his mother’s patriotic vagina. That’s one way to do it. In any case it was clearly some kind of propaganda. And the rhetorical question posed to me along with the piece got me thinking. How can people believe this stuff? 

Propaganda is one of my favorite things, I love to see it, identify it, think about it, definitely talk about it, and I am sure I have written about it before. But since I only seem to like what I write while I am writing it I am unwilling to go back and look at older essays before I begin potentially repeating myself here. I am lazy and annoying like that. But I am not outraged by propaganda the way some people are. I dream one day of being a writer of propaganda. I really want to get paid to tell people what to think. I think I would be great at it.

When we become aware of propaganda, we always think of it as happening somewhere else. We know Hitler made great use of it for example. How else could an entire nation of people maintain even a low level of apathy toward a horror like the holocaust? I don’t buy the ignorance argument. World War II was very well documented and there seems to be a lot of evidence to suggest that the German people, not to mention the people of Nazi-occupied countries like Poland and Austria, were keenly aware that their Jewish neighbors were disappearing. And still the 99% in those countries seem to have just gone with it. Maybe they were afraid. I think it more likely that they were convinced. 

I think the general population, of humanity, hates to think for themselves. This is why propaganda works so well. It is far easier to believe someone else’s story than it is to make up your own. 

I answered my friend’s rhetorical question (because I am arrogant like that) with the story of George Washington never telling a lie, and the one about Ben Franklin “inventing” electricity. Which I consider to be equally incredible lies about our own founding fathers. My friend responded by drawing a line between political propaganda and what he called “insane magical or supernatural propaganda.” Maybe. 

And then I thought about all the people I know who truly believe in a virgin birth, when they would never believe such a story from their daughters. I thought about the people who truly believe that once upon a time a six hundred year old man built a boat and filled it with every kind of animal and insect on earth, then watched while the physical laws of the universe were suspended and magical rain clouds produced more water than even exists on the planet and turned the whole globe into a single ocean. I thought about all the people I know who truly believe that an angel told a fourteen year old boy where to dig up an ancient golden book and translate it into English. Reasonable people truly believe all these things. So why does North Korean propaganda seem so crazy?

In reality propaganda appears everywhere, not just in North Korea and Hitler’s Germany. Neither is it a relic of the past. I know I have written previously about the post 9/11 “God Bless America” billboards that mysteriously popped up all over the country thirteen years ago. But what about “In God We Trust?” In 1864 a purposefully secular government which prides itself on maintaining and defending freedom of religion began minting coins with this phrase on them, and has done so continuously for 150 years now. Why? Because that’s what they really want you to believe. That’s why. It’s the same reason that every president ever has had the same single religion. We can have a black president. We can probably even have a female president. But we can’t even dream of having a president who isn’t Christian. Could you imagine? Me either. 

Have you ever wondered why anyone cares so much about the phrase “under God” in the pledge of allegiance? Of course you have. We all have. Some of us wonder why these atheists get their panties all bunched up about it when it is just words. Others of us wonder why theists added the phrase in the first place to a pledge which had already been just fine without it for 60 years. Still more of us wonder why anyone recites the pledge at all, or ever did. The truth is the pledge of allegiance might be the greatest and most powerful piece of propaganda ever used on the American people. It is the poster child for political propaganda. It originally appeared in a children’s magazine. That’s genius. Any propagandist worth his salt knows that kids are more impressionable than adults. So we teach our children to recite a pledge of blind and unwavering loyalty to a thin metaphor for a government which they do not understand, and in which they are unable to participate. We still compel our children to recite this pledge in schools, decades after the Supreme Court ruled the practice unconstitutional. Nothing teaches freedom quite like forcing kids to pledge allegiance to a flag representing the country whose highest court declared that they could not be forced to pledge allegiance. 

   

It’s no wonder the “In God We Trust” people wanted to get hold of the pledge when they did. In 1954 the pledge was wildly popular. After having been an informal tradition for half a century, the previous decade had seen the pledge adopted by Congress and taken up in the highest court of the land. So it is no surprise that Congress voted to add “under God” to the pledge, thereby igniting a new controversy. That action has managed to keep a simple mantra first published in a children’s magazine in the conscious minds of almost all Americans for another 60 years. Everyone has an opinion on it. Now that’s successful propaganda. 

If we really want to see through these things we must assume that our own government is not any different from any other government. Any time we see insane propaganda from a foreign land and wonder how those people can believe that shit, we should automatically assume that our government is feeding us a similar meal.

But then, that sounds like a lot of work. It’s easier to just believe what I am told. I’m glad I don’t live in a country where people believe crazy lies. I wonder what’s on TV tonight.