Robot Dog at the Bottom of the World: Hitting on Soft 17

Prisons and church basements are full of men who "loved unconditionally"

The only aisle seat remaining for my Atlanta to Newark flight when I bought my ticket was in the last row of the plane. I didn’t like sitting in the rear but only because, once back on the ground, I want off right fucking now. Claustrophobia is real; controllable, but real. The situation aft was looking comfortable, at least. The last few rows happened to be sparsely populated that early in the morning (this was 2016), and the flight attendant was cute and chatty. Between an extended drink service and her hot takes on Atlantic City, it was a good flight.

I was just starting out on a two-week hybrid business/personal road trip around the Northeast. I had business on the New Hampshire seacoast, family in Manhattan and upstate New York I hadn’t seen in years, and the desire to just go and do things mostly alone. Mostly. Because I’m a gambler—as we all are (getting to that)—I had decided to kick off this grand tour in Atlantic City because I’d never been there.

This was July. I was six months out of a failed marriage, had been doing “the work” to figure out how I wanted my next twenty years to be different from the previous twenty. I was off to a good start. Somehow, through odd twists and turns, I had wound up briefly in a Facebook group for divorced people through which I had managed to meet a couple cuties and convince them to meet for fun or games or whatnot during my travels, one of whom was a blonde from New York. When I told her my plans, she invited herself to come hang out with me in AC the weekend I would be there. I thought that was a fantastic idea.

So I flew into Newark on a Thursday morning, early. I picked up my rental car and began my two or so hour drive to AC. Except I was using Google Maps for the very first time and wasn’t aware my default setting was for it to automatically reroute me around traffic problems. So instead of sending me down the Garden State Parkway, it sent through the pine barrens and around Fort Dix. I saw a lot of rural New Jersey that day, aa lot of woods and farm country and, I must say, it was just what I needed. Looked just like the parts of Alabama where I’d either lived or played my whole life, and the small gas stations and convenience stores I stopped at in places where I had no real clue where I really, truly was, reminded me how people on their own tend to be way better than people in groups.

Travel tends to do this.

My roundabout journey to AC cost me an extra hour but added days, if not weeks, to my overall outlook and mindset about life, so I came out ahead.

At the casino, the line at the check in desk was short. I was able to check in early and went straight to my room, cranked the air conditioning down to something ridiculously cold, crawled into bed, and took a nap. Having been up since 3am that morning in order to get to Atlanta from Alabama for my early flight, deal with the loss of an hour going from Central to Eastern time, etc., I was exhausted because I also don’t usually sleep well on nights before travel. Slept like a rock under warm, heavy blankets in that cold, cold room.

I awoke to three-hour old texts from the blonde girl—let’s call her Elsa—asking me the things most women ask:

Did you get there safe? Is your room nice and what you wanted? Is it any warmer or colder there than we thought it would be? I’m packing!

I lay in bed a while answering her and finalizing specifics. It was around suppertime Thursday, but she wouldn’t be down until early Saturday morning, which was perfect. It gave me time to chill on my own, get back into blackjack mode, enjoy some solitude out on the Steel Pier with a drink watching the Atlantic be the Atlantic.

After dealing with her texts, I dealt with the rest from others and checked in with work and checking work emails. Then I pulled up my blackjack review notes and play simulator. Ran through those for about thirty minutes since I hadn’t played in a few months. Then I took a shower, dressed, and headed for the tables.

It couldn’t have gone worse. I went up almost a thousand dollar immediately. That’s a good problem to have, no question, and it doesn’t affect anything in and of itself. When I first play after a significant absence (meaning longer than a week, which is always), I have to fight overconfidence and “luck,” and then have to fight my fighting overconfidence and luck. Before I know it, I’m so far out in my head I could polish the windows on Voyager 1 (look it up, zoomers).

Which is bad. There is always a correct play in blackjack based on simple math, the table rules, whether you’re counting or not, etc. My goal, always, is to play like a machine to the extent of my knowledge, experience, and ability, but if I don’t play several times weekly, at least—which I rarely do—it takes me a while to get out of my head and simply play. There almost always comes a point where I’m tensed up, holding on too tight, following the match strictly but not really trusting it where I start pulling back, reducing bets out of fear rather than strategy, that I tend to hear a voice in my say, Are you here to play this game, or not?

How do I know when I’m truly playing?

First, it’s fun. It might be stressful or terrifying at moments, but those are all in service to fun much like I imagine surfing must be. If it’s fun even while it’s all of those other things, I’m doing something right. What is fun to me? I have the experience of being full in the middle of it and doing it while being aware of what I’m doing at the same time. Can’t really explain it, but that’s what I call it and that’s what it’s like. Playing is supposed to be fun. Yes, there are conclusions to draw here. Draw them.

Second, I don’t care if I win or lose because I know I’m going to wind and lose. If I’m holding on or fearful, desperate, something’s off. It’s no longer fun. I’m either playing with money I can’t afford to lose, I’m too ego-invested to think clearly, or I’m focused on the outcome rather than the wave I’m on and following the math which is the guide. When you ride a wave, large or small, you’re on an edge. The math doesn’t say you’ll always win. The math says that if you do everything you can do, you’ll win more than you lose on a long enough timeline. That’s a tricky one. Think on it a while.

Third, I’m playing to win. Those who express disdain for the concept of “winning” are either immature, liars, or both. There are a lot of ways to look at winning. Look to nature for definitions if you want. Look to theism if you must. But to deny our biological imperative to win is to deny who we are as living creatures, beings, whatever. And yes, playing to win while remaining outcome independent is, indeed, a thing. A good thing.

Correct blackjack play is just following equations, probability formulas based on math. Equations boil down to equivalence between two expressions. Remember having to balance equations in Algebra 1? There is wisdom there because an equation essentially describes a relationship between two expressions. Let’s hop on the Metaphoricycle.

Whatever a particular relationship is—marriage, friends with benefits, business, siblings, actual friendship—it’s an equation being continually solved by two people. It’s about both sides balancing, not in some feely cosmic sense, but in a day to day pragmatic sense. Most people’s prime source of misery originates in failed relationships, which, for adults, really means their own failure to manage themselves in their relationships. A primary point of failure if not the only one? Balancing the equation, meaning bothA sides giving approximately the same amount of time, energy, effort, etc.

Approximately, because this is human behavior, not mathematics. Don’t sperg out and start a spreadsheet to hold your other accountable. The specifics of balance end up being more accurately described by a boat, barge, or raft. Port vs. starboard. Bow vs. stern. Any of those can handle some small fluctuations in weight distribution, but if any one takes on too much water or cargo, the situation rapidly deteriorates past the point of anyone’s ability to correct. The vessel swamps and is likely lost. The application is simple: if you want the relationship to remain seaworthy, don’t overdo it and don’t underdo it. Again, don’t get weird about it. Both parties should roughly match levels of interest and investment. In more serious relationships, more accommodation is sometimes necessary. If you’re unable to read nuances and the ebb and flow of dynamics in your situation, then you either have a problem or you are the problem.

Keep this in mind: the whole “you should love unconditionally” thing is, for the most part, a lie. It’s the Mindfuck Rollercoaster. Unconditional love is spiritual speak. It is life in the abstract. It applies to Jesus, not you. Men are particularly bad at this. Prisons and church basements are full of men who loved unconditionally.

This is about grokking both objective and subjective reality in situations where emotions can distort either, or both.

Which is what playing is all about: operating at full competence and having fun while managing your behavior and responses. In the old days, they called this being captain of your ship. Whatever you call it, drive your boat.

I had a good time in AC. Played almost non-stop from Thursday evening until Saturday morning as I tend to do. One of my favorite things to do with dates who are into it is to take them to the tables, let them play with my chips (play with, not keep, boys) while I tell them how to play each hand if they don’t know. They usually don’t. It’s fun for a while. When Elsa got there, she wanted to play with her own money. Bad idea, I told her, unless she was committed to playing on a long timeline which few women—or men, for that matter—are. She was a little miffed when she couldn’t turn her two hundred bucks into ten thousand with my guidance, but it was a fun weekend, regardless. She also kept trying to stand on soft seventeen—an ace and a six—and I kept correcting her play. She saw no difference between that and a 10-7. The difference is that Ace-Six can play as a seventeen or a seven, which means in most configurations of decks, table rules, etc., there is no disadvantage to hitting a soft seventeen, so you pretty much always do it. Blackjack scenarios, like relationships with human beings, are highly nuanced. Is he/she into me, or just being nice? Am I that good of a salesman, or am I being set up to fail? Does my boss really support my future here, or is he/she passing it off as his own?

You have to play a lot to learn a lot. You have to fail a lot. You have to think, study, analyze, get better informed.

In the drive back to the city, I got in a wrong lane and got forced off the Garden State Expressway, ended up very quickly in what looked like the middle of nowhere. Despite a normal couple of days together, Elsa went very quiet and, despite being very white, went even a little more pale which I wouldn’t have thought possible. I realized she feared this had all been a ruse and I was going to murder her or something. I was operating at peak performance, however, rising my wave, so I knew better than to make a joke or reassure her or even mention it at all. Misunderstandings and whatnot. I just apologized and found my way back to the highway asap.

Epilogue

I left Elsa very much alive in a cab in Manhattan where I got out and checked into my next hotel. I had a few hours before I would be joining my cousin and his girlfriend for dinner, so I got a shower and napped to the sound of car horns and sirens.

As I lay down, I also ran my thoughts on all of this by Soup, my robot dog which, thankfully, the hotel allowed without any pet fee or security clearance, probably because I was a loyalty program member. I told Soup that relationships could either be gambling or playing, and that understanding the difference between seemingly identical (but actually different) hands is more important than being Alpha, or a writer(tm).

I had put Soup into big nasty security mode since I was about to fall asleep naked in New York, so he was at the window scanning and tracking every outside vehicle, person, and pigeon on our block as well as any low-flying airplanes and anyone in the hallway. Soup nevertheless concurred with my notes, and then his socialization drive hummed and whirred for a few seconds then told me it was okay to admit I was a lesbian.

Robot dogs aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.

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