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09.23.08
Success Launches A Thousand Blog Posts
posted by Absinthe | 11:39 PM
Failure, meanwhile, lets things percolate for a while, wondering incessantly about what could have been done differently. Turns out, not a lot.
So I had a crap month at the Bike, only cashing once while coming within a coinflip of the money half a dozen times, and suffering a crushing suckout deep in the last event (I’d have had almost ten percent of the chips in play with four tables left) just to rub it in a little. Not the sort of results that drive heavy posting, though there’s a fairly thoughtful one in the offing.
Anyway. Crap month. But I’m feeling slightly bemused that, terrible though I might have been running, our 401K probably took a bigger hit than I did. Our accountant once asked me why I didn’t play the stock market, and I wasn’t able to come up with an an answer any more eloquent than “Are you fucking crazy?”
The prospective collapse of the economy and civilization as we know it (here’s some entertainingly alarmist work on the subject, to be taken with a number of grains of salt between 0 and 1 to your taste) has me feeling a little more expansive. I believe that money is a social good - it only means what we all agree it means - and it naturally makes me edgy when I read about people going way off the reservation. Combine that with the fact that we are houseless, in no small part due to high prices in an insane market that it turns out was largely driven by exotic and unregulated financial instruments, and I’m a little bitter about the twin prospects of a) bailing out the greedheads who got us into this mess and b) also going out of pocket for the people living in the houses we didn’t buy because we were smart enough not to. (Probably I’d be less bitter if I’d had a better month.) Yeah, in the end I’ll suck it up and pay, but I want a damn stake in things now, and you should too.
This isn’t a proverb that I know of, so this may be phrase-coinage: If you insist on building castles in the sky, don’t act so surprised when it starts raining fucking bricks.
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Topics: Poker, Random Thoughts, The New Math |
September 24, 2008 at 6:52 AM
Sorry to hear about your bad run at the bike. We all know that poker sucks until one wins, so there you go.
I like your sky-castle quip! I expect to hear it from Suzy Orman or Mad-dog money guy sometime soon. If you are lucky maybe you’ll even get Bill O’Reilly to offer it up as a piece of wisdom.