Tag Archives: poker

Eights and Aces

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Posted by on in Assistance, collaborating, distraction issues, impediments, Inspiration, Matters of Faith, Personal goals, Personal Values, service, Social, Spiritual, Striving, Travel

August 8, 2024- The number eight was in serial mode, in a few places today. I went off towards breakfast at 8:18 and this evening, when I pulled out of the carport, the odometer read 808080. Of course, this is the eighth day of the eighth month and the digits of 2024 add up to the number 8. It is a lucky, powerful number-except for Wild Bill Hickok, when he held that infamous hand.

Eight requires its holder to take informed action, which may have been why Sheriff Hickok took a bullet, as he allegedly was sitting with his back to the saloon door. Awareness of surroundings, now, as then, is the only way one can confidently move forward-whether on one’s feet, or sitting.

For me, today was a day to set a definite agenda for the final 4.5 months of 2024, knowing that the biggest item on the list will very likely have implications for the rest of my earthly life. Every atom of the Universe seems to be telling me to head for the Philippines next month, with full confidence. The last time I got such a strong message, I found myself alongside the woman who helped me get rid of a fair amount of personal baggage and embrace the Faith of Baha’ullah.

So the rest of August will see several faith-based gatherings, medical check-ups, Tagalog lessons (online) and a renewed fitness push. September and October will start and end with service activities here at HB I, but will mostly be across the Pacific, with similar service activities and building friendships. November and December will find me back in Arizona, with the focus largely dependent on what happens across the ocean.

I know one thing: The right thing will happen. I will be in a good place, come January 1, 2025. I will not sit with my back to the door, gamble or no gamble.

Soft Landings

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Posted by on in Assistance, collaborating, Community, Entertainment, impediments, Inner Struggles, Inspiration, Personal goals, Personal Values, Social, Spiritual, Striving

December 4, 2022- This will go down in history as the first time I won at “Candyland”, since 1959. The other players then were my sister, younger brother and a neighbour kid. Today, there were a friend up the road and two of her young neighbours. “Candyland”, the game, but not the fictional plantation in Tarantino’s “Django Unchained”, is the stuff of soft landings. Kids of any age can win or lose, because there is no strategy, no give and take-just pure dice rolling and advance or retreat, as the card pulled says to do. Of course, whoever shuffles the cards can pull a fast one, but why bother? Texas Hold ’em, it isn’t.

Speaking of poker, I haven’t played the game since 1974, before the heyday of Texas Hold’em. Back then, we preferred Seven Card Stud, and my own skills in the game were hit and miss. The particular logic of poker is often the sort of winner takes all thinking that routinely stoked anger in some of my friends at the time, with ridicule coming from those well-versed in ante-based card games in general, and Seven Card Stud in particular. Three guesses, as to how anger inter-playing with ridicule turned out. Poker is not the stuff of soft landings.

Some people see romance as a game of hit and miss. That is missing the point, both about love and about gamesmanship. A game, in the classical sense, has winners and losers. Love, in the true sense, has only winners. Of course, if romance-or any other by-product of love, becomes viewed as needful, then naturally there is a sense of loss. I have been in that state of mind, several times. Now, after an intense, but basically sound, marriage that physically ended nearly twelve years ago, and an equally intense, occasionally tortuous, effort to shed stored old pre-marital baggage regarding friendships with women, I have made the soft landing. Friendships with both men and women occupy two levels: A large number of people who I care about, but don’t see in the flesh all that often and a core group of people who I see on a regular basis. There is a third group, of 2-3 women, who are my closest confidantes, rating with my middle brother and my son, in that regard.

It is a world that some see as getting worse, a harder place in which to live. I don’t have their woes, but have come close at times. The parachute of the social network helps greatly, in lowering the impact, in softening the landing.