Coping: With a Perfect Monday

(Canyonville, OR) —  The long visit with kids and friends in Seattle was too short.  We didn’t get to see everyone we wanted to (apologies to Dr. Rob and Syl) but there was too little time and too much family to squeeze everything in.

This morning, the dawn’s early light catches up in Canyonville Oregon, or more specifically, the Seven Feathers Casino which is one of my favorite places to visit.

A few of my friends wonder “Do you have a gambling problem?”

No…we all do.  We get born and that’s dealt from a (perhaps karmically) stacked deck.  Then there is the luck of the breaks that can run anything from a mobility-ending accident tgo a bad go in the military where the outcome range is PTSD to dead…so we celebrate any time out of the pine box we can

The reason we drift from Casino to casino is simple:  The Casino industry does a better job as hoteliers than the hotel (plain/vanilla) does.  When you check into a good casino, the rooms are great and the staff is warm and friendly.

Take here, for example.  A worker mentioned that he knew of Mazatzal casino in Arizona by name, but he would look into it for his next visit to the Valley of the Sun.  He gets down there every year, or two, for Spring Training.

And that gets me to the first point of the day:  If you ever have a chance to read a book by Studs Terkel called Working, do so.  I have admired Terkel forever because he’s one hell of a fine writer and believed (as do I) that everyone has a good story to tell.  It just takes someone to listen.

Take this outstanding human who has been a worker here for 15-years.

Now,  some people might not see that as a fine and honorable career, but don’t let this stereotyped “lesser” jobs as less than they are.  For example, the worker has a lifetime goal of seeing every Major League term in America play on their home field.

He’s on the home stretch now..,.but it has taken him – and his wife who is also a fan – 15 years to get this far.

Raised in L.A. he was a Dodgers fan for the longest while, but after moving to the Northwest, the Mariners became his adopted team.  He’s not particularly impressed with the Bay Area teams, which are a bit closer.

His wife surprised him last year with a trip to Boston and a couple of games at Fenway park.

For a few minutes before (work called) getting back on pending tasks, we pondered some of the greater mysteries of the Universe.

Like:  Why does a hot dog always taste 200% better – no matter what I try at home – when you’re sitting just up from first base maybe 20 rows and are holding two dogs and a beer?

Ah…the point.  No matter who you are, or what your station in life, there is a magic of having goals.

And our hats off the this fine gentleman from Canyonville, Oregon,  who has a good life and who has well-defined achievable and shared goals with his wife.

While I can’t get Elaine into a baseball park without a promise of diamonds, there is a magic of camaraderie with a spouse.  Whether it comes from shared baseball adventures, long driving vacation trips to see the Country up close, or whether it comes from negotiating  the final touches on the kitchen remodel, or rec room, it’s the stuff of which a happy life is made.

They all seem to have teamwork and our spouses involved and happen ,mostly on weekends. 

Damn shame we can’t live that way, everywhere on earth, seven days a week instead of one or two….

Car Talk

As we were zooming down I –5 about the 10th Honda Accord passed us.  Prompting us to wonder “Is the right class reference to Accord drivers “Accordions?”

U.SD. Department of Woo:  Dream Tuning

Say…I’m going to compress a whole bunch of thinking into a very short series of bullet points, but see if this makes sense and you can follow along:

• People’s dreams are likely influenced by the vitamins and foods they eat.
• That said, perhaps the effects of changes in diet take a while longer than is commonly thought.
• Since we are in a casino, we know that our mindset toward play MAY influence the arrival of luck.
• But are there types of luck that are influenced by the past several days of eating?
• And if YES, then is it worth doing ,MEAL LOGGING in order to determine a) what meal/food sequencing brings about ty he richest personal dreamscapes and b) are elements of Luck also attracted or repelled by our bodily intake…so of like Crystals resonate…might Luck have a resonance…or dreams?

On the way here, we pondered this a good bit and have designed yet-another crackpot series of casino experiments to test our simple notion.  Which is…

The “science” and “business” part of the George-brain understands that probability follows standard distributions, such as Gaussian and so forth.

HOWEVER this all assumes that we consider probability from a mechanistic/calculable perspective.

The “wild thought” to chase is whether there is an “orthogonal viewpoint” under which a “normal distribution” isn’t more predictable than our limited understanding of math would lead us to believe?

With this in mind, we have written down a long list of “perspective modifying” mental conditions which we tests last night.

Normal still seems to work, but perhaps one day…meantime, have an august Monday.

Write when you get rich,

George@ure.net