Northward Midget

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  • Casino Royale With Cheese

    This post is about my first visit to a casino.

    I wish I’d done one about the strip club, but that’s faded into a dim I cannot properly recall except for the unexpected sadness of beautiful young women collecting crumpled dollars from a glowing glass floor.  Subsequent visits made me realize it’s not as sad as the visual.  Life, as cinema, has its actors, and the star of a tragic film is not necessarily a tragic person.

    But this is about casinos.  This is my first, so perfectly apt, impression of the Seneca Niagara Casino in Niagara Falls, New York:

    Thank you for smoking.
    Thank you for smoking.

    Actually, the first impression was walking toward the bathroom past displays of ultra-expensive baubles branded with names unknown to me, and thinking of what a perfect set-up they’ve got.  It’s not likely, but if you do win a bundle, you walk out, and the lady you’re with (or the “lady” you are) decides she absolutely must have one of these trinkets of prestige, and there goes your jackpot.

    The second impression was seeing an ATM and wondering if the fees were as high as the strip-clubs, and for the same reasons.  Together, those impressions are just a reinforcement of what I assumed: that this is a well-crafted island of consumer exploitation.

    The toilet picture is there because it’s just so poetic.  I was rushing into the bathroom because I’d been sweating during the tour my special lady friend and I had made on foot down amongst the Falls park.  It’s also the only pic– well, I’ll give you this one, too, because it’s just so fucking cool:

     

    TESLA! CASH! me.

    But this isn’t about my day as a local tourist revisiting for the countless time what is to American what the Pyramids are to Egypt, and the East Coast equivalent of the Grand Canyon — but with water.   It’s not about seeing an obese family and a son sporting a mohawk and an MMA shirt causing me to burst into “Ain’t That America”.   It’s not about the black squirrels that are ruining the neighborhood.  It’s not about wondering whether or not it’s racist of me to think all Asians just wander aimlessly without any regard for those around them as they try to take that perfect shot of a mailbox.

    It’s about CASINOS.

    Before we left, I printed out the Wikipedia entry on Blackjack, primarily so I’d know the proper hand signals.  Turns out they’re fairly intuitive: tap the table or make two “gimme” curling fingers to hit, flat horizontal back-and-forth to stay, and some others.  I won’t go into the others, or any strategies, because it turns out it didn’t matter.   I hadn’t planned to count cards or beat the house– I just wanted to have a fun.  I had a wild whim to follow the advice the titular  Philip Baker Hall character from “Sydney” (AKA “Hard Eight”) gives to  John C. Reilly, but that still makes about as much sense to me as the end of “Trading Places”.

    Practically, it doesn’t matter because the table minimum — the minimum bet you can make on a hand — was $25.  I wasn’t gonna risk blowing my wad on a couple hands.

    Therefore, this will not be so much about gambling in casinos (except for penny slots), but about the experience, what to expect, and how to avoid appearing to be the newbie you most definitely are.

    There are a shitload of slot machines.  Rooms full.  You turn a corner, and there are a thousand more, and a room full of Thai businessmen playing Baccarat.   But all these slots, they’re running a total of maybe a half-dozen programs, just colored with different themes.

    Most do not have levers.  This was disappointing.

    You pay by slipping in fives, tens, twenties, or higher bills — just like a snack or drink machine.  Chips are for the tables, and I didn’t play the tables.

    At this particular casino, you get a “Players Card”.  It comes with a $10 credit you can spend, but you can’t cash it out.  It’s for spending on the machines.  Oh, and coins don’t spill out when you win, and you don’t feed them into the machines.  You press a “Get Ticket/Cash Out” button and get a slip of paper you put into another machine that dispenses American cash.

    The “Service” button on the slots doesn’t indicate that you want a drink.  It means the machine isn’t working and you need some help.  We figured this out (and my lady had been there before, many times) after waiting at least an hour for a “drink girl” to come by.  I wanted these vaunted free drinks they give to ply you to spend more.  The human drink dispensers came by twice in the six-plus hours we were there.  That was my disappointment.

    Anyway, I kept slapping that “Service” button because I wanted a drink.  A light atop the machine would go on for a bit, and I thought that indicated to the servers that you would like a refreshing alcoholic beverage.  Well, about an hour after we’d started pressing it, two guys in suits come over and say, “We noticed you pressing the button a lot– is there a problem with the machine?”  And I honestly answered, “No, I thought that’s how we let you guys know we wanted a drink.”

    They weren’t upset.  They said they’d tell the girl to stop by on her next time around.

    They didn’t, and she didn’t.  Must’ve been because we were in a sparse penny-slot section.  Maybe the nickel or quarter slots get more drinks.

     

     

     

     

  • Dusk Of Defiance

    The narrative catalyst that brought about the ultimate physical separation of my wife from myself — when she texted me from Rochester threatening to never bring the children back unless I vacated our rental home — was a story I wrote about a character in a Star Wars role-playing game I’d started playing on the advice of my therapist.  To start doing some of my “own” things.

    Apparently, to her,  it resembled too closely our real family, and she took offense, or was frightened, or merely offended or annoyed, but, in any case– we are not “we” any longer, nor ever shall be again.

    I admit I was a bit of a mess becoming messier when this bomb was dropped, but in the past half-year, I’ve cleaned up.  I’m with a good woman.  I’m not as impulsive and reckless as some might say I had been.  Not as many entertaining stories, but then, I don’t live to amuse “you”, eh?

    In the course of becoming a better person who is always a worse person when tomorrow’s version glances back at him, my “free” time has diminished, and I’ve left that group of role-players.  That group of fellow Star Wars geeks are closer friends to me than nearly any of the others in my orbit who hold that title.   When my wif– when I was involuntarily placed into a mental hospital, all but one of the non-family callers were part of that group.

    As such, they deserved more than an unexplained cessation of my semi-monthly visits.   Here it is, reposted from its permanent location within our campaign files at Obsidian Portal.

    My character is (was) Kelyn Langolier.   When we meet him, he’s a smuggler.  A scoundrel.   His father killed himself when Kelyn was on the cusp of adolescence, willing him The Spelljammer — a modified starship with a weird and ancient engine that was stolen by a group of  Trandoshan slavers.

    As an adult, while Kelyn was off-world working as a legitimate “Space Trucker”, his wife turned up the gas and went to bed with their two daughters.  None of them woke up.

    Or so he thought.

    Due to some dark pedigree of Force-sensitivity unbeknownst to Kelyn, the Imperial Inquisitors orchestrated the murder of Kelyn’s wife, but left clones in place of his abducted daughters, making it appear to be a murder-suicide resulting from the depression of a wife left behind once too often by a trucker trying to make ends meet.

    Kelyn’s daughters — Adria and Bella — were tutored by Grand Inquisitor Draco as Sith “witches”.  Kelyn turned to smuggling, then stumbled upon the “Dawn of Defiance” — the period between “Revenge of the Sith” and “A New Hope” wherein Senator Bail Organa is funding the nascent rebellion against the growing Empire.  Eventually, he recovered his birthright starship, and his companions redeemed and returned his daughters to him.

    If you’re a fellow Star Wars geek, you’ll love it.  I hope.  If you’re not, you might still like it.  If you’re my please-soon-to-be-ex-wife, you’ll probably think it’s more about real life than it is.

    In any case, here it be: a future-long-time-ago shock that will shit you up.  Enjoy.

    Well, I say “Enjoy.”

     

    (more…)

  • Bullets For the Curious

    No time right now for a detailed update, so here’s a few of the highlights since my last major life update back near November of 2012.

    0x01: Met a wonderful woman at work.  She wore a poncho one day.  I said, “It’s impossible to be unhappy wearing a poncho.”  It’s a Mighty Boosh reference.   Next day she left an orange juice bottle on my desk wearing a little poncho.  We are still together, despite my sometimes difficult personality.  She’s the best female I’ve ever had in my life, with the exception of the one who brought me into the world and the ones I brought here.

    0x02: Started “vaping”, as per the penultimate (as of this writing) “Digital/Analog Freaky Smoke” entry.  I’ve got 90% lung capacity now. Pretty good for smoking raw zware tobacco for two decades.  No more wheezing at the end of a long exhalation, and no more of that stench you only notice when you stop smoking.

    0x03: Shaved my head.  Kept the goatee and mustache.  Without facial hair, a man ain’t a man.  A bald man without facial hair is demoted all the way to a baby.  Grew the hair back.  Shaved it again, and the current HEAD is bald with beard.

    0x04: Contact with the girls has continued at $50 a week for a two-hour supervised visit.  I contend that the $200 would be better spent directly on the children who want free access to their father.  My opinions do not matter to anyone who makes decisions about my participation in my family.  Namely: lawyers, this police state of ours, and a woman apparently scorned.

    0x05: Continue to see Dr Gandalf.  In March we were both surprised to realize it had been a year since my involuntary hospitalization at the Erie County Medical Centre.  We’ve made a lot of progress.  I’ve made a lot of progress, mostly credited to my new special lady friend.  Needless to say, grieving the loss of ones family is “difficult” — even if that loss is (mostly) figurative.  Maybe worse in this case, since my daughters aren’t “gone” from the world, but simply being kept from me.  They’re not silent in their graves– they live and cry and need their father, yet are restricted to a few hours a month of closely supervised visits that preclude so much as a whisper between us.

    0x06: My oldest daughter turns ten soon.  I’ve missed over a year of the last years of her childhood.  Girl?  She’ll be a woman soon.

    Orders of protection are generally classified as either “stay-away” or “refrain-from”.  The former specifies that a party (the “respondent”) avoid all contact with another party (the “petitioner”) and perhaps other associated parties, such as children under the petitioner’s care.   The latter simply requires the respondent to refrain from some specific behavior.

    If the petitioner is in a state of desperation or urgency (e.g. being contacted by an exish-spouse with undue frequency and in states of inebriation and/or otherwise being a nuisance),  s/he may not know or (understandably) care to learn the difference between these two types of orders.  S/he may ask that the respondent be denied any communication with or access to his or herself and their children.  S/he may have felt this was his or her only recourse, and, if s/he is a “she”, the petition will likely be stamped by a “family” court judge without consideration and “he” will be denied his right to be an active and available father.

    The more you know...
    The more you know…

    If such a bureaucratic miscalculation is made, the petitioner may request that the order be vacated by the  issuing judge of the original or a subsequently amended version of the order.

    If the petitioner still fears some manner of harassment from the respondent, s/he may request the aforementioned “refrain-from” order which, if granted, would result in the arrest of the respondent for contempt of court should s/he “misbehave”.  In cases that do not involve violence, a “refrain-from” order is logically the best and fairest choice.   And, from the perspective of the petitioner, it puts even greater pressure on the respondent to modify his or her behavior, as s/he is still allowed to communicate with the petitioner, but if the petitioner construes any such communication as harassing or otherwise in violation of the order, s/he may call the authorities and have the respondent immediately arrested.

    In the author’s opinion, such risk is worth being allowed access to his or her children.

    Furthermore, assuming those children are in no danger from the respondent and were not exposed to the alleged harassment, a single-party refrain-from order is a more fair and just recourse for a petitioner who may have a legitimate reason to limit their communication and feels compelled to seek legal intervention in the matter.

    0x07: I’m on Wellbutrin ER 300mg/day, Adderall ER 60mg/day, Klonopin 0.5mg/6h as needed, and some residual Provigil.  The Provigil (presumably in conjunction w/the Adderall) gives me the anxiety somethin’ fierce, so it’s rarely used.

    0x08: The divorce continues to crawl along.  An agreement was made that if a professional evaluated me as suitable for unsupervised visitation, it would be done.  The evaluation was made.  It hasn’t been done.  The next court date is in a week.  It will probably be postponed.  Again.

    0x09: Complicating the divorce issues, my place of work shut down last month.  I immediately notified my lawyer of this.  I promptly applied for state assistance, and for a modification of the support order.  Because speaking with the mother of my children would mean my going to jail, I was unable to freely communicate regarding any issues of financial needs.  My modification petition was a blunt request for a “suspension”, since NYS unemployment insurance (“UI”) would barely cover my rent and bare essentials– not counting food as an essential.

    0x0A: Got a job about two weeks later, mostly thanks to a good friend from the old place.  Received a total of one UI check for about $300.  Attended the scheduled support modification hearing after filling out another dozen pages of financial details.  Opposing counsel requested it be rolled into the matrimonial proceedings.  I don’t know what my obligations are now.  My communications with anyone in this debacle has been unreliable, sporadic, downright refused, punished with jail time, costly, necessarily vague, rarely understood or fully addressed– it’s been shite, o my brothers.

    That just about brings y’all up to date.  I suppose I didn’t have to put it in bullet-list form, but I didn’t want to change the title.

    The past year and a half has been, mostly, some kind of a special Hell.   A relationship with a woman triggered it, and a relationship with a better woman has helped turn things around.   In any case, I’m a better man than I was last year.

    If we can’t say, every day, that we’re better than the other-self behind us in the clone-queue of our life, then we might as well be dead.