Cone on February, Get a Move On

Got beaten up a bit at the poker tables yesterday but I was overdue a beating. I'm still adjusting to playing 6 max 5/10 tables, as far as loosening up my starting hand requirements and pushing harder with decent but not great hands. All is well and good and happy and shiny when you're getting strong starters and they hold up, but if you're getting crap hand after crap hand sometimes you have to create your own action, lest the blinds eat you alive. Elementary lesson, I know, and one that's easy to learn at 1/2 tables, but a bit harder for me to implement in the real world when sitting at 5/10 tables, when that semi-bluff check-raise suddenly costs 20 bones.

Part of me is tempted to shut it down for the month and just savor the winning month that January was. I've knocked out all the Crypto bonuses, the Party reloads, Empire reload, etc. I've mostly wiped out all the good sticky casino bonuses left to do and hit the decent monthly casino bonuses. It's been a really good month. Woot.

I've been reading the James Gleick biography of Isaac Newton, which is pretty dang interesting. Cats like Newton are intriguing, as far as the lengths that some genius-types go to explore whatever field they're involved in. Especially when it's apparently not even really a conscious decision, ultimately, to sacrifice everything, to lock oneself in a room for years, to insert bodkins in one's eye to explore the effects it has on one's vision, etc. It's just what they do, what consumes them.

When I was in grad school a friend and I had a running mock-debate, usually brought up while drinking, about the possible artistic value in going to jail for a decent amount of time. When you got out, you'd have that cool cachet of being a "real" writer (or sculptor/painer/whatever), making anything you did inherently more publishable, especially in snooty, brandy-swilling circuits, who'd love to slum a bit and publish some gritty, hungry author with jailhouse tattoos. Plus you'd have all that time, with absolutely no distractions, to just sit there and write. No wife, no girlfriend, no job, no bills. Just you and paper and nothing to do but fill it up.

(Obvious benefits aside, such talk always ceased when the real-world consideration of having to constantly guard one's cornhole in prison intruded. We never came up with a way to get around that roadblock.)

But that idea eventually morphed into plans (usually while drinking) to offer a similar writing retreat for wannabe writers, where they paid you a sum of money and, for one year, you provided them a place to live, provided sustenance, utilities, etc. Except you locked the door and would not let them out, no matter how much they begged, for one entire year. They'd be allowed no phone, no e-mail, no Internet, no communication tools with the outside world whatsoever. Just a room, a bed, food, a bathroom, and something to write on.

Yeah, I know, legal issues abound and this was always more drunk talk than anything. But it's an interesting idea, as far as how much some people would actually PAY to experience what is, in essence, a bare-bones environment that is really simple to produce, in theory. Yet basically impossible to achieve, in the complicated world we live in, with entanglements everywhere.