Middle of the Night

Hey Gang...

Sorry that I haven't posted much in the past couple of days, but I've been pretty bored lately. Not a whole lot going on around here, and since I'm scrimping and saving most every dime this month, my adventures are somewhat tame.

But I'm wide awake, sipping on a delicious rum concoction, and attempting to post something of interest to my handful of regular readers. My most influential composition teacher back in college always told me that if I was suffering from writers' block that I should just sit down and spend fifteen minutes writing about whatever mundane shiat pops into your head, and inspiration will eventually come. This is my attempt to do just that...

Oh, and those of you who may be tut-tutting about me enjoying a tall rum cocktail at 4 am on a Wednesday morning, remember that it's only 4 am on a Wednesday morning to the rest of the world, but it my world, it's Sunday afternoon. Brother Jimmy was absolutely right--it's five o'clock somewhere.

Last week damn near wore me out--I did five straight nights of dice dealing. It was quite an accomplishment, as I survived the first three nights without killing one of my fellow crewmembers--the most obnoxious and disgusting human being I have the displeasure to know, and I also survived eight hours dealing to "Hoppin' Bob"--probably the most difficult dice player that frequents our tables. Nice guy, easy to get along with, and a decent tipper, but after eight hours of him, you feel like you've been ten rounds with Mike Tyson.

The guy has a seemingly bottomless pocket of hundred-dollar bills that he gladly pisses away when he visits, and the words 'same bet' are nowhere to be found in his vocabulary. He keeps the stickman busy by having a half dozen prop bets going on every roll, along with pressing or changing every place bet after each toss of the dice. As soon as the dice land, he's rattling off instructions like a machine gun and tossing checks around the table like an old man at the deli trying to send back the soup sitting on a bench feeding the pigeons. Not so bad when he's alone, but on a full table it can get a little busy. I bent over to set up his bets at 6:00 pm and I swear I didn't stand up straight again until two in the morning... But as the boss said, eight hours of him is like spending a month dealing at any other table. It was good practice, although I certainly didn't enjoy doing it at the time.

Anyhow, five nights straight of dice dealing, especially with some of our regular players, has a tendency to suck the life out of you, so when I finally made it home early on Tuesday morning, I was exhausted, spending most of my day in bed recharging the batteries.

Before coming home, though, I went out with a few of my friends to drink a few beers and shoot some pool. Of course, I've never really enjoyed shooting pool that much, so I spent a little more time on the beer-drinking side of the equation. But since I was worn out and it was still about a hundred degrees outside at four in the morning, I couldn't decide if I wanted beer or just a bottle of water. So I found a happy medium and spent the morning sucking down a sixer of Michelob Ultra.

We had a great time drinking our free beers while gossiping and bitching about work. My lipstick-lesbian friend Candace brought up an excellent subject for discussion--What would our 'desert island' albums and dvds be if we could only pick three each. Regular readers know my first two album choices, but I couldn't decide on a third. I did learn however, that one of my buddy's favorite artists is David Allen Coe. I would've never suspected that, since he's such a clean-cut, preppy, Lexus-driving, married-to-a-cocktail-waitress father of two little girls.

After talking about music for awhile and moving onto favorite dvd's, the conversation pretty much devolved into four drunks standing around a pool table tossing out lines from Dazed & Confused. Good times!

Although this past week at work wore my ass out, it's been well worth it. Our daily toke amount has been going up significantly lately, in complete contrast to bigger Strip properties. The neon telegraph is a wonderfully efficient industry scuttlebutt provider, and last week when we were getting $165-$200 per day, word around the campfire was that places like the Venetian and Hard Rock, typically huge-toke jobs, had a few days where they didn't crack a hundy.

Heh.

I didn't go to poker school yesterday--the World Series started on Monday, and since I was unable to enter the first event like I'd been planning on for several months, I'm pretty ambivalent about the whole thing now. Besides, half of the guys I went to school with got jobs working the tournament, so if I went to class it would just be me and a bunch of newbies. I'll probably go back today, just for the practice, but again, any thoughts of a second job are on hold until this whole shift-bid thing works itself out at the end of next month.

As far as school goes, I'm pretty much finished. A couple of days of practice is all I need, then I'll need to re-do my final evaluation. Then it'll be 'officially' over. Of course, I never officially finished dice or blackjack school, but I was so tired of classes that I just quit going and went out and found a job. Just like college.

Besides school and work, I need something else to keep my brain from turning to mush, so I do a lot of reading. On my days off, I like to browse the bargain racks at the front of the store down at Barnes and Noble. Of course I pick up the latest sailing magazines, too, but my latest find was a 500-page masterpiece called W.C. Privy's Original Big Fat Bathroom Companion. Great summer reading, and you don't have to be in the smallest room in the house with your drawers around your ankles to enjoy it. On the more serious side, I got my hands on a paperback edition of Flags of Our Fathers, and I'm looking forward to digesting that over the next few days, too.

Mikey