Has it really bean eleven days since my last post? I’m sorry to have neglected you for so long, but every spare moment seems to have been spoken for as of late. The Elder Experiment in particular is proving to be a major consumer of free time. I have played 2,655 hands so far, which has taken me over forty hours.
I have also been reading a lot lately - both about poker (Gus Hansen’s Every Hand Revealed - which I will review in my next post) and poetry. Yes, poetry. What’s up with that? A poem by Richard Wilbur keeps coming back to me as I tally up my results from the hours at the virtual felt:
A Measuring Worm
This yellow-stripped green
Caterpillar, climbing up
The steep window screen,
Constantly (for lack
Of a full set of legs) keeps
Humping up his back.
It’s as if he sent
By a sort of semaphore
Dark omegas meant
To warn of Last Things.
Although he doesn’t know it,
He soon will have wings,
And I too don’t know
Toward what undreamt condition
Inch by inch I go.
That pretty much sums up how I feel about the Elder Experiment and about poker in general or life in general for that matter. I find it helps to keep this in mind when I feel like saying to hell with it and quitting. It would be pretty to stupid to fall off the window screen now, when someday you might have wings to fly away.
Wow, who would have thought it? Mott reading poetry! If you don't watch out you're going to get well rounded.
ReplyDeleteYes, poetry. Richard Wilbur and Billy Collins and X.J. Kennedy and our own Rosemary Griebel, who wrote:
ReplyDeleteBecause we love most
the things we lose,
there is a recklessness.
It's why a man swims a deep river,
and why he confuses fire with light.
Which applies to poker in particular as to life in general. I try to understand my motivations and differentiate between truth and wishful thinking. I try but do not always suceed.