A Mobius Strip Life

[jerrywear]

by TC

There were five of them, all probably under 21, all wearing their best Las-Vegas-out-on-the-town-slut-wear.

They walked towards him in a row, almost like they were the opening sequence for some new television action series.

Sure, new from the WB network this fall, Fox Force 5.

And they were all pretty. Real-life Bratz dolls. And each was wearing stiletto-heeled shoes so colorful they must have been candy-coated by the M&M people. Their dresses or skirts were CD cellophane-wrapper tight and they collectively showed yards of tanned, coltish leg.

Monday through Friday, he'll work at the café. Friday night after work, he'll hop the red eye to Vegas, get a cheap room, and play as many hours of poker as he can until he flies back on Sunday night. He'll let his employees run the store while he's away.

It's not exactly what he wanted to do, but it's not bad. He gets to keep the sure income stream in the café and he gets to see if he's cut out to play poker.

He's into the third week of his grand experiment but he's not sure he's on the right track. He's a little short of his poker goals, money-wise, and he's worried.

And that brings him to the front of the Bellagio, slipping a Slurpie and watching the living Bratz dolls. The girls get to within ten feet of him when one of them, unnoticed by the others, falls a step or two behind them. She tiptoes up behind a dark-haired one wearing a fuchsia tank dress and like a hockey goon, she pulls her friend's dress up over her head in one deft motion.

The others back off, hands over their mouths to stifle their shrieks of laughter while the victim of the prank starts screaming like Oprah had just given her a Toyota. She's clearly embarrassed but her embarrassment goes beyond the pale because, lordy, lordy, she's not wearing any underwear! Instead of thongs, Jason sees a dark bacon strip of pubic hair against the one part of her body that isn't tan.

To make things more embarrassing, the perpetrator of the prank has gathered up the material of the poor booty-exposed girl's frock over her head and she's gripped it tightly with her clenched fist like she's trying to prevent a weasel from getting out of a gunnysack.

And she won't let go.

The victim is thrashing around and flailing her arms like she's Frankenstein's monster and a villager just set her aflame with a torch.

The other girls don't even think of coming to her aid. They're in spasms; they can't breathe. In between their shrieks of laughter they yell at the girl in the gunnysack, "I can't believe you're not wearing any underwear!" "Why aren't you wearing any underwear!?!

After 10 or 15 seconds, the prankster lets go of the dress and the victim, red-faced but none the worse for wear, smooths herself out and regains her composure. Fox-Force 5 continues on their way in a halting, staggering, heads-back-laughing walk. And none of them paid any mind to Jason, who was clearly moved by this gift from the gods.

It's got nothing to do with Jason's dilemma, but suddenly he knows he's made the right decision. Fate just spoke to him through a flashing naked beaver.

So what if he's splitting duties? He's honing his craft, still operating the café, and God and Doyle Brunson willing, he'll make some extra money at the tables. Oh yeah, and for the first time in a long time, he's having some fun, all kinds of fun.

I tease him that he's Forrest Gump's girlfriend, Jenny. Forrest was on leave from the army and he'd heard that Jenny got a job in a theater. Now Jenny had told Forrest that her dream was to become a folk singer, so when he walks into the theater and sees Jenny sitting topless on stage while playing a guitar and singing a Dylan song, he's all choked up:

Her dream had come true. She was a folk sin-ger.

Okay, so maybe it's not the same thing. Singing in front of drunk and horny men who only want to see her tits wasn't exactly what Jenny had in mind when she said she wanted to be a folk singer, and playing part-time poker in Vegas while still putting in 90-plus hours a week baking scones and muffins in San Diego wasn't exactly the way Jason had planned it, but it was good enough... for now.

So, gentle reader (you knew this was going to eventually turn to you, didn't you?), if you're like 99.99999% of the population, you have your ambitions, too, whether they're career ambitions, conditioning ambitions, or physique ambitions.

Only you suck.

I suck.

We all suck compared to Jason.

Let me put it this way, are you sacrificing even 10% of what Jason's sacrificed to get what you want?

I doubt it. I rarely meet anyone who gets what they want. Everybody's got plenty of lofty ideas, but I rarely see anyone carry through with them. I run into hundreds of people want to change careers, but the only effort they expel towards that end is complaining to me or any other poor bastard unlucky enough to be in the way of their lament.

At least 3 times a week, someone asks me what he or she should do to lose weight. I tell them I'll help them, but the first thing they have to do is write down everything they eat over the next three days.

It's not like I ask them to clean out the stables of Zeus, but to this day, only one person has ever completed the task. She, however, was highly motivated because she wanted to look good in her wedding dress. After she'd bagged the guy, she reverted to her dumpy self.

I'm usually highly resistant to motivational articles or articles designed to harness the psychology of positive thinking because I'm a motivational reductionist; I tend to break motivation down to the simplest statement: if you want to do something bad enough, you'll do it. Clearly, most people are comfortable with the status quo because they don't do it.

But what the hell, I've come this far so I might as well try to offer a couple of words of advice.

Get off your ass.

For once in your mediocre, lack-luster life, take one thing, one goal, to completion; see one thing to fruition. You know how to get the new job. You do. Really. You don't need anyone to tell you about education, certifications, studying, contacts, etc.

Do it or just stop boring the hell out of the rest of us, okay?

And if your ambitions or dreams have to do with your body, my God, what could be easier? If you had Jason's drive for just two hours a day and you applied it to working out, nothing could stop you.

But maybe you feel the economy's thrown a foreclosed monkey wrench into your plans and you're not eligible for a bailout.

If you've been hit, then you might think about taking advantage of the circumstances; do what it takes to ride out the storm. Money tight? Gas so expensive you can't make the 30-mile drive to your favorite Ethiopian/Italian fusion restaurant when you're jonesing for some Couscous Diavolo? Finances so tight you can't join your autoerotic asphyxiation club for their annual choke-off in Cancun?

Maybe it's time to go a little Spartan.

Eat smart. One skipped dinner at Ruth's Chris Steak House could buy a week's worth of quality food; a month's worth of protein powder. Take some of that time you might normally spend recreating and get thee to the gym, or the garage, or the track. Use these times to get your body (or your mind) right. Do two-a-days for once in your lousy un-productive life. Sprint. Lunge old ladies across the street. Do hip thrusts with your neighbor's garden gnomes.

It may or not be the best time to invest in the market, but it's sure as hell the best time to invest in you.
The people watching was one of Jason's favorite things about Vegas. He'd sat down next to the motorized walkway outside the Bellagio hotel to sip his Slurpie, contemplate his life, and of course watch the people, or in this case, the babes.

He'd just spent seven hours at the poker table and he was up a few hundred dollars. Still, he didn't know if he'd made the right move; not the right move at the poker table, mind you, but the right move in life.

Back home in San Diego, Jason owned a little neighborhood café that served coffee drinks, sandwiches, and pastries. He was a success, but my God how he had to work! He woke up at 3:45 in the morning and he usually didn't get home until 9 or 10 at night.

Weekends were a little better, 12-hour days instead of 18-hour days, but he still felt like the walking dead. Luckily, he had the alarm clocks, 6 of them. The first one, right next to him, would hopefully start to rouse him from what was closer to a coma than sleep. He'd take a bear-paw swipe at it, either turning it off or knocking it across the room, but it was hardly enough to rouse him.

Then the others would start to buzz, trill, drone, or clang. Sometimes they'd go off for 15 minutes before he woke completely, or what passes for completely in someone so perpetually sleep deprived.

For Jason, life was all about schedule, highly orchestrated 15-minute chunks of time. Botch up one and it has a cascade effect on the remaining 15-minute blocks of time until they start piling up on each other like delicate ceramic dolls on a runaway conveyor belt.

If he did everything right, if nothing screwed up his delicate schedule, if no pudknocker stopped to ask him about his goddam day, he had two 15-minute blocks of time to study Texas Hold 'Em at the end of his obscenely long day.

He didn't drink during the day because that meant he'd eventually have to take time out to pee. Eating consisted of jamming bits of pastry or lunchmeat down his throat as he worked.

He didn't do laundry; he just bought boxes of shirts from Costco. He'd throw the one he was wearing away at the end of the day and he'd unbag a new one in the morning. He didn't make his bed because he didn't have one. Having a bed requires washing sheets and pillowcases, so he slept on a mat on the floor. Besides, he worried that sleeping on a bed would make him "soft."

It was all because of what he called his 80-month plan. He'd continue working at the same pace for the next 80 months until he had his bankroll. At that point he'd sell the café and move to Las Vegas to become a professional poker player.

You're probably thinking that there's no way he can do it; there's no way he can keep it up, but he'd already kept that pace for five years.

You can keep your DiMaggio's and Ripken's; those iron men had nothing on Jason.

But then the economy got funky. Household income dropped for the sixth year in a row, gas prices soared, companies laid off people everywhere, and the mortgage crisis kicked us in the balls.

Traffic to the café slowed down. People started staying home and drinking Maxwell House Instant coffee instead of schlepping down to the coffee shop for a three or four dollar coffee drink.

It was bad enough that the cost of his raw supplies like flour and milk had almost doubled in the last year or two, but when the economy put a chokehold on his customer life line, Jason started to worry; he could see his 80-month plan turning into the 100 Year War.

For the first time in a long time, he felt despair. His goal, the one thing that kept him going, was moving further from his reach. It's like he's in a prison cell and he's managed to coldcock the screw with a rolled up copy of Popular Mechanics, but he can't quite reach the keys attached to the guard's belt. Just when he's about to snare them with a rolled up poster of Rita Hayworth, the guard twitches and kicks the keys further away.

So he experiences a few dark nights of the soul, arranged in 15-minute blocks, of course. He decides to make the best of the situation. Rather than see his 80-month plan turn into a repeating one-sided loop, a Mobius strip, he makes a bold decision.

[CoachBeezy03]

Good Post!

[mopar76]

yes good post

[gbuild]

Originally Posted by mopar76

yes good post

I agree.


Thanks for that

[slwfz1]

Originally Posted by gbuild

I agree.


Thanks for that

Excellent observation..how true