Keep on

While I’m not happy that Grump is having a bad run at the tables, variance taking one of those hard turns it does from time to time for an undetermined period, I am glad that he’s decided to take a break from the game. I’m not thrilled with his threat to stop posting for a period, but that too I can appreciate. I haven’t played any poker since Las Vegas (social time on Poker Academy excluded), and while a couple weeks may not seem like a long time for some, when the game has been an almost daily practice for four and a half years, three weeks off is a big deal.

Somehow, Las Vegas was pivotal, so much so that while holed up in my hotel room, and stewing in my juices, I wrote what may be my first blog post that didn’t see the cathodes of day. It was a farewell to bastin as an online persona.

Well, it didn’t happen, as it became clear upon writing that bastin has become more than poker content these days, and has indeed become synonymous with my given first name, and all of this is just too trivial, too self-indulgent to consider, so I decided to just keep writing whatever I felt like, posting photos, thinking and reading and sharing, and then ascribe it to The Man in the Moon for all that it mattered in the virtual world. It is given in the same spirit that it is received and viceyversa (although upon closer inspection that makes no sense). For better or worse, it perpetuates itself.

I received an email last night from a friend, older in years, not in spirit, and much wiser than I. He had been away for a couple weeks and had missed the chatter in the social sphere about “the procedure” that was couched in rather oblique allusions to my “Peaches!” video from over a year ago. He was writing to inquire if my entries were just more art or if I had indeed been hospitalized. He figured the latter but could not be certain. I wrote back in more explicit terms and apologized, more or less, for the ambiguity by explaining that the internet was a little too permeable for my tastes, hence the dance.

I am certain others are just as confused, but as there is a thin line between friends and acquaintances online to necessitate further inquiry these days, they may have written it off as more b(l)a(n)d performance art. As another friend, much closer to the end than I, writes (and I paraphrase), erring and erring is unerring.

Not that it matters. Both friends have seen much more pain and tragedy than I, and have found ways to endure. Enduring matters.