By LuckyJimm

Playing no higher than $1/$2 I'm down £746 since my last post, wiping out my profit for the year.  I'm now down a couple of hundred quid since 1st January.  I had a sustained run of playing badly and running badly across four sites.  To appropriate Raymond Chandler's phrase about a blonde, I suffered beats that would make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window.  I fell into a bad frame of mind, calling with the thought "There's so much money in the pot I can't fold now. Perhaps he's bluffing" each time I knew I was beaten.   I played when tired, tilted, angry or late for something else.  I wasn't enjoying myself at all, and didn't seem able to snap out of it.  It feels like I just wanted to create difficulties for myself, some drama, something to worry about.

On the weekend I started to lose, sensing the need to stock up I bought a lot of fresh fruit and vegetables. That Sunday was Chinese New Year, so I went for a meal with friends in Chinatown.  The waitress served us fish, saying it would bring good luck.  Well, so much for that.   The next day at work I discovered I could run up a negative balance on my swipe card which I use for buying food in the excellent canteen. I soon got it up to minus £40. So even though I'd lost all my money, I was still able to eat well.

I haven't been fired from work yet, but I'm not doing a good job. I divide my time between watching videos on Youtube, posting on poker forums, going for cigarettes, reading the newspaper in the toilets, and bitching about the lawyers with my fellow secretaries who I soon realised are not hawkishly watching what I'm doing. That's a relief, because sometimes when you're temping the people around you take it upon themselves to ensure you're keeping busy.

The Trinidadian lady I work alongside is my favourite person I've ever met in an office. She's retiring in a year and so is very, very relaxed, while still always happy to help. She's had an interesting life, too, moving to Kansas in her 20s after marrying a G.I., then spending a wild decade in New York after their divorce. It's too easy to regard office workers as monotone drones, when their pasts are often as interesting as anyone else's. At my last firm, I was shocked to discover one of the corporate lawyers had spent several years as a cycle courier. People's lives are more varied and less easy to pigeonhole than I might lazily imagine.

On Valentine's day in the annual absence of female interest I went to the anti-Valentines show at the Sartorial Gallery in Notting Hill. My first sight when I walked in was a man with a banjo, back-combed hair and a Bryan Ferry voice performing in front of a masked man who was lieing naked on the floor except for some food scattered across his torso. This was supposed to be some kind of statement. I realised later when the naked man stood up and mingled with the crowd that he was the gallery assistant, somebody I knew.  He was keener to talk to me than I was to him.  Hey, we can catch up another time.  Perhaps because of his presence the mood was much more open than usual.  Normally at these things you huddle together with the people you know. This time there was a general enthusiasm drinking as much white wine, champagne and G&T as possible and talking to strangers.  It was the most fun I'd had in a while.

I cycled home drunk, turned on my computer and lost a third of the money I'd just been paid. I didn't particularly mind, and perhaps that's the problem.  I just read in Poker Player magazine that Grub Smith has decided to give up poker, so far as that's ever possible.  He writes "The most important thing I've discovered is that, for me, online poker was never about winning money.  It was about wasting time - time I should have spent doing something more important, like writing a great novel, helping the homeless, or teaching my black pug, Gilbert, not to poop on the bedroom carpet."  Although the activities we avoid may differ, isn't this true for most of us?