Sharon Nichols is back at work as an emergency services operator in Detroit. Before she was fired last time around, she messed up so badly that she was actually convicted by a jury on a criminal charge of willful neglect, after Sherrill Turner died of heart failure while Sharon told Sherrill's five-year-old son to quit playing with the telephone. She might have even got away with that, but the second time the boy called, Sharon sent the police over to scold him in person, and they found Sherrill's body. Anyway, like the song says, "Go back, Jack, do it again."

We leave for Berkeley at dawn. I'll be off the Internet for days and days.

The ophthalmologist confirmed my self-diagnosis: posterior vitreous detachment. He says the best course is to get used to it. I was almost blind before the detachment; but even now, I'm not blind enough to impress an ophthalmologist. I have another appointment in about a month to get fitted for prescription glasses. Maybe it'll be an improvement over rotating three different strengths of off-the-shelf reading glasses.

I don't even have time to read the Internet now. I'm wanted in the real world continuously, and it isn't pleasant: all sorts of disasters stacked one upon the other. They're necessary to get the karmic balance right. God is being good to me though: the disasters have been leaving things such, and have been timed such, that there's as little total unpleasantness as possible.

I seem to have broken my right elbow. Not today, but over a month ago, out in the wilderness. It took me this long to figure it out. It's got considerably worse over the past week because I've been abusing it terribly. I suppose I'll have to stop abusing it and hope that it heals correctly. That'll take a bit of discipline, but I'll begin by indulging the delusion that I can manage it.

This afternoon I'm meeting some more people at the airport. Fortunately they're renting a car, so I don't have to drive there. But I will have to drive around town Saturday and Sunday. It probably won't be too bad for the elbow, even working the stick. I don't remember it hurting last time I drove. Monday evening, I think it was.

I'm sure I'll wind up driving most of the way to and from nickykaa's at the beginning of July. That'll be a rental car. No stick. (The last time they gave me a rental car with a stick, I drove it to the top of Silverado Peak. No joke.) The hard part will be loading and unloading all those bags, especially my notorious map case, which has but one small leather handle, and which I've often loaded to upwards of fifty pounds — mostly flashlight batteries, United States coin and (of course) maps. I'll just have to move it all with my left hand. That'll be okay.

As outrageous as my approach to all this might seem, there is a difference between me and a madman: I'm not mad.

I just got an email from a United States senator touting a bill that would give the feds "the resources they need to go after the white-collar criminals who have wreaked so much havoc on our economy and hard-working families." Wreaked! Oh, well. I must admit, he owns the language as much as I do. I'll stay with wrought. I was born in the last millennium, back in the days of Socrates. I had a pet stegosaurus.

I just approved an application for membership in the asperger community. During the course of considering that application, I looked at the applicant's profile, and I found a couple of interesting quotes.

"Religion is for those who are afraid of going to hell and spirituality is for those who have already been there."

Shades of nickykaa's classic journal entry of February 8, 2005, The Wheel of Samsara on Fast Forward.

"We are all haunted by something; it’s just that most have the ability to repress it to a point where they can comfortably exist. For others it isn’t that simple, though they dearly wish it were."

Shades of The Dark Wall by Arthur C. Clarke.

Last Tuesday evening I had a plan for Wednesday morning. I was going to ride the bus to the Palms, put in a few hours gambling in the casino, and have breakfast in the buffet. Then I was going to write to Plan R, who sometimes comments in this journal. When Wednesday morning arrived, God told me to work on my next music compilation instead. I did — the whole day through. Much of Thursday and part of Friday too. I've got the playlist done. Technical production remains, and could easily take three weeks.

The compilation is outrageous, over the top and self-indulgent. The title, which I've mentioned before, A Wheelchair on the Canyon Wall, is equally outrageous, over the top and self-indulgent, but I haven't been able to come up with a better one.

A Wheelchair on the Canyon Wall is the shortest compilation I've ever made. Because it's so outrageous, I wanted _wind_spirit_ to hear it before I told anyone else it's done. I thought I might have to keep it to myself if she was worried about everyone moving away from her on the bench. She loves it! But she loves them all — even 100 Years of Solitude.

The themes of some of my compilations are remote from areas in which I have pending spiritual work; the themes of others are highly charged for me. There's a feedback process: I string a bunch of tracks together, trying to tell the truth, at least insofar as the concept is relevant. Then I listen. If the theme of the compilation is charged, I learn something. Thoughts come back out at me that I wasn't aware of having put in. My attention is called to issues that need attention. When the mix of tracks is simply wrong, I fix it. When I identify issues that I need to process, I process them. I'm pretty dedicated to doing the work.

Incidental to the process of putting together this compilation, I've packed more spiritual work into a shorter time than ever before, at least without the help of any of the major entheogens. Even nickykaa will be shocked, and he's used to a rapid rate of change. It's been scary. How scary? I DIDN'T KNOW IT WAS LOADED! That scary.

Somewhere on my list of future compilations is one with the working title of Hunter's Ether. If it ever gets made, it will be different than it would have been if I hadn't put together this compilation first. More balanced. Closer to God's own truth.

If you're one of the people who's asked to be on my distribution list, you'll eventually get a copy of A Wheelchair on the Canyon Wall or whatever I wind up calling it. If you're not on my distribution list, feel free to put in a request. Just be forewarned that you'll have to give me a real mailing address. It's a prospect that seems to frighten some people. That puzzles me a bit less than it did last week.

_wind_spirit_ wanted to see a trailer for a movie called The Reader, so we watched a couple of them on the computer. Fantastic!— but the trailer is enough.

On the other hand, _wind_spirit_ is sitting behind me whining, "It made me curious. I want to see the whole thing."

Several times in the past week, a line from Castaneda has drifted into my consciousness. It goes more or less like this (from memory, after a quarter century or so): "A sorcerer who finds himself face to face with his double is a dead sorcerer."

This afternoon, this bit of commentary crossed my mind: Kind of like on a pinball machine, when you break the rules and the TILT light goes on.

I've been Twittering a bit about playing poker this weekend at the Hard Rock Casino. It's an easy walk from my apartment and there's a $1/$2 no-limit holdem game that runs round the clock and usually includes a few players who have very little understanding of the game. I played a while Friday evening and won $302. I played a while yesterday morning and won $321. Before I go further in this little narrative, I'd like to say something about the chips they use at the Hard Rock. The Hard Rock commemorates almost every event and performer with a $5 chip, so in the $1/$2 no-limit holdem game, there's a tremendous variety of $5 chips in play is at any one time. My favorite, though, is their basic $5 chip:



Anyway, I went back to the Hard Rock this morning, directly after walking _wind_spirit_ to the bus stop. In fact, I rode the bus with her a couple of stops before transferring to another. When I got to the Hard Rock, the game was going as usual, and it looked promising, but it was full. I put my name on the list (making it the only name on the list) and went to breakfast at Mr. Lucky's, their twenty-four-hour coffee shop. When I was done with breakfast, the game was still full and I was still first on the list, so I read a magazine until a seat opened up. Then I bought in for $300 and started playing. There were eight other players of varying skill levels, but the one I was happiest to see was drunk and had never before played no-limit holdem. Some would call it paradise, but it was more like a happy hunting ground, because the guy was no more stupid than he'd had to be to get himself into that situation. Put another way, I've seen much worse players who knew a lot more about the game. Fortunately his temperament was quite pleasant, and the other players were as tolerant as could be of the degree to which he slowed down the game. After three hours of play, there were seven of us remaining and I'd slowly built my stack by about 150%. I'd pretty much decided that I was going to stay there until the drunk ran out of money. He had about $250 in front of him, and he'd been adding to his stack at the rate of about two $100 bills an hour. Then a middle-aged couple came in. Together. They looked like they were comfortable in the environment. They took the two empty seats at the table (they wound up with two other players between them).

I've encountered husband-and-wife teams before, usually in split-pot limit games. And I know that even in a limit game, they're dangerous. The potential for mischief in a no-limit game — well, it's limited only by the amount of money on the table. Like the song says, "Know when to walk away and know when to run." I picked up my chips, cashed out my win of $476, and walked home in the rain. I hope I was wrong to leave, but it didn't seem like that was the way to bet.

Long before I finished A Boy Who Can't Talk, I burned my first cut of A Wheelchair on the Canyon Wall. Then I put it away and forgot it. Forgetting it was actually my intent: I deliberately deselected the option that causes track titles to display on my player, so that I could listen to the transitions without prejudice. I'm impressed with what I've got, and I'm impressed with the number of echos I hear of A Boy Who Can't Talk. I didn't expect that, though I should have. One track (a track I got from nickykaa) even wound up in both compilations. I don't know whether I'll keep it in A Wheelchair on the Canyon Wall, but I very well may, even though I've never re-used a track before, and this would put the same track in two consecutive compilations. It seems that the connection should be stated, even if the statement is made in such a bizarre and esoteric way. Then there's Pinball Wizard echoing the title track of A Boy Who Can't Talk and Magic Man echoing Black Wings. Does I Don't Know How to Love Him echo Let My People Go? Does Good Night echo All Together Now by the same obscure group? Maybe. I find it interesting to contemplate.

This is the beginning of the biggest gambling weekend of the year, here in Las Vegas. I should go out and find a poker game.

Outrageous as it may seem, I just set up a Twitter account. If it seems too outrageous, blame it on mercurygrrl. And on the necessity of replacing my cell phone — a calamity that was the subject of my last journal entry. When I replaced the phone, I also replaced my service plan with one that allows for unlimited text messaging. It costs no more than the plan I had, and it includes other goodies besides.

I figure there's a chance that I'll find it convenient to Twitter while doing other things, especially while riding the bus. Then again, maybe I'll hardly Twitter at all, the way I hardly update this journal at all. We'll see.

_wind_spirit_ and I just got new cell phones. It couldn't be avoided any longer. We still have to figure out how they work — if indeed they can be made to work at all. If you're among the few people who sometimes has occasion to call one or the other of us, I wish us luck. I suspect we'll need it.

We found the following notice taped to the front door of our apartment when we got home this evening:

January 18, 2009

TO: Resident

FROM: Andover Management

SUBJECT: 24-HR NOTIFICATION

As of Monday January 19th, 2009The Roof Leaking Company will be on the property to fix the roof. Please consider this your 24 HR NOTIFICATION to enter your apartment.

The Roofing Company will be here Monday 19th Thru Friday 23rd. We appreciate your cooperation to this important matter. If you do not intend to be home, please make arrangements for your pet.

I didn't bother checking the phone book to see whether there's a "Roof Leaking Company" in Las Vegas, and I'm certainly not going to take it as far as "The Roof Leaking Company," let alone, "2009The Roof Leaking Company." Somehow, though, I suspect no one is really doing business under any of those names.

It's a bother. I guess I'll get a lot done around the apartment this week. Strange, though: There were roofers overhead last week.

I received this link yesterday from my old friend, Argus MacWargus. The article is very long, but I found it worth reading. By one of those coincidences that God creates for Her amusement and ours, I was involved in a discussion of cultural isolation this morning with anais_pf and roniliny under a protected entry in anais_pf's journal. In that discussion, anais_pf mentioned that the Washington, D.C., area is culturally isolated in its own peculiar way. I suppose it is.

I suppose I'm a bit ahead of my time with this bit of political blasphemy, but I've been ahead of my time before.

We all recognize, "War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength." Many of us (I hope) are familiar with the process whereby the meaning of words is adjusted in order to manipulate the popular sentiment. If you're not, I recommend that you reread George Orwell's 1984.

Now that the long introduction is out of the way...

What is change becoming?

This morning _wind_spirit_ and I went to have a look at the Encore Casino, which opened on the Strip last week. I won't be going back. They don't want me there.

Encore is an ultra-high-end extension to Wynn. The hotel is intended as a place for couples to go on high-priced overnight dates, either alone or in the company of one or two other couples; and the casino is intended to be one of the amenities available to couples staying at the hotel, in case gambling is part of their ritual, or in case one of them wants to make a show of gambling. It's not intended for public use. It's not even intended to become crowded. Implementing those intents, though, presented something of a problem to the company that owns the hotel. Private casinos aren't allowed in Nevada. A gaming licensee is obliged to make his facilities available to all comers over the age of twenty-one, without fee or limitation. This morning we got a close look at one circumvention of that law.

The security guards at Encore wear suits. There are a lot of them. The casino hosts wear suits. There are a lot of those too. The number of suited casino employees standing along the walls and in other prominent positions on the casino floor is so large as to make a strong impression in itself. Almost all the slot machines are reels or video reels, with only a few banks of video poker machines along the edges of the floor. Knowledgeable gamblers won't play reels, whether mechanical or simulated. The gaming tables are clustered in little alcoves containing only a few tables each, that are intended to give passers-by the impression that if there are people playing at a table, they all know each other and probably came to the hotel together. I can easily imagine that that impression is made strongly enough that very few people actually dare join strangers at a gaming table, and it becomes true that only people who know each other actually gamble at the same table. The environment is sufficiently forbidding, and the games are sufficiently unfavorable from the perspective of the knowledgeable gambler, that only hotel guests (and only the most casual gamblers among them) would choose to gamble there; so the members of the small target market have plenty of tables across which to spread themselves, and needn't intrude upon each other.

There are signs to Poker and to the Race and Sports Book. Following the signs leads one through a corridor lined with snob shops. At the other end of the corridor is the Wynn Casino. Encore doesn't have its own poker room nor its own race and sports book, and it's obvious that they don't want a cadre of professional gamblers (or degenerate gamblers either, for that matter) hanging out in their facility.

We noticed some flower beds around the periphery of the swimming pool, so we figured we'd go out there for a closer look. I was wearing a sweatshirt ("Autistic Activist — Autistic rights are human rights") and carrying an arctic expedition parka under my arm. The temperature had been twenty-nine degrees Fahrenheit at dawn, and it risen about ten degrees since. We were stopped at the entrance to the pool area by a security guard (wearing a suit, of course) who explained that the pool was open only to guests of the hotel — that it was actually open, and that the water was heated to over eighty degrees. He went on to say that although no one was actually swimming at the moment, they were expecting that someone would, and they had towels ready for any hotel guests who might want to try it. Indeed there were about a hundred towels, each rolled into a neat cylinder, stacked up nearby. Well, okay. They're going to great lengths to keep the place private without overstepping the bounds of the law.

The whole thing strikes me weird, mostly because no one has ever tried such a thing in Nevada before. I have no complaints. There's nothing for me at Encore, and I have no reason to go back there. It doesn't bother me that that's precisely what the owners intend. There are lots of businesses that sell only goods or services that I don't want to buy. Wigs, for example. Or massages. I'm used to it.

I don't expect Encore to be widely emulated. The casino caters to a niche market, and the niche isn't that big. Very few people will play reel slots. Some people, even among those who come to Las Vegas on dates, don't gamble. Those who do gamble, and who have some experience, won't play reel slots. I'm sure that if any serious gamblers choose to stay at Encore, they do their gambling elsewhere, even if it's just down the hall at Wynn.

Please go sign this petition.

It's raining in central Arizona. It's going to continue raining in central Arizona until Thursday afternoon.