Depravity Friends during Downtime

I caught a glimpse of the economic crunch on the streets of Las Vegas. Construction projects halted. Rusted steel beams shot out of concrete blocks on unfinished architectural superstructures. The vertical ghost towns cluttered the Las Vegas skyline. The illumination of Sin City, once glorious and majestic as the morning light at the dawn of the new day, has been dulled by a morass of financial gloom, so much so that even the languorous hookers were bitching. Shit, everyone was bitching. Cocktail waitresses. Poker dealers. Cab drivers. Valets. And even the crackling snaps of pamphlets from the porn slappers seem a little sullen these days.

— Tao of Poker

You know what, fuck this \”Pauly\’s the Hunter Thompson of Poker\” shit. Woo-woo, I\’m a tortured writer who does lots of drugs to share my twisted vision of the world with the world [/whine] … all so you\’ll play $10 tournaments on PokerStars … Saturday\’s with Dr. Pauly! — and then we can bet more on FantasySportsLive! [/excitement] It\’s seems to me like a pathetic cover for life as a (balding) professional shill.

OK, maybe I\’m just bitter — because one of my best pals called me a \”cooler\”. Do you realize how damaging that can be to a guy who scratches out his living as \”The Ernest Hemingway of Gambling\” a casino hanger-on? Granted, it really did happen for like 6 hands in a row that whomever I stood behind was guaranteed to lose at pai gow — and when I courteously left to play craps for the first time in two years, not only did I blow $93 in about 7 minutes, but also I literally killed the table … messed up a \”hot roller\” by improperly placing a bet and impeding a flying die with my hand … re-roll … and from there it was craps, craps, craps — seven out — until all the other players left the table rolling their eyes in gambler\’s disgust. Ha-ha, luck is funny.

But all is not fun and games here in Vegas these days — in America, really; but the morale-shift seems accentuated in Sin City, where just about every hooker has lost at least one home in the desert suburbs to foreclosure. So it\’s not all about me, but I get to be the Set-up Guy (nice) … and it\’s definitely not all about poker: DPauly just happens to be journaling life on a road speckled with tables, where he sees the American lives in the face of severe economic downturn — the human condition amid stormy weather — as revealed ever clearly through the teats and mouths of an aggressive pack of 3rd Millineium Mary Magdalenes.