Around 1996 I had been working with adolescents diagnosed with Autism, Schizophrenia, Downs Syndrome, and an array of cognitive and emotional challenges for about 13 years. By the time that I decided that it was time to move on from that career my situation was as cushy as a job like that could develop into. My situation at the time was that  working in a group home consisting of six highly functional kids who didn’t need me for hardly anything more than distributing meds and money and to provide them with some gentle reminders to clean up after themselves and as part of their chores.  

An overview of my daily work was that I slept overnight and when they awakened I would help them get ready for whatever day program they had to go to. I made sure that they made a decent breakfast, that they took their meds that they were dressed appropriately for the weather and off they went. But since they were practically just regular kids that meant I didn’t really have to do any of those things. They did it all themselves. They would be out of the house by 9 and they didn’t start streaming back until maybe 3 P.M. or later.  In the evening they made their own food, and either had a pass to go somewhere that was all checked out and approved ahead of time, or just hang out at home, clean up and get to bed on time. These kids were as high functioning as it got and still be in a group home setting and you would not be able to tell them apart from any other kids going to High School or working at McDonalds.

The “Deveruex Foundation years” should make for some very interesting reading I would hope, but that will wait perhaps for another day. But for the purposes of starting the poker playing years story by ending my time at Deveruex I will point out that I had attained the position of supervisor of my own dorm. And not only was it mine in the sense of I was in charge as a supervisor but at a point I created it from the ground up and received huge accolades for what I had done in that regard, bringing the project in 10’s of thousands of dollars under budget but a month ahead of time. A few years later that dorm got consolidated into another dorm and my position was no longer needed because the program didn’t need two supervisors and I had become a supervisor more recently than the other guy I was going to lose my supervisor position

The Since the decision to consolidate was administrative and not because of my performance I guess there must have been some kind of H.R. deal where I had to be offered whatever jobs where available at the same pay rate. There were no supervisor jobs and there were jobs both on campus and off and one of them was working in a group home where the schedule was a week on and a week off. Not only did I get to keep my supervisors salary, which was more than anyone else in that program, including the supervisor of the program, but I was probably paid twice what the regular staff was making. Also as described above even the weeks when I was “working” I was free most of the day. I could go and do anything I felt like. I just had to answer to my pager if it went off which it almost never went off. My major decision on any given day at work was what to watch on TV and that isn’t an exaggeration. Even on the rare occasions when there was some problem between clients, which with these folks rarely became violent, I had been dealing with the toughest kids on campus for over a decade and I could deescalate most conflicts in my sleep.

I’ll reiterate that these clients were independent and just waiting to age out of the program. I basically didn’t need to attend to them any more than maybe an hour total in a 24 hour period. And as I stated in another narrative the staff turnover at Deveruex was very high and I had all that time in as an employee, maybe 7 or 8 years more than the next closest employee including the supervisor. I was well known by everyone and I was respected because of what I had accomplished, especially when it came to creating that dorm from the ground up. Basically, my shit didn’t stink! PLUS I got 2 weeks off every month simply by virtue of the week on-week off schedule! Are you kidding me?

I milked that for maybe a year and a half until two things happened at around the same time. One thing was that the Chumash Indian Casino opened in Santa Ynez California, basically in the mountains above Santa Barbara. This is up there in the general area where Michael Jackson, Ronald Reagan and other uber-rich types lived, but near a town. This was in 1994 when the place was little more than a warehouse set up for gaming. But it did have a poker room and that changed things for me. Back then it was hard to find a legal poker game and I figured that if I was patient and smart enough that maybe I could earn a living at it. Indian Casinos seemed to be popping up all over the country so wouldn’t it be cool to travel around to wherever I felt like playing and earn whatever I could until I felt like moving on? It had travel, excitement, avoidance of regular “work” for a living and a romance to it that is obvious.

Meanwhile I got a new supervisor at work who insisted that I …gulp…do work around the house that needed to be done. “Oh hell no! There is a maintenance department to do that stuff. Besides, do you know who I am?” She was adamant and she gave me a list of tasks starting with cleaning out the gutters of the house. Well, here’s the thing, if I ever get around to writing the story of being in the army, it was there where I became a world-class expert on disobeying orders while avoiding the repercussions of such things.

So, the first act of defiance was simply culled from classic asshole class 101: Avoidance. For weeks I would simply ignore the directive and when asked about it I said I was too busy. Thus started our escalation of wills which was palpable in every room where we were in at the same time. She had the administration and company rules on her side. Sure I had done stellar work for over a decade but now I was a liability to Deveruex inasmuch as I was getting paid a supervisors salary in a position that any schmuck could do and I’m sure they wanted me replaced. By then I was more into keeping the job I had than getting back into the process of climbing the ladder of Deveruex success, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the folks higher up might have even pressured her to make things uncomfortable on me. I knew that the next step she would take would be to give me a timeline and then if it wasn’t done within that timeline she would have it documented and so would begin the process of progressive discipline. But I had years of experience in creative anarchy against the might of the U.S. Army and I beat them in a head to head match, so, even if she was backed by every suit up the Deveruex hierarchy I was determined to win and I had a particularly slippery skillset with which to draw from.

I don’t know how long it took me to come up with my brilliant strategy but as I write this about 25 years later it seems like the kind of solution I would have hit upon fairly easily. On a Saturday when I knew that there were a couple of clients in the house I said I was going around to the side of the house to clean the gutters. I want to a spot where basically nobody could see what was about to happen, I set a handful of leaves on the ground along with the ladder, tipped over, I banged my head on the ground (being committed to the gig, as I was) to give myself a little cherry on my noggin and started to yell for help. Out came the clients, followed shortly after by the ambulance and it was off to the hospital for as much morphine as they would allow me to buzz for the next two days because, well, I was in “horrible pain.”

I don’t know how long I was out of work and getting workman’s comp, but I do remember I pushed it as far as I could, naturally. I’m thinking a month sounds about right. When I returned it was for restricted duty, which, at that job would mean, I don’t know what, I don’t lift a finger? But it is clearly tough to do less than deciding what to watch on the TV. From then on I just loved being around my supervisor, especially when there was other staff around because this little move was well known and I was more than happy to gloat overtly, or covertly, whenever I could.

Even though it was about as soft of a gig as I could hope for the idea of being the traveling poker player had grabbed my imagination and that turned into a need to hit the road. At that time I was already living in a nice 30 foot Pace Arrow in the mountains with Cheyenne, my wolf-hybrid. Cheyenne had it made since he got to run around the mountains and get his wilder ya-ya’s out and then come with me everywhere I went. This included work, since I got an exemption for him as a therapy dog since he was a puppy. He went to bars every night cuz he was as lovable and cool as could be and I brought him most places that I went. Whenever there was an occasion where he’d have to be left for even a day, or less, I made sure he was looked after by a friend. The dog meant everything to me. And since he was loved by all he was easily approachable and that might have turned out to be why I lost him.

I had making the move in my head for a while but couldn’t manage to give up the cushy job. Then, one day, I found out that Cheyenne “bit” someone in the leg. As I heard it some guys were playing soccer and Cheyenne, being a dog, was playing with his mouth. A guy got his leg caught up with one of Cheyenne’s teeth and required stitches. I put it this way because not only was Cheyenne a wolf-hybrid, but he was as healthy and bad-ass of a dog, in a good way, as I’ve come across. If he were not playing this guys leg would have been shredded. I watched Cheyenne tree a bobcat and take down two similar sized dogs attacking him from opposite sides in a flash. I’ll save the story about the mountain lion for the sake of maintaining some semblance of credibility, but…anyway…. Cheyenne did not attack dude.

But that didn’t matter to the County Animal Control people who had him in custody because they said that if they let him go and he does anything like this again then they can get sued and so, they said, forget getting your dog back. I suggested that I get an affidavit that says that if he is released to me that within one week I will leave the state and not return. They said that would be fine and so started my life as a traveling poker player.

For maybe six months prior to hitting the road I had been experiencing a massive pull coming from New Mexico. So it seemed like that was where I should point the RV. Of course the RV had to pass through Las Vegas first and so four months later, I rolled out of Vegas having sold my RV for a song and purchased a custom extended van that came with the name, I’m not kidding here, “The Gambler”. I had already gone through far more of my funds than I had intended plus I was in a rig with about half the value of the one I started with four months before becoming “pro”. This was not a good sign.

Thankfully neither you nor I am to have to suffer through the minutia of 3 years of playing poker but the highlights are a-coming. I made it to Albuquerque having already lost a chuck of my bankroll, and my nice R.V. Within the next couple of days I will have lost Cheyenne, for good. I won’t go into it in too much detail but since he was so approachable and a very beautiful dog and we were deeply in love I have to assume someone dognapped him especially having done my due diligence looking for miles on the side of roads just in case he had been hit and posting the obligatory rewards that were in the thousands of dollars. Again, these things I should have taken as signs because the whole business of playing poker for a living turned sour pretty quickly, but I was determined to make a go of it so, as strange as this might sound, it took my years to realize that it was exactly what I shouldn’t be doing!

When things were working out it was very cool to be able to pick a destination a few states away and just go whenever the mood struck me. As I pointed out earlier the Native American’s where just getting their casinos going all over the country and so they were competing for players. They did this by offering free food, rooms and a lot of them were paying players a certain amount just to play. I understand how weird that sounds and how it would work out for the casino, but it is how it was.

I was what is known in the game as a low limit grinder. That meant that I would play low limit games “tight” meaning waiting for premium starting hands and since that became apparent pretty quickly to anyone at the table it meant that I would usually not get called when I bet and take small pots only. But, it did keep me from losing much, at least initially and I could always get whatever freebies that they were offering, so food was covered, drinks were sometimes in the mix, and if I didn’t get comped a room I would still have my van to stay in, so it was a way to keep doing what I was doing, which was avoiding having a real job.

There really are some fine stories to tell, given the crazed hitchhikers, the traveling adventures, living off the grid, the characters I met along the way, the standard craziness that just comes from being a high-risk-taking individual, adventure seeking, consumer of mood and mind altering substances to excess, as I used to be. However I want to cut to the quick about how I learned a couple of profound lessons and I want to share so much of my other stories with so little time that I think that it might be a good idea to synopsize those stories where I am aiming at providing value to you, my good reader, get to that point, and perhaps add details later on in life if time allows.

But before I do there are a few stories worth mentioning in synopsis before moving on to the point. One involved the fact that I had lost contact with my family. Keep in mind this was before everyone had cell phones and email addresses. My family was scattered across the country as it was and I had lost my contact information. At the time I was playing at the Sandia Casino (this is where they annual ballooning event happens and if you’ve never seen all of these balloons take off, and the different types and shapes here is a video link. shttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGAMTlI6XxY) and one of my sisters was driving from Southern California to Colorado to visit some friends when she happened to notice the casino as she drove by on the freeway. This was not at the time for the event so all she noticed was just some small start-up casino, in fact a huge tent, as she drove by. She said that she was miles past it, something like 3 exits past it and something just kept gnawing at her to turn around. If it’s me I have to be almost positive that I left my wallet behind in order to turn around to go back 3 exits. In any case all she knew was that I was on the road somewhere west of the Mississippi playing poker and, OMG was it a trip to see my sister walking across the casino from a distance like that towards me. But it was no small thing that she brought with her a reconnection to my family.

Another story worth sharing because of the intensity is where I was in the Mojave Desert at around 3 A.M. in the middle of a meth cook that goes south because the cook started to think that the twinkling lights from the closest city, Riverside,  was essentially a thousand cop cars coming out to bust us and I that the only way that they could have known we were out there is that I must have ratted him out. Being that he was a full-on deranged criminal, who, about a month later was busted by the FBI for holding a woman as a sex slave, of course he had a gun and of course he was taking potshots at me in the middle of the night. I detail the story a little bit more in the ‘Crime Stories” if you care to read more about it.

Then there was a very important connection that I made with the mother of a meth dealer friend of mine. She was an older woman originally from Germany with a heavy accent that I mention only because we became friends of sort and even went places together so we made a strange couple, even though I don’t mean that we were a couple. She had a deep spirituality that was eclectic which appealed to me and we also shared an interest in the esoteric. It was during that time of becoming close with her on the intellectual and esoteric levels that I found my way out of rigid atheism and onto a path of finding myself opening up to the idea of a spiritual world that would take many years to come to fruition. And by that I mean for my spiritual belief system to develop to what has become my best understanding so far of what might be happening “behind the curtain”. I detailed the sequence of events that put me into an office she was renting with endless resources and endless time to spend exploring them, which, eventually led me to Spirit. That story can be accessed in detail in the spiritual story.

Alright then let me get to the point as quickly as possible from here. When I started out there were the standard good days and bad days and traveling was cool and it was all good. But after the first year and a half, or maybe more into the second year the following two things started to happen more or less simultaneously and very incrementally. They unfolded so slowly that I couldn’t say when it started, or if one happened before the other but as I said they just slowly appeared.  

First the thrill of the novelty of it wore off, as almost anything is apt to do at whatever rate these things happen. Shortly after the novelty wore off I started to have a losing streak the likes of which went far past “weird” and went into full-on absurdity and lasted for over a year. Keep in mind that I know about statistical probabilities, selective memory, biased interpretations and other errors in cognition and memory, but the things that were happening at the poker table for me for as long as the last year were, for example, let me offer this comparison; if I flipped a quarter 100 times and it came up tails 85 of those times that would be statistically improbable enough. If I tried the same thing and it came up with the same statistical imbalance twice in a row it would be start to be a bit mind-bending. I’m saying it was as if this same thing happened (of course not the numbers, but conceptually) like 20 times in a row. It was beyond bizarre and it was not a trivial mattered since it affected my bottom line to the degree that it did. I’m no great poker player, but I probably know enough having done it for a living and having played serious poker for almost 30 years. But for maybe the last year of my playing I would say that a drunken monkey could have done better than I did, no matter how I decided to play my hands, meaning loose, tight, recklessly, it didn't matter. I also want to emphasize for the sake of credibility that I understand how much of an exaggeration that my example seems, but, I honestly feel like I’m even downplaying it for the sake of staying within the readers believability limits.

The other thing that happened is that, as the novelty continued to ware off that playing and even traveling whenever I wanted to just became something I did day after day with almost nothing else occupying my time and it was not just not good, but it really felt bad, and more to the point "empty". I found that a weight began to slowly descend upon me that I couldn’t determine what it was. Mostly I attributed it to this absurd losing streak that I couldn't shake and I felt that if that went away all would be well.

There is a saying in the poke circuit that “poker is a hard way to make an easy living”. There is some truth to that, but it isn’t like digging ditches. It can be exceedingly tedious and even though just watching the action can be plenty entertaining for a while and even though I would bring books to the table to read when I wasn’t involved in a hand, it went much deeper than just being bored. And by the time I had been doing it for three years I felt stuck to it for a variety of reasons. I had a nagging irritation that was that distant, yet distinct sense that this is not what I should be doing, without even fully understand what that might mean, or imply. I just know that it gnawed at me for months, and maybe into as much as a year.

This “losing streak” had been running so bad, and for so long, that I was often times scraping together money for a $20 buy-in. To make matters worse I had developed a very bad video poker habit and I didn’t have any direction out that I could think of anyway. My closest sister, Joy, was living in south Texas south of San Antonio and going there had very little appeal except as safe harbor from the chaos that had been my life for some time by then. Still, I had no money to get there from where I was at that time at the Pechanga Casino near Riverside California and I had long ago tapped out every conceivable source for getting money that I could think of a long months previous to that point. Then I hit a $4000 dollar jackpot on a $5 dollar bet and I decided that this was a clear sign that it was time to head to Texas.

Being the gambling addict that I was I stopped at a casino along the way in a place in Ruidoso at the Apache Inn of the Mountain Gods. Jeez, how does anyone pass up a place with a name like that? I sure couldn’t and, of course that is where I lost almost all of the money I had. When I finally got to my sister Joy’s house I was so broke to the degree that I couldn’t find a quarter if I had to and I had been driving with the gas tank on E for so long it seemed a minor miracle that I got there at all. And that was were my sobriety started, which is a whole other story which I thing is very important to detail and that I hope to get to.

Now to the profound spiritual insights; Over the years through great effort and study I feel that I gained a deeper and broader understanding of Spirituality as I’ve come to understand it. There is no way to “prove” the following, but I suggest that you consider for yourself if the idea that I am suggesting has merit and/or if you have seen this play out in your own life. Perhaps you have recognized it play out in your life before, or even now.; Let’s assume that the essence of God, Great Spirit, Allah, Jehovah, whatever you want to call it is love. Our relationship to It is Creator and we are the created. As any healthy parent who loves their creation (child) knows that child has freewill and that we can’t “force” them to learn and change into who we hope them to be. There is a variety of good ways to encourage them to go in the direction we think might be best for them so we guide, role model, reward, and praise and, let’s say, point in the right direction. What I’m getting at is that I think that when our benevolent Creator wants us to go in a direction, let’s say, that there might be a subtle pointing of the way. If we don’t get the hint and stay on that path of self-will and ignore, or don't recognize the guidance  then the next step, metaphorically, might be a nudge, followed by a push, then a shove and so on. For me to finally get the awareness that I was meant to be doing something other than playing poker, let’s say perhaps being a counselor and then therapist, it required Creator to use a proverbial baseball bat on my thick skull. This was profound insight number one.  I'd say be aware of the guidance when it's offered and to know that if it is indeed guidance that it is probably going to go against our will. Otherwise it wouldn't be noticeable because we would be doing it already, right?

Then as I learned everything I could in order to help others, culminating in four degrees which I bring up only to emphasize that with all of the "formal" education I still feel that the greatest value that I bring to the benefit of others comes from my personal experiences and the mountain of additional information that I have sought out to consume over the years.

With that established please believe me when I tell you that the research on the following as regards ways to improve our overall level of happiness is solid and well established and validated and I would offer the following resources for your consideration; Two books that I read which were helpful were The Happiness Hypothesis and The Happiness Advantage. There is now a wonderful podcast called The Happiness Lab. This information is based on validated research so if you are one of these people running around these days who devalues science then you might find seek out some other source of information that works for you. But one established criteria for happiness is having a sense of purpose. I also noticed that when I got sober and started to learn, and exercise, and meditate and become honest that as I witnessed my own growth and progression in those areas that I felt good about myself.  Healthy self-esteem is a component of happiness. That wasn't something I needed read in order to acknowledge any of that because my own sense of growth did for me all I needed in that regard.

The second profound insight that I had was that great personal joy comes from our improvement in the areas of physical, mental, emotional, and, if a person is inclined towards it, spiritual growth. There is a seemingly common tendency for humans to compare how we are doing to how anyone else is doing.  This is a trap since what we are is simply occupying one of 8 billion dots along a continuum whether we are comparing looks, wealth, education, personality, and everything else. And if you look up the line on the continuum than you are "worse than" and if you look up the line then you are "better than" and ultimately it is just an ego-trap of comparing "us" to "them". There is a joy that comes from silently comparing ourselves now to how we were in the past. When we see of ourselves that we are clearly better than we used to be, perhaps not as good as we are going to be, silently witnessing the improvement, I assure you that joy comes from that. And while this might seem like an obvious and far overdue awareness on the surface of it what I realized only years later with my "eyes" a bit more open was that by sitting around a poke table all day, every day, there is a complete absence of physical, mental, emotional and spiritual growth there. In fact it is bereft of all of those things.

I believe that with all of what I experienced as bizarre, absurd, bad “luck” that God was pointing me away from poker and even towards counseling and therapy. Meanwhile the reasons and messages where clear and that is a message that I offer in detail in the spiritual story and if you don't read about that in the context of which the following occurred then it's just going to sound pretty nutty. But the message I got from "beyond myself" was "take care of yourself." Which I discovered has more layers of profundity than I could have imagined, even though it might sound simple. If you doubt that improving your physical, mental, emotional, or (if you want) spiritual wellness will make you happier (which, I doubt that there can be a few people in a hundred who don't know that on some deep personal level, but probably right on the surface.) how about if you were to take just one moth out of your life and put in the effort and you will see. The problem that we all have when trying to grow into a better self is going back to whatever we were doing that was "familiar". And we also want to avoid the pitfall of expecting too much to quickly. "Perfection is the enemy of the good" said  Voltaire and I'm saying if we can just improve as we go in whatever increments then as the years go I can pretty much guarantee that you will be happier.

A more detailed account of the gambling journey is on the way and perhaps completed by the time this is read.