Eulogy for a Gambler
Four days before he died, I bought my dad a car.
It was a used sedan, low miles, 2019. A new car wouldn’t have made sense for someone like him, a person who drove shitbox beaters for decades, ones bought with cash and coasting on old registration; a person who dodged W2-G’s like draft letters after collecting on countless machine hits, these tax forms sent to defunct addresses, sometimes signed by someone else for a piece of the hit if the casino staff was being difficult.
A new car would’ve felt alien, something he wouldn’t have maintained, wouldn’t have changed the oil or rotated the tires. I got him something he could drive for a while without feeling guilty about not taking care of it, something he desperately needed to drive to the bay, to see his other son and his grandchildren, to see me and the blonde guy from the video where we laugh at a monkey. The price wasn’t trivial, but it wasn’t out of line. Still, I didn’t tell him the full amount, and I said he owed me nothing, that it was for him, finally. He said he’d force compensation on me, sneak it into my pocket, and I said good luck trying. He never got to see the car.
“I came here for two weeks 48 years ago and never left,” he once said about Las Vegas.
My father was a career gambler in Nevada, a path of equal parts spite and opportunity and generational holdover. For three decades of the century, he could beat sports, something he replicated less and less as the edges dissolved over time. He gained a reputation, his understanding of numbers and pitchers and quarterbacks getting him attention in small circles. People with massive bankrolls took his advice, and he in turn took the heat for them, placing bets on their behalf for a piece of the action, at sports books that would eventually bar him from the entire franchise. For most of my life he was not allowed to enter a Harrah’s or the Cal Neva in Reno, taking too much money off them on behalf of winning players like the late Hans “Tuna” Lund, who I had met as a kid when my dad would take me on his morning runs.
But he never found the success of people like Tuna, too much of a nit for poker, too addicted to the idea of a bigger and bigger score. He’d take massive dogs and lose, knocking his bankroll from six figures to five to four. When stone-broke he’d hustle in a hundred ways, play on machines for an hourly rate or sell weed or run bets for others where he wasn’t yet eighty-sixed. He was recklessly generous, lending money to others that he almost surely knew he would never see again. For others he’d find something for them to do, drive him around if he didn’t have a car or place bets at the books that he couldn’t. Sometimes people would disappear without placing the bet. Sometimes they’d wait for it to hit and collect before leaving out of a different entrance.
The plan was to drive the car to Las Vegas where he lived and take a flight back, leaving him with the reliable key to freedom. He was old now, he wanted to hustle less and relax more, though it would truly never leave his DNA. Once, so starved for action, staying with me in Colorado after my mother died, he drove four hours to the Black Hawk Casino just to make bets that he couldn’t bear to miss. He came back the next day with a few grand less than he left with.
I took my friend Miles, we’d both been itching for a trip out to Vegas, and there was a home poker game my father had been going to for the past few years, before and throughout covid. He said it was soft and loose, good people, 1/2 with a $1 jackpot rake, most of the players middle-aged working people who felt the need to part with their real-estate salaries. When covid closed down most poker rooms, home games like these continued, masks slowly sinking beneath the chin as the hours clocked by. I hounded him not to go, and then to get vaccinated once it was available. He did the latter, which I was grateful for.
Covid had been picking back up though and the Wednesday game was smartly canceled, though we still drove down to put in a session or two at a casino. Miles and I had both caught it weeks before, and I got the booster at the same time, with the first few days putting me in a literal fever dream, aching and babbling and overheating as I tried to sleep through my body rejecting itself. When I told my dad he admitted that he also got sick recently, incapacitated for a few days and then concerned enough to go to the hospital. Upon arriving, he told me he got impatient and left, that they’d stick tubes in him and keep him there for days. I told him next time to stay at the fucking hospital, and to take it easy, just relax, I picked out a car and I’m going to drive it to you when I’m in the clear.
Before arriving in Vegas with a fake ID, he grew up in Elmwood Park, Chicago, a fact about himself he was annoyingly proud of, a trait common in people from Chicago. He was classically trained in piano and by the end of his adolescence he was a skilled and sharp piano player. He played in groups here and there, taking naturally to jazz, to weed. He was in love with David Bowie and Elton John, with anything weird and odd for the time. He was a pothead, never drank, saying once when he was young that he got blackout drunk on the beach, waking to find the love of his life walking hand-in-hand with his best friend.
When I’d stay with him in the summer he’d play for hours on a Yamaha DX-7 only owning two sound cartridges that he’d rotate after going through all the patches. It sat on a tall Peavey amp that acted as a stand, flanked by stacks of music books. He’d play and sing and change the lyrics to make me laugh while I played on my Gameboy. He’d ask me if I knew the song that he was playing, and I’d say no, because I was nine, and he’d tell me who it was and who wrote it and what else they wrote and who they used to hang out with. He loved reggae too, playing tapes of Steel Pulse and Israel Vibration while taking me to comped buffets to eat like a nine-year-old king.
He met my mother some time in the late 80s when I was accidently conceived, then born, in 1990. He had another son, something 10 years before, with a woman that seemed as equally angry as my own mother, a smoldering wreckage of a relationship. My half-brother Patrick is tall, athletic, handsome, receiving an unreal genetic half from his mother. He was nice to me when I’d see him, when he didn’t have to be, when it would have been easier just to be an indifferent teen.
For all his avoidance of responsibility, my father loved his kids, the two of us. He loved other kids as well, his many cousins growing up and living normal lives, having children, my father making sure he knew all their names and watched them when he visited. When Patrick had kids of his own, he was enamored with them. He bought them books and toys and remembered their birthdays.
He and my mother gave it a try, but not a good one. They lived in Chicago where his father would take me for walks around the block. My dad, now a gambler for now half his life, buckled down and worked construction in what I believe would be his last year as a working stiff, when he jumped off a scaffold to collect try and collect disability, ruining his knee for the rest of his life. It didn’t work.
“I have no respect for money,” he once told me when I asked why he just didn’t get a normal job. “I’ve seen too much of it come and go, too fast.”
A famous story corroborated by my mother was my dad telling her one evening he was leaving to go the store for cigarettes. He returned two weeks later, having taken a plane to Jamaica.
They didn’t work out. They moved to Tahoe for one final, failed attempt at a nuclear family. Six months later she took me to Colorado, where she had made most of her friends, where she found comfort in cocaine. Hers is a story racked with its own pain and cruelty at her own mother’s hands, tempered by an unconditional love for a me, a son she hadn’t planned to have. I’ve owed her a writeup for over 10 years now.
Miles and I arrived late Tuesday night at the Rio, where he had gotten a suite for two nights for us. Career gamblers have a lot of comp power at the network of casinos in the town, so things like rooms and drinks and show tickets tend to accrue quickly. For a few months he was technically homeless but had enough comp banked to be able to live in a series of hotel rooms, uninterrupted. He was not in the hotel, however, as he had found a slot machine down on the casino floor that had a high progressive, ready to pop. It’s a common idea to have eagle eyes for these machines that are due to pay out, some of them actually required to pay out before a certain bonus value is reached. We found him on the machine, talking to an old Asian woman who was sweating the machine with him. Behind the two of them was an older man, a vulture they’re called, someone who had also seen the high progressive and was waiting for either the machine to hit or for my dad to give up and leave it.
“I’m stuck for two thousand on this shit,” he told us. He wasn’t really a machine guy, just hoped to catch a quick hit and be on his way, but sometimes they just don’t pop as fast as you need them to.
He cashed out and took us to the room, surrendering the machine to the vulture, but he was more happy to see us than he cared about the slot. It was a two bed suite where we dropped off our bags and told him that we weren’t tired and wanted to play some cards, and that I’d use the car while we were here to get around and if needed to go anywhere to let me know. He asked if he wanted him to go back to his apartment and we laughed, insisted that he stayed and got some sleep, which he did.
“I’ve known him for five minutes and I fucking love this guy,” Miles said in the car.
I laughed. “I know.”
Miles and I have the same foundation for a degenerate lifestyle, an altered worldview, willing to part with things like money and convenience and furniture for a big shot at big money. My affinity is likely genetic, but his is impossible to know, his parents being the two most loving and charismatic people I’ve ever met in my life. Maybe Australians are built different. Still, the three of us in the same room held an immediate understanding. It’s not a good thing, it’s not a club you necessarily want to be in, but it’s one that holds a powerful, sad bond.
We left to play poker at the Aria until the sun came up.
After my parents split up my life became a seasonal rhythm: the school year with my mom in Colorado, summers wherever my dad was living, sometimes Reno, sometimes Vegas, sometimes California. These summers were the best months of my life. I remember getting off the plane at six years old and waiting in the car was a Nintendo 64. We got to his apartment and he watched me set it up myself, solving the puzzle of the RCA connector. I wouldn’t beat Mario 64 until years later.
Every summer was a new location, but I was gifted the same endless freedom every time. He let me stay up and watch Conan O’ Brien or play Nintendo if he didn’t need to watch the games he had action on. He would watch movies with me, movies I shouldn’t have been watching like Baseketball and Blazing Saddles. He took me to see the South Park movie and I heard him laughing as he covered my eyes when Saddam Hussein took his dick out while in bed with Satan. He read voraciously and made sure I did too, buying me books by comedians and biographies and Calvin and Hobbes collections and true crime non-fiction, always used, going to a bookstore weekly and letting me pick out whatever I wanted.
I don’t think he was trying to instill in me a comedic rubric that would dictate my value system for the rest of my life, but he did. I’d go into 5th grade saying “Deep Dish Moose Balls” because I’d read it in Brain Droppings by George Carlin. I remember laying on his stomach watching a Richard Pryor special while he howled laughing. I was too young to laugh so I just absorbed, with my dad saying every now and then, “You know he really did all that?”
I loved him so much that I would be racked with anxiety when he left to make his betting runs in the morning. I knew he lived recklessly, his car was always overheating, he was always trusting people that he shouldn’t. He played dumb when he didn’t want to do things and complained about simple problems and I felt like I had to protect him. He’d come home around noon and I’d rush to hug him, screaming, glad that he made it home. He smoked and I’d hide his cigarettes, once throwing them out of the car window while we drove. He had enough, sat me down and said, “Kiddo, the only things I do that you don’t see are masturbate and shit. I’m going to be ok, and you can’t live life worrying about me like this.”
We got back to the room early in the morning and crashed, my dad fast asleep. We slept until one or two, waking to find him gone from the room. He was downstairs at the same machine, having barely slept, the progressive still not popped by him or the vulture, who was now gone. He was in now for about $3,000, to his lament, the payout now unlikely to cover what he’d put in so far. Usually these didn’t run this bad but sometimes that’s the way it goes.
I told him that we’d sit on it for him and play it, he could get some food and get some sleep. He objected, and I objected his objection, and he finally surrendered back to the room with a box of lo-mein. Miles and I sat on the machine, our first paid gig on a slot. We talked about my dad, about hands from last night, about the absurdity of this buffalo-themed slot that rumbled when the bonus almost hit, but kept fucking us the same way it fucked everyone. We shouted Train catchphrases and took turns sitting in the chair.
There were only two of this particular machine, and a man sat down next to us on its twin, feeding $100 into the slot. He was tall and black, probably twice our age, a Hugo Boss crossbody and a deep, cigarette-stained voice. He heard Miles’ accent and asked us if we followed cricket, revealing an accent of his own.
“You here with the old guy that was here before?” he asked. Not surprising that he had been a spectator.
I explained the situation and the three of us talked while slowly losing money. After twenty minutes he had enough and cashed out, wishing us luck.
Something in his young years, something I’ll never know, made him despise authority, any sort of conformity. From what I gather he was a hellish, smart teen, he would impersonate his father on the phone and trade stocks on his behalf, or take impromptu flights across the country to attend concerts, once an orgy, where he got sympathy fucked by a schoolteacher and flew back days later, his parents knowing nothing. He drove with a friend to Omaha where they heard weed was growing in fields, which it was. They cut the tops off the plants and filled their trunk, getting threatened at knifepoint in the process, eventually escaping back home where they discovered that there were no flowers on what they cut, that they were all male plants.
He hated police, he hated being told what to do. He hated paying fines and having to register things. He was stubborn and childish and temperamental and it cost him years of his life in prison, once for being caught in a stolen car (judge says he took the maximum sentence because he refused to snitch, but he wasn’t the most accurate storyteller). Another stint for getting caught with a felony amount of weed gave him a second strike in California, with a third one meaning 25 to life for any felony conviction. This was amended in 2012 to only apply to “serious or violent” felonies, dulling the guillotine that hung over him for nearly 20 years.
A classic Bruno Family Caper: He was once pulled over with my mother and an infant me. The officer asked him if there were any drugs in the car. Like a petulant boy, he replied that he had lined the interior of the car with kilos and kilos of cocaine and they did a great job of catching him. This was not true, but it didn’t stop the police from making him and my mother stand on the side of the road, holding me while they ripped open the doors and seats, finding nothing. My mom eventually found the story funny enough to re-tell, but no matter how long it had been she always ended up angry at the end of it.
The machine paid out shortly after our new friend left. We were awarded 170 bonus spins at 2x, with re-triggers getting us up to around 270. It wasn’t enough, and the half hour of spins netted a little over $1200, the threshold that requires them to collect my information and send me a form. I will be reminded of my father’s death through an IRS document by this time next year.
Still, we were happy to have finished the mission for him. We returned to the room and told him how low the hit was, gave him the payout. He was pissed, moaning and scoffing the way he had for my entire life whenever he’d come home, the beat particularly bad. Sometimes he’d be pissed all night, but it usually never rolled over into the morning. He also never treated me any different, even in the depths of a big loss. He also never shut the fuck up about it.
But this wasn’t a particularly bad time. He lost a bit, but I was here, his car was ready and waiting once we left, he got some sleep, got some food. It was around 5:00 p.m. now. We headed off to the Aria to put in another session. I was down a buyin from the 2/5, Miles was up one. When I wasn’t in the room he told Miles that I shouldn’t be playing 2/5, that I wasn’t good enough yet. Miles laughed. He told me what my dad said later on in the car and I said he hasn’t seen me break shitreg ankles and lose five figures to find out how.
His parents were together his entire life, his father a man he respected and loved, and his mother someone who he made so angry that she ruthlessly dissected him from their living will and any sort of inheritance, something she made sure to remind him of constantly. His sister allied with their mother and considered him a burden. But his father was someone who quietly supported him, believing in him even when he decided to live antithesis to the American dream. My father called my grandfather every single Sunday for decades until he died last year, at something like 98 years old. He was diabetic, ready to go long before that, kept afloat by the same woman that decided my father would receive nothing upon their deaths. I met him once when we stayed in Chicago for a week, a few years after my mom died. He told me to be good and not take anyone’s shit.
At the Aria I played on a table with a European maniac with extremely short shorts. It was a swingy, lively table, and I treaded water on one buyin for most of the night. I bled out after about six hours, retrieved Miles from his table, and ended up at blackjack where I quickly lost about $10,000, your podcast dollar hard at work. Still, it was fun for the both of us, with Miles up a much-needed rack and getting to shout, “give us a big guy!” when I needed a bust.
We grabbed In-n-Out before heading back and talked about our hands. In a good way, nothing has changed since we’ve met.
I learned a lesson from my mother’s death, which was call often, pick up the phone often. My Dad since then made sure to call me every week, either before or after calling his father. I didn’t always pick up, or call back, but I never went more than a few weeks without making sure I talked to him, telling him I loved him at the end of every call. He made sure too.
In 2010 or so he had a heart attack in the Palace Station poker room. Had he been alone or elsewhere I might not have gotten 10 more years with him. He survived with a new constant burden: taking heart medication and preparing for a surgery that never came. He ate like shit and never took his medication consistently, but he did quit smoking cigarettes, which I was proud of.
A month earlier he said he was going to get surgery on his knee, finally. I told him to make sure he called me before he went in.
“What, in case I die?”
“Yes,” I said.
It turned out his heart was not in good enough shape for the procedure on his knee, but also not in bad enough shape for a procedure on his heart itself. Talking to my brother on the phone after he died, my father admitted to him that not being able to get the surgery made him depressed, something he’d never admit to me. Though he said he nearly did at my mother’s funeral, I never saw him cry once in my entire life.
We got back to the room around 1:30 a.m., he was sleeping but woke up when we walked in. I didn’t tell him about blackjack, but he did scoff when I told him I was down and Miles was up. Miles and I got into our bed and he sprawled out in his. The three of us spent a half hour talking, he told us how he had to deal poker in the 70’s to pay off a bookie, that he had come here for two weeks and never left. He talked about how a judge threw out his probation because he wasn’t actually working, just finding a way to be a degenerate gambler. This was the first time I’d ever heard this one. He had endless stories and non-sequiturs about his life, many I’ll never hear now. Some of them I estimate that I’ll gather in the coming months as I speak to his family members and friends.
He asked what people saw in Ludwig, because all the people he’s shown just don’t get it. He asked in the way that was meant to needle me, get a rise. It worked, I told him that he thinks the opinion of seven people is the entire world. He laughed at his own bait. He was proud enough to show everyone what my friend had built, though, to show my cameos and attempt to describe what I was doing. When I worked at BTS he was determined to “get twitch or whatever to work” so he could see the shows I was producing.
The conversation tapered off and I set an alarm for 4:15 a.m. Our flight was at 6:00 a.m. or so, and he’d take us to the airport, drop us off, and have an almost-new car to go do whatever he pleased.
We are getting toward the end of the story. I want to write down every single thing about my dad that I can remember, to make sure I don’t forget, but this is for whoever is reading as much as it is for myself, and I’ve been granular enough. There are a hundred stories of his that will now go untold, unheard. For as much as I wished he’d open up to me, I think the closest I’d ever gotten was just hearing him talk about his life, sometimes secretly recording his stories on my phone, knowing that this man is truly a character.
I visited him for Thanksgiving the year after I had finished college. Almost immediately we’d been arguing. For a long time I didn’t have very much patience for his complaining, his woes, his childish behavior and rudeness to waitstaff. I valued economy of words and he often just spoke to hear his own voice. I’d chastise him for asking the same questions to me that I knew he knew the answers to, that he didn’t need to make conversation like I’m a stranger next to him on a plane. I was driving a shitbox of my own, a ’92 Accord that I eventually gave him, which got stolen and then abandoned on the side of a Nevada highway, partly the reason I was apprehensive to get him something fresh from the lot.
I told him, “One day you are going to die, and I won’t ever know who you are. You’ve never had a serious conversation with me.”
He got quiet and stared out of the window for a few beats.
“I’ll tell you one day,” he said.
He never did, but what he said that day was enough.
My phone alarm went off at 4:15 a.m. I wanted to make the flight more than I wanted to hit snooze, so I shut it off and sat up on the bed. Miles woke as well and yawned.
“You ready to go?” I asked to the other bed. He didn’t respond, we all only caught a few hours of sleep, so it was expected.
He was lying on his stomach, sprawled in the same way I sleep. I walked over and touched his ankle. It felt cold the way a limb should never feel. I moved forward and squinted in the darkness, touched his arm. Also cold. His chest didn’t seem to be rising or falling. I shook his shoulder, saying “dad” in the form of a question. He was unresponsive. I shook harder. Even harder.
Miles sprung out of the other bed, concerned, pacing. I kept calling to him and then noticed a patch of dried blood on the pillow, near his mouth.
I pulled out my phone and dialed 911, was given an automated option for police or medical. A woman was shortly on the line.
“I am at the Rio in room 1528, my dad went to sleep and he isn’t waking up,” I said.
“Ok, is he breathing?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. But I did, just didn’t want to say it out loud.
She made me check, tell the truth.
“You need to get him on the floor, on his back, and I am going to tell you how to do chest compressions.”
I asked if he could stay on the bed and she hurried me, saying no, he needs to be on a flat surface. Miles had been pacing with an increased speed around the room. I asked him to help me transfer him from the bed to the floor. I grabbed his legs, Miles his shoulders. He was heavy, ragdoll. I put the phone on speaker next to me.
“Put your hands on top of one another at the center of his chest and press down an inch, wait for the chest to rise to again before doing another compression. Follow my rhythm. Are you doing it?”
“Yes.”
“One, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, EMTs are on their way, two, three, four.”
Small grunts of escaped air came through his mouth, almost live sounding. I could hear sirens. The front of his body was still warm, the side that had been against the blankets and pillows. I performed chest compressions for about a minute until hotel security came into the room and took over. I didn’t want to watch, so I walked near the door into the small bathroom hallway and sat on the counter, Miles sat down next to me. Three EMTs arrived about a minute later and took over again, asking questions to security. The woman on the phone had hung up.
Over the next 15 minutes or so I listened to the medical attempt to resurrect my father. Get this shirt off, get me an airway, epi five. One came and asked where his ID might be, I said probably in his pants. They asked me more questions while the other two followed procedure. The jargon was followable, dire. I sat in silence unless asked a question, unmoved, my head buzzing, just wanting to hear what they were saying.
The energy had come down from the other room and the conclusion finally came in the past tense.
“How old was he?”
That was it. I waited for the EMT who had been communicating with me to come around the corner and “officially” tell me, which he did, that my father was dead, that when they arrived his heart was in an unresponsive rhythm, that it was likely covid related, that he was sorry. He delivered it awkwardly, as if he didn’t feel confident at this part of the job yet. I asked him if it was his family member, would he have done everything he did today, for mine? He gained his confidence back, said yes, explained the process. I believed him.
A cop showed up, tall and oval-shaped with glasses. Miles and I had to clear out of the room while he talked to the EMTs and got caught up. They pulled chairs into the hallway where we sat and waited.
Eventually, maybe 20 minutes later, the cop came out and asked me questions. He was soft-spoken, wrote a few things down. I explained everything, again. He asked what I did, tried to make conversation. I obliged the way one would in an Uber. He let me know that now we were waiting on the coroner, and that there was a community funded organization that provided resources and advice for situations like these. He gave me their card. He was nice enough.
The coroner arrived, a short, young woman. She explained the process of funeral homes and decisions and how things went, gently and clearly. I was somewhat seasoned, having to make decisions for my mother who I didn’t share a last name with, when I was 18, so I asked the right questions and got the right information.
I asked if I could go in and see him. She said yes, but that they’d be unable to remove the tubes and devices they attached to him. I said that was fine.
He was on the floor, his shirt cut open, a bit farther away from where we had placed him. The tube, machine, thing, whatever that was meant to help him breathe was indeed coming out of his mouth.
I laid down next to him on the floor and finally broke. I told him through tears that I was sorry, sorry I couldn’t have given him more, sorry I couldn’t save him. That I wanted to get him a house and have him live easy and calm and read books and play piano. That I hope he knew how much I loved him and made sure to tell him on the phone every call. That he gave me the best years of my life and that again, I was sorry. Sorry the money didn’t come sooner so he could forget about a big score. And then I thanked him. And said I was sorry again. And still it’s all I can really feel.
He never got to see the car, a 2019 Kia Rio, ironically and cruelly named. I put Miles on a flight that day and stayed behind to take a few calls. Leaving the Rio the next day I saw the man from earlier, the cricket fan, sitting on one of those roulette machines with a big screen, a filmed woman that tells you when to place bets. I passed him, stopped, then turned around.
“Hey, how’s it going?” I asked. It took him a moment to recognize me.
“Hey!”
“I’m leaving but just saw you, and I wanted to tell you, the old guy from the buffalo machine earlier, my dad; he died last night.”
He was slightly shocked, the maximum amount available for someone hearing news of a stranger from a stranger.
“I’m sorry to hear that young man.” He asked how. I told him he didn’t wake up.
“I figured I’d let you know. I’m never going to see you again.”
“I wouldn’t say that. It’s a small world.”
I shook his hand and walked out into the empty, winter daylight.
My father was a flawed person, but a good person. He gave away his money and his time and saw the future in his and others’ kids. His blood runs through mine in ways I could never escape if I tried; we eat cereal the same way, sleep the same way, get angry in the same way. We also are addicted to chance, me lacking the inherent skill with numbers and statistics he demonstrated all his life, but a degenerate just the same.
If you made it this far, or skipped to this far, all I ask is that you tell someone in your life who you love, that you love them, someone you truly know, truly care about. Make it matter, mean it. And if you don’t have anyone to tell, then tell yourself. It’s all we’ll ever truly have. As for me, you do not need to offer me condolences or sympathy, I do not need or want it. I will remain incurably angry in that fun way, creating and giving as much as my old man did. I will be ok. Your reading this was enough.
I’ll end with someone else’s words, a common tactic by those who do not write well, but wish they could:
[…] because as long as we can keep both eyes on the road, we do not need to look at the landscape, and as long as there’s gas and asphalt and rubber trees, we can keep driving without destination, a word we know not what to do with, a word and idea, we’re really pretty sure, that somebody else was supposed to take care of, while we leased SUVs and ate maki rolls and attained thorough knowledge of Wall Street’s big gainers, and since we know nothing, since the directions were lost, since all manner of order was tossed out the window, as we enter this century grasping at straws and pointing with fingers, I urge, while you can, listen less and see more, before what lies ahead turns to dots in the rearview, before life is a marker long passed and well gone — steal those candlesticks, fill your coat up with forks, and hurry along into the night; do not let this world catch up with you, ever, and if it knocks, do not let it in.
Charles McLeod, National Treasures
