Dance the Ztar

Part 1- Dancing

I couldn’t wait to get off work, and it was one of those nights where the minutes ticked slower as excitement grew.  Meeting old friends one hasn’t seen in awhile always encourages anticipation, otherwise they wouldn’t be old friends.  They would be friends who faded away instead of friends who grew strong with time.  Instead of merely fading away old friends grow apart because of distance, obligations, etc.

 

Old friends conjure up anticipation better than ‘the regular’ set of friends just because the best memories are the ones immediately associated with said friends.  And because you are meeting them for the first time in seemingly forever you just know this is going to be one of those times.

And tonight was one of those times.  Not, despite thoroughly enjoying their company, because of them, but because of the environment.  Tonight, I went to what I imagined a bar to be before I turned 21.  Crowded, loud, exciting.  The full bar experience.  I had to walk up to the bar to get served, instead of someone coming around to ask for my drink orders.  Different from the restaurant bar experience.  Different from the small bar experience.  Different.

Our destination was an Irish pub.  We arrived, after meeting up with our friends, and searched the casino for a way out.  Instead, we exited to dead end balconies and endless loops of escalators.  Eventually, we found our way back to the parking garage and walked down the street towards the Irish pub.  Cars splashed water on us as they sped by, us being ill equipped for the weather hurried our pace.

Eventually, there it was.  Next to the Irish pub was a, let’s say, Southern bar with five cent beer and country music.  There was a long line.  I do live north of the Mason-Dixon line, yet there is this inescapable ‘Larry the cable guy’ influence on such a large amount of the populace.  Obviously it is a large simplification to credit this trend to one ‘comedian’.  Perhaps it is more due to 9/11, nationalism, corporate sponsored populism, and the general commercialization of ‘the south’ as a concept.  Or, to sum it up in four words, Larry the Cable Guy.

What people think of themselves, as far as social groups go, is unimportant really.  That really only determines the group of friends they have, and perhaps the type of job they will take, but only to a small extent.  It’s mostly just the least economical circle of social groups, the friends, that will be effected by the social group one chooses by dress and speech.

We chose our group, certainly.  We speak in full sentences and pride ourselves on correct pronunciation (to the point of ridicule when someone pronounces a word incorrectly).  I wear, if possible, flannel shirts I buy for three dollars apiece at the Goodwill with the same pair of jeans I wear to work day to day.  And of course my black thick rimmed glasses and badly grown beard and puffy hair.  That is my look.

I moved furniture with two guys that belong firmly to the ‘southern bar’ next to the Irish Pub category, however I can’t picture them taking the trip to the city to drink.  Instead I just seem them slamming down warm cheap lite beer sitting on the bed of their truck and throwing the empty can as far as they can before they drive off towards whatever.  Perhaps with a rifle stowed somewhere.

What we do, us the intelligentsia, is arrive at this Irish bar where the bouncer checks our ID’s.  He then tells us there is live music downstairs and a ‘DJ’ upstairs.  After finding no seats downstairs where the solo acoustic guitarist/singer is performing, we trek upstairs with our drinks.

The upstairs is crowded and too loud for conversation across the table.  The goal upstairs, while listening to the general roar of a crowd talking to itself and music played on every city’s most popular stations, was to dance, at some point.  This drove me, at least, ever the performer and happy clown, to want to get drunk enough to entertain.  

After many beers, I was drunk enough to dance.  But the creative flair wasn’t there, listening to songs I heard places I didn’t want to be, played by people I resented for playing those very songs.  So I was in a situation where I had to dance to songs I despised on their very principle (mass produced bullshit, in summation of a long argument) and I couldn’t.  

I couldn’t because I reached the oasis of clear thinking.  I call it, when I rarely achieve it, my philosophical drunk.  Instead of just dancing like I would have at black out or trashed stages, I just thought.  Thought about everything I’m writing now.  About listening to ‘DJ’s whose only job was to choose songs Pandora could have chosen if one searched “top hits.”  I know because I have to listen to a Pandora station called ‘top hits’ every day at work.

What do these DJ’s actually do?  Listen to requests for “teach me how to doug-e” and decide what the appropriate lapse between repeats is?  Wait for the energy to reach a precipice as one searches in iTunes for that “shots shots shots” song?  Tonight the prerequisite for being a “DJ” was to be a bald white dude.  I think they “DJ”ed my junior prom.

I understand the urge to dance, I really do.  I enjoy dancing and losing myself in the moment, but usually by myself when the music or mood takes me.  There is something so contrived about dancing at a business filled with random customers.  At least with the high school prom one knows most of the people dancing.  Here it was filled with strangers of all ages, some drunk, with the pretext of bumping into the wrong person perhaps causing a fight.  With my first glimpse of the people dancing, I saw within each clustered group at least one person holding the now ubiquitous cell phone light in a dark area.

I know people talk a lot about the effects of cell phones, smart phones, and portable communication technology, and that the drawbacks are known and rejected in favor of the benefits they provide.  But still, one must acknowledge from time to time the large paradigm change in body language that the smart phone has created.  Those without these phones I think are far more perceptive of the effects on nonverbal communication.

But what does this symbol of nonverbal language mean: is it as easy as a sign of boredom with present company and/or environment?  Is it a wish to be with someone else or somewhere else?  Either way, one can see how discouraging, in this environment of forced dancing or faux spontaneity, these thing can be to one who genuinely likes to dance for fun.  Not for form, or to practice dance moves learned as ‘appropriate for the song or genre,’ but just to feel one’s body moving in space and doing something that seems at its core subversive.  Maybe that’s just me.  

Instead this was the complete perversion of my concept of dancing.  Maybe I’m just making too much of this.

Part 2- The Casino

The casino resides inside of a boat because like international waters there are no laws.  Of course that isn’t true, but due to some strange laws, operating a casino docked on the water is ok, while playing a game of poker on the ground isn’t.  Whatever.  No matter my dislike of gambling because of what it does to people, and also the focus on money and its importance in happiness, etc., I can’t think of any rational reasons gambling is illegal except moral ones, and by moral, I mean religious.  From the same vein as no off-premises alcohol sales on Sunday.  Lawmakers saw good Christians damning themselves to hell, and knew they had to step in and prevent this sin.  No serving yourself alcohol on Sundays! (Unless you bought some ahead of time, like every good alcoholic knows to do).

Walking through the large hallways of the casino, one is immediately reminded of boarding an airplane through those strange hallways where suddenly the temperature  and humidity changes and one can tell they are no longer on quite as solid ground as before.  It’s a neat feeling, and alien to everyday experience (unless you go to casino boats or fly a lot in which case you would probably zip up your coat as you walked towards the connecting hallways.  (And you would have a better word for them than ‘connecting hallways’).

When we stepped from what I assume was ‘gambling is illegal’ area and stepped onto the actual boat, there was a security check point.  Our IDs were checked by what could either be described as the real life manifestation of a 25ish year-old squeaky voiced teen from the Simpsons, or that weenie from 30 Rock.  I don’t watch the show, but you know who I’m talking about.  He commented on how recently we had turned 21 and asked if it was our first time on the boat.  He was shocked to hear it was for a few of us.  He then implored us to “stick to the slots.  Stick to the slots.” 

There was also, if I recall correctly, a security guard or two.  Most notable was the older man in a suit with slicked back grey hair who could not have fit in better, sitting on a barstool next to the (metal detectors?  They looked like turnstiles without the metal arms you turn) things we had to walk through.

I imagined being caught counting cards and having security guards surround me and take me down to the sub deck, into a small white room, sitting me on a chair and waiting for this guy with the slicked back hair to come in, and as the guards hold me down, he punches me in the gut.

Philosophical drunk was the term. 

My friends had one dollar they wished to bet on the slots with but my smallest bill was a ten.  We found a suitable ‘penny slot’ and, contrary to its name, bet 9 pennies per pull for a larger prize possibility if we hit a winning combination.  I was told that instead of pulling the lever each time I could just push a button to spin the machine.  I scoffed at such a suggestion.  After all, if I was to blowing my money, I wanted the full gambling experience, and pulling the lever has always seemed to be a large part of the gestalt.

The highest I got that night was winning thirty-two  cents over the ten dollars I already had.  Em asked if I wanted to cash out.  Once again, I scoffed.  I mean really, thirty-two cents?  I would have rather just lost it so I could pull the lever more and hear the sounds.  Even when you lose money and cash out poorer than when you started it plays the change pouring out sound.

And my god is it addictive and rewarding.  Every part of the experience is designed to be.  One of my friends had mentioned the often repeated fact about casino design.  That is, they are designed without windows or clocks.  It’s like entering a vacuum where nothing changes and time isn’t noted at all.  One can from there start to understand how one could sit at a slot machine for up to a day, and end up defecating themselves.

Obviously, the time distortion is half of the reason for this.  The other half I covered somewhat already, but now intend to cover further.  The reason slots are so addicting for so many people is that, well, it gives you a lot of dopamine, like the best drugs do (cocaine, for example.  Most drugs act on dopamine).  Dopamine is the reward neurotransmitter.  When you get a reward, your brain is flooded with dopamine, and man, does it ever feel good.

And of course, we like when things feel good.  So we seek to repeat whatever we did to get those feelings again.  This is how you train a dog with treats.

It’s called classical conditioning, and if you’ve taken an intro to psych course you’ve heard of it and know the name associated with it, B.F. Skinner, and the movement he forwarded, behaviorism.  Perhaps you’ve even heard of the Skinner Box and it’s inevitable comparison to slot machines and online games.  If you haven’t, let me break it down.

This is one of many examples of what could be in a Skinner Box, but for our purposes, this is the most useful example.  Let’s put a mouse in a box.  Inside that box is a light, allowing the mouse to see.  Under the light is a lever, and under that a dispenser.  The mouse walks around for a while until it finally, perhaps by accident, triggers the lever, and food falls out of the dispenser.  The mouse eats the food and looks around, trying to figure out what exactly happened until it chances back onto the lever.  More food.

Now the mouse gets it, it has to press the lever for food.  And it works, for a bit.  Eventually, the lever doesn’t give out food each time it is pulled.  Maybe it only rewards food every five times, and then later ten.  But still, the mouse keeps pushing and pushing.

If instead of food the level is hooked up to the mouse’s brain, with an electrode stimulating the pleasure center of the rodent’s brain, the mouse will press the level repeatedly until it dies of thirst or starvation.

Either way, one can see a slot machine as the literal embodiment of such a thing.  The chance of hitting it big.

After losing a dollar or two, I was urged to seek out a machine that would be ‘hot’ soon.  I went with it even though I thought that I had seen a documentary long ago that debunked the whole ‘hot’ thing.

So I looked for seats with large butt imprints, which often put me next to other people at the slot machines.  Being drunk still, I didn’t mind violating the personal space equilibrium that had guided my entire life up to that point, and I found it easy to ignore the people next to me.

The first time I did this I found 20 cents extra in my credits, and was very confused by this.  Later, sobering up, I realized that it was the woman next to me’s twenty cents, and that most likely she was playing both machines.  I’m happy I lost every single pull there, otherwise it would have turned into a sadder story that it already was. 

Later I sat next to a small man, who, when I sat down, stood up from his slot and stood behind me, carefully watching every pull I made.  Clearly, I had made the same mistake again, and he was waiting for me to ruin all his investment in making the machine ‘hot’.  I was going to steal it all from him.  Once again, I’m glad I didn’t win anything.

I ended up losing four dollars total, when originally I had only intended on losing one dollar and cashing out.  But I wanted to play more.  And the temptation was strong to keep playing.  After all, with each pull, the big win seemed like a possibility.

Perhaps the experience wouldn’t have allowed me to be so taken in if I wasn’t intoxicated.  Even drunk, I had all these thoughts going through my mind about how I felt about slot machines, and how unlikely it really was that I’d ever win an amount of money that would make me glad I did so.  As I said, the highest I ever got was winning $1.42, bringing me back up and over my original ten.  After that I don’t think I won another time.

But for some, warming up machines is a way of life, the lever in the skinner box.

Other than the fact that these two things happened in the same night, I’m not sure I can connect them in a reasonable or useful fashion.  The apathy towards dancing at the bar and the pull of the slot machines.  Perhaps the two draws of capitalism, sex and money risk, and what capitalism really does to these two things.  But maybe not.