Aimlessly

He hated looking at his watch. He couldn't avoid it, but he could hate it. He hated staring at the thin, inconsequentially thin figure of the second hand marching grimly around the face, ticking off the moments which came and would never come again. Time was a bitch, Deck thought.

He tried his best to look at his watch less and less. He tried to avoid being seated anywhere within view of a clock. He tried to ignore the ticking of the watch of the guy seated next to him at the table, whether it was real or imagined.

He got better at it gradually. He started waking up at 12:47 PM on the nose every day, and decided to donate his alarm clock to Goodwill. He ate dinner everyday at 5:15 PM sharp, since Subway's 2 footlong sandwiches for $8.99 deal started at 5 PM and that was how long it took him to walk to the restaurant. He saved the second sub for breakfast, which he usually ate at around 4 or 5 AM. He went to bed as soon as he finished eating his breakfast sub (usually a sweet onion chicken teriyaki on honey oat bread, with lettuce, tomatoes, olives, pickles, and jalapeno peppers). Sometimes, he would brush his teeth. Most of the time, he just comforted himeself with the fact that nobody ever came to see him anyways, so no one would ever notice or care.

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Online poker was not the occupation Deck had gone to MIT to prepare for. But he didn't know why he went to MIT anyways, so it really didn't matter. The whole thing had been very accidental, and Deck felt like he had somehow just woken up one day, and found himself living in Boston. He remembered half-heartedly filling out his application, and turning in some sort of generic essay (or maybe a couple of generic essays) beginning with the words "I wasn't really sure what to write for this essay, so..." Apparently, somebody at MIT was trying to get fired, because Deck soon found out that he wasn't the only one in his class who didn't really belong there. It wasn't that he wasn't smart. He just wasn't brilliant. He had no outstanding traits whatsoever. He did nothing better than anyone else. Everything was easy for him, but he wasn't especially good at anything. Oh, he ended up graduating, but neither he nor MIT felt like either had gained anything of value from the other after four years.

And so it was that after he left the most prestigious technical university in the world, he found himself profoundly and utterly without direction. He had no overwhelming desire to do anything. The few truly brilliant folks he had met in school did nothing to inspire him; they had dismissed him as being just another bright young fellow who lacked the extra something special needed for success, and so he had dismissed each of them as being just another asshole who didn't and couldn't give an honest shit about him. But even if he wasn't inspired or motivated, he could still be hungry. The question of what to do for money led him naturally to the solution which kept him fed and occupied now.

Poker came as easily to him as everything else in his life had. His temperament was especially suited to the game. Natually emotionless and introverted, he couldn't give off tells if he tried. Some of the more overzealous types took this as a sign that he was trying too hard, and in trying to take his money, lost considerable portions of their own stacks before they realized that Deck really was as dead calm and serious as he looked. The other guys just didn't notice, or if they did, didn't know what it was they had noticed. He was just as calm when he took his bad beats. They were inevitable, but he didn't mind them all that much. Probably because he didn't mind anything all that much, an attitude which had gotten him pretty far in life thus far by most peoples' measures, and would probably have carried him even farther had he never met her.

...


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If a certain friend tells me he wants to rape a certain other acquaintance of mine, am I obligated to tell her?