Tuesday, July 04, 2017

No Brain for Poker


A friend of mine is playing poker in Las Vegas. He just sent me a short video of him or someone apparently winning a poker hand. I say "apparently," because I don't understand the first thing about poker, and I think it would be difficult if not impossible for me to learn. I've never been good at learning these kinds of things. He, on the other hand, learns these and many other kinds of things easily. And he's a pretty good poker player from what he's led me to believe.

I don't know if I'm better or worse off not understanding anything about poker and probably being unable to learn. However, I think I'm much worse off being apparently incapable of learning so many things that many if not most people seem capable of learning quite readily. It makes for a very narrow range of activity I can hope to perform and enjoy with any potential competence.

I wish I wasn't so limited in what I can do. But I'm still grateful that I can do some things reasonably well. For one thing, I think I can speak and write better than most people.

I've read articles that say the printed word will increasingly give way to multimedia communications that rely more on imagery and audio than text until text becomes virtually obsolete.

I hope that never happens. But if and when it does, I guess I'll be obsolete too, if I'm not already. But maybe it won't happen until after I'm dead and won't care.

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