Day 16

If being a mother is the hardest job in the world, being an uncle is the funnest. 

Obligation exists, certainly. I love these kids, I want to protect them, I don't care for moments when they're starving or in immediate physical danger. I'm also, mostly, not responsible for them. I'm allowed to retreat to my sanctuary. I'm able to turn off, set my own hours, take unlimited PTO. In most cases this creates a bit of distance and opportunity to observe. 

While I'm living here, though, things start to shift. For these kids' entire lives I've been less than a part-time parent, rather more like a substitute fun house. Now that I'm omnipresent in their homes there's more realness. I'm sometimes interacting with them while doing some sort of chore - cooking or cleaning up their mess. I step on their lego-eque toys from time to time. I try to take phone calls and can't hear over their screams, or their repetitive tv shows, or loud banging of water bottles on the table. I've become somewhat integrated into the household dynamics. They're getting used to me. I'm getting used to them. I'm not quite used to the noise, though.

In other words, the vibe is starting to normalize a bit. The realness factor has crossed an arbitrary, yet important threshold. At first it took me off guard, last week's bout of ennui was part due to this shift and subsequent emotional turbulence. The novelty wore off, which was a bit scary for a moment. Am I actually getting sick of the kids? But I love them, why am I feeling withdrawn? I believe that what I mistook as aversion to the house was more like a brief overwhelming feeling exacerbated by the rain and lack of sun. A house with three children can be a lot. I wasn't quite used to the noise. 

After a few good days I feel much more relaxed and energized. I'm out the other side. Giving myself permission to take my space without any guilt was a big part of it. "I'm going to remove myself from the screaming children now! I love them but they are not mine. See you in an hour." It does the trick. It's realistically all I need. Actually, more than the rest itself, just the ability to gain that rest does a lot for the mental health. It's an escape hatch that gives me comfort without even using it. Don't get me wrong, I still pull the lever. Just once a day, though.

These are all day 18 thoughts and feelings. Quick rewind,

All through the night and into the morning of Day 16 the rain comes down heavily. It's becoming a bit absurd, now. Without much to do I resign myself to a slow morning. By early afternoon the rain subsides, giving way immediately to warmth and sunshine. Jacki is at the pool with the kids while Brendon and I set out to explore the aftermath of the flooding. Apparently it's not at its peak, Brendon explains, since a lot of water is still making its way in from upstream. We head to the golf club for a quick lunch and a few horse races before we need to need to pick up the kids from the pool.

There's a big gambling culture in Australia, apparently. Every day there are horse races on television, broadcasted from all over the country. Using a handy app on his phone Brendon places some modest bets on nearly each race, allowing me to pick one of the horses. At one time in my life I would have picked the funniest name. It's not my money, though, so I pick the highest odds. Based off my picks we ended up about one or two bets in the red. Horse racing isn't for me, although I don't have the app on my phone. That's the last thing I need, truly.

I've felt satisfied in my gambling to this point since a few days prior, wherein I hit a bonus on the pokey to get up to +$140 on my winnings. I sent a picture of the win to Brendon at the time, claiming "this is too easy!" The next text I sent, twenty minutes later, read "I lost it all!" Probably for the best, since having some loose bills in my pocket would have sent me right back to losing it anyway. I'm -$30 on the pokeys so far, clocking in about two hours of entertainment. That's popcorn and a movie anyway. Not worth a mention on the lost cash, but it definitely leaves some thoughts on gambling overall.

I can sense in me a pull towards gambling in any form. I find it thrilling - flimsy and stupid and childish, but extremely fun. One of the best games I ever invented is to make four computers fight each other in Super Smash Bros, placing a buck or five on one of them. Truly random, skill-less, and silly. Slot machines have worse winning odds than any casino game in existence, but they thrill me nonetheless. I feel enough shame in the activity to make it even more enjoyable. It's degenerate and awful. Poison for the mind and soul. Dangerous and short-sighted. The most fun things in life follow this sort of formula though, don't they? You ever hit a big bonus on a slot? Feels like you beat the universe. Like you're the chosen one. There's a reason they make so much money, and it's not because of weak-willed, stupid people. It's because life can be hard sometimes and there's a lot of value in hope. 

The best way to utilize slot machines or any gambling, in my experience, is to maximize the amount of time between each press. To savor those moments of glorious wishful thinking. To allow the fantasy of a major win to materialize in your brain in a way that charges up the neurons, stretching the bounds of your perceived future in a way that can last. With enough time, and a low enough bet, these moments can string together at a minimal cost. Maybe it costs $100, but if it lasts two hours then maybe you leave with a sense of hunger for that future you just conjured. It's playing with fire, It's chasing something unrealistic. It's also unimportant to win anything at all. It's the hope that matters. There's some value in that.

There's an exercise in self control, too. Should I have left with my $140 in my pocket? Hindsight says absolutely. Taking the losses afterwards felt pretty lousy, and I left the pokey that day a loser. Pain drives growth, does it not? Can I extrapolate that feeling of loss to a lesson that benefits me outside of my next gambling session? Can't this loss be considered cheap? I realize how much of this sounds like coping, like I'm just defending my worst vice with creative metaphor and spin. Can't it not be both? What's better, someone who yearns for the tables but exercises self control to keep themselves away, or someone who slowly leaks money towards a hobby while training themselves to find meaning in the process? There's worse ways to enjoy gambling, certainly. I've long accepted that I will be a lifetime loser, and the real game is in keeping those loses marginal. I've done well enough so far.

These thoughts tumble around my as I catch myself staring at the pokey room after my second beer at the club. Without giving me any chance to test my self control, he tells me it's time to pick the boys up from the pool. I tell myself that I won, and in a way I actually did, since he paid for lunch after a horse named "Jess ___"  won him $35. 

We pick the boys up and head back to the house. The end of the street has flooded about 18 inches since we left, with Brendon's prediction coming true. It's strange phenomenon to see rising floods long after the rain stops falling, and even stranger how the town came alive during this time. Apart from enjoying the long-awaited sunshine, there's a levity in Narrabri when the rains fall down. There's the element of the farming community welcoming the added water, the tendency for droughts to occur and just the rarity of rain overall. We speak to some neighbors on the way to a "flood party" at the local pub, and after a chit chat with me in the front seat Brendon turns to me and asks "Did you pick up around 30% of what we just talked about?" I told him it was a pretty solid estimate. Aussies get very slangy when they're excited.

As for the kids, they've been eager to do nothing else than Minecraft since the weekend began. It's their favorite thing in the world. We pick up where we left off from last weekend, except this time with the improvements I've made to our little digital town. There are plenty of advanced mechanics to this game that are beyond the average 7-year olds understanding. In many ways Minecraft is a game about exponential growth and snowballing your power. While the basic gameplay loop entails leveling up your tools and armor (Stone, then Iron, then Diamond) - there's a more important progression system revolving around economics. Non-playable characters called "Villagers" can be given jobs and subsequently traded with, allowing for renewable resources to be directly converted into high level weapons and armor without any sort of exploring or randomness. This takes a bit of knowledge and a lot of patience. 

All this is to say, this achieves an easy sort of "reset button" for the kids when things inevitably go poorly for them. Dying in Minecraft is actually quite brutal. You drop all your items on death and go back to your spawn point, and in some cases, those dropped items get destroyed and lost forever. Being able to quickly get those items back is a crucial part of keeping that feeling of progression alive. Otherwise these kids would die once, get way too discouraged, and decide that it's time to restart the world to their more familiar state of early game progression. I'm not allowing this. We're going to beat the damn game.

As the kids log in and I start to show them around the work I've accomplished for them throughout the week, I get regain the sense of purpose in playing this game with them. These memories, lessons, and chastisements I'm putting these kids through can be legitimately valuable as they come to terms with challenges in their late childhood & early adolescence. I want them to think about what they're doing before they do it. I want them to consider other people when pursing what they want from the world. I want them to be able to think ahead and make a plan for what they want. I want them to have patience in achieving their goals. More importantly than all of that, I want them to be respectable Minecraft players. That's an important thing in today's world, at least for seven year olds. Don't be a tree punching scrub. Level up, gamers.

We play on until it's time for me to cook some shrimp scampi then we call it a night. With golf canceled the next day I'm slightly concerned for what we're going to do to fill up our collective day off. I can only play Minecraft for so long...