Stand by your Van

On the back of this post by one of my favorite bloggers, Richard Nikoley of Free The Animal, I decided to stop using soap and shampoo about a day after his post was published, about 3.5 months ago.

I’d always suspected that nearly every personal-care product peddled to the public was a preposterous put-on, sold to us through mass advertising and insinuating that were it not for the dozen bottles of chemically questionable concoctions crowding our counters, we would walk around smelling like dung, shedding dry flaky skin at all turns, with brittle hair, fungus ridden fingernails, oozing zits, noxious armpits and genitals and oh thank god for modern chemistry (and chemical companies!) that we can tolerate being in the same room as each other! Our very DEMOCRACY is at stake after all!

I had my first thought about this when I was a teenager and had a case of really bad acne. I tried every product on the shelf, and some not on the shelf over the course of at least two years. I finally got either sick of it or lazy and just stopped. Almost instantly, my acne cleared up substantially. I thought, wouldn’t it be funny if the products that were supposed to be our salvation were really an alternative form of chemical dependency, causing the very problems we were trying to solve by using them in the first place, all for the purpose of keeping us buying them. Nah, that would be conspiratorial and anti-capitalist, and I was a budding fan of the free-market hopped up on Ayn Rand and Ludwig von Mises. Capitalism is good! and so are the things produced under it!

Now that I’m older, I’m a little more conspiratorial and much more aware that our watered down hamstrung version of capitalism is only slightly more retarded than our country’s cultural values. The point of this is that the version of capitalism I advocate is not the same as the “consumer capitalism” we have today, and therefore I don’t feel there is any inconsistency in criticizing products of the latter while upholding the former.

That brings me to soap and shampoo. When Richard first published his post, a light switched on immediately. THIS is correct and I always knew it, and now I had the commiseration and impetus to immediately act on it. So since Dec 30th I have used soap in the shower 3 times (primarily from bouts of paranoia) and shampoo twice (both before haircuts, on the premise that the hairdressers might be accustomed to working on freshly shampooed hair). And I haven’t used any of it in the last 6 weeks.

Does that mean I don’t shower? No I shower every day, scrubbing really well with a washcloth and vigorously scrubbing my hair with my hands.

Do I smell? Nope. Although everyone around me smells like the detergent aisle at Target. It’s amazing to me how de-sensitized I had become to the chemical smell everyone exudes. It’s really rather disgusting. I smell like…nothing. Like a person.

Is my hair oily? It was for a long while, but it has been gradually getting better. There are now days where my hair is just as soft as it was before, although it actually seems a bit thicker. How funny is it that we use chemicals that strip out the natural oils in our hair, and then other products to put oils back in.

Is my skin all nasty? On the contrary, my skin has never been better. Acne breakouts are nearly non-occurring unless I eat particularly poorly the day before, whereas before I always had some pimples somewhere. The bit of eczema that I developed in the corner of my eye about 4 years ago has diminished in severity by about half. My skin is not oily or dry, it’s just…normal.

What about after I use the bathroom or before I make dinner? Yeah I still wash my hands with soap. Soap does “make water wetter” and nature had no idea what kinds of nasty crap modern human hands would come in contact with so I’m happy to leverage the power of soap in those circumstances, plus in the case of food preparation, especially for others, I feel hand-washing is part of the social contract.

[TMI alert!]

Is my “private” area all grody and nasty? Nope. In fact it is WAAAY better than it was. Any kind of…err…cheese… is made up of soap, sweat, and oil. Well soap is out of the equation, and now that my skin doesn’t have to overcompensate for my chemically stripping it of its oils every day by over-producing it, the oil is out of the equation as well. My balls are virtually “cheese-free”. As Nikoley says in his post, “If for nothing else, I’m soap free for life on this point alone.”

Nikoley also says: “I feel as though I’ve been scammed — and liberated.”

Yeah, me too.

There was definitely a period of adjustment, but then again any chemical dependency has its ugly detox period. But I stuck through it and definitely reaping the benefits now.

If you google “nikoley” and “soap” you’ll find links to more personal experiences and discussion, but as for me and soap, we are barely on speaking terms. And that goes for any other skin-care products as well.

I eat nothing but the new KFC Double Down “sandwich” for a month and see what happens. Could I stick with it? Would I die? Would I gain 200 lbs? Thoughts?

Was wasting time cruising Sharkscope and came across this guy’s 2010 results:

Notice the highlighted portion? He’s playing $36 turbo 9-man SNGs on Full Tilt. That down period lasted about 650 games and is over 100 buyins deep.

What’s amazing is that despite that godawful run, this player is still #6 overall on his respective leaderboard, and the highest-ranking Full Tilt player on it.

How many SNG players do you know who would more or less give up poker and stick their heads in the oven after results like that, and totally fail to rebound? Maybe you don’t know a lot of SNG players, but I do, and the answer is: lots. And yet this guy managed to hang in there, grind his volume and get back on top. I don’t know this player personally, but this implies:

1. He had a particularly large bankroll for his chosen game, which means that he was probably doing the right thing: letting his bankroll grow. All the proper bankroll advice in print presumes that your bankroll is allowed to grow over time, not just withdrawn down to 75 or 100 or 150 buyins month after month. The fact that he was able to withstand this kind of downturn and never move down means that either he started off what many players consider to be “over-rolled” or allowed himself to get that way, which in fact is the proper thing to do.

2. He was able to maintain confidence in his ability to win despite his losing results. A lot of players in his situation would “take a month off” to “question everything they know” about SNGs, poker, their sexuality, life, and the universe, and indeed I’m sure a lot of the monkeys in the forums would encourage him to do so. But this player didn’t use this episode as an excuse to slack. Instead, he went to work. This means that he either worked hard to expose and correct any bad habits that he might have developed, or, not having found any, had the discipline to do what was correct despite what would be a soul-sapping period of extreme frustration for almost anyone. I’m sure he was buoyed by the fact that his lifetime graph looked like below, where this incident appears as a mere blip on the radar screen of what ultimately is a very long run.

I think this guy’s example can help give us a little perspective on our next “rough day” losing 15 buyins or whatever, or in the face of even longer bad runs, remind us what it takes to get out of it and that it is indeed possible.

Now get to work!

After a couple sour weeks and an overall disappointing month at the virtual tables, I’m looking forward to leaving my computer behind and playing on some real felt with actual cards for ten days in Vegas with the rest of the TEAM MOSHMAN crew (I do some coaching work for Collin’s staking empire and thus am a full-fledged member of his posse).

Well, not “with” them per se, because to be frank, this trip isn’t really about palling around for me. After a few cursory drinks and pleasantries, I’m pretty much going to have my face buried in cards the whole time. I’ll be playing some low buyin MTTs, the $100-$200 variety from which I made a partial living when I lived here in 2006-2007. I played several hundred of this kind of tournament that year, often two a day, and while I was nowhere near as proficient a tournament thinker as I am now, I managed to grind out a 125% ROI for the year. That’s not bad scratch as it is, and who knows what kind of damage I could do with what I know now.

Even though I’m planning playing 2-3 MTTs a day (depending on how deep I go in them), 20-25 MTTs is a pretty tiny sample and it’s possible I could totally tank it in the turd bowl. But that’s tournament poker. Longest I went without cashing back in the day was 11 tournaments, but then I went on a tear, banking high finish after high finish and it was as if that 11 days never happened. Let’s hope I don’t break my own record.

Also, if the stars align, I might get to satellite into some of the Venetian Deep Stack events that are going on this month. I feel a need to get a little bit of revenge on them as I was run out of the few that I played (in the V’s inaugural series) really quickly on the typical ridiculous BS that sends you muttering walking down Las Vegas Blvd. looking for something to do with the rest of your day when you planned on spending it stacking other people’s chips.

My flight leaves in 4.5 hours and I’m strategically loading up my iPod with content to accompany me on the trip. Highest priority is to fit Tommy Angelo’s “Eightfold Path to Poker Enlightment” series in my limited disk space. Thank bejeebus DC has no DRM. Makes it easy to get files where and how you want them. Then I’ll make sure I load up on podcasts and radio shows (Adam Carolla, a bunch of NPR stuff, and the “History of Howard Stern” specials), audiobooks (probably Jared Diamond’s Collapse and other things along those lines), music (undecided what to bring here), and maybe some more poker vids that I never really have had time to watch.

Above all, whether I run goot or bad, I’m looking forward to 10 days not looking at that soul-sapping computer screen.

Here’s hoping I run goooot in Vegasaments!

P.S. I’m going to try and twit, tweet, and twat my progress. Follow “vandweller” for the hot details of my days.