Where You've Been, Where You Are, and Where You're Going

The scene was a nondescript casino floor-side bar in the Monte Carlo casino, a bar not much different than dozens of others that sprinkle the Las Vegas Strip like freckles on an Irishman. The time was 5:30pm on a Tuesday, a time when respectable folks with respectable jobs are either wrapping up work for the day or already on their way home to their respectable families.

Dan Michalski, Stu Hoegner and I were seated around one corner of the bar with four Blue Moons (theirs) and two Fat Tires (mine) between the three of us. I don't know how respectable Stu is – he *seems* respectable, at least – and I won't speak for Dan, but I don't neatly fit that description.

Stu asked me about my "career trajectory". It's an odd one. It's not just that I turned a page a few years ago and moved from one line of work to the next in a tangential direction. No, I put the book down mid-sentence and picked up an Xbox controller. What came before: eight years of corporate and commercial lawyering for the finance and real estate sectors in the greatest city in the world. What came after: a poker industry jack-of-all-trades (master of none?) in a city of tract-housing subdivisions separated by cookie-cutter strip malls for 20 miles in every direction. The connections between the two careers are tenuous, at best; the only connection between the two cities is that they're polar opposites.

And yet there I was in 2008, packing up my life to head west. Again. I even wrote a long post about some of the thinking that led to the decision. Once I'm on board with something I commit 100%. To do anything less is to do a disservice to myself.

There's plenty I could say about that trip, from its emotionally wrought beginning to its predictable end. Little backstage anecdotes that never made their way into the critical reviews of the show. It's not ancient history – what's a year or three, really? – but it's sufficiently in the past that dredging up those anecdotes now would do nothing but hurt feelings and point up the capacity of otherwise intelligent people (like me) to turn obvious facts into the illusory narrative that they most want to read. I'm no stranger to ritual self-disembowelment but I try not to splatter other people with my entrails.

So I brushed by all of that as neatly as I could and told Stu that I moved to Vegas for what were probably the wrong reasons. The 2008 post is a great reminder not to put on rose-colored glasses, not to see the grass on the other side as greener (rosier?) than it actually was. But it also doesn't mean that the specific reasons I had at that specific time for moving specifically to Vegas were the right ones. Specifically.

Stu nodded, then asked me if I'm happy where I am now. Which, to remind you, at the time of his question was a nondescript casino-floor bar in the Monte Carlo at 5:30pm on a Tuesday – a city I moved to for the wrong reasons – two weeks after the poker industry's "Black Friday". ("Why's it gotta be black?" --Dawn Summers)

I gave Stu a lengthy response about the quality of Vegas and the quality of its inhabitants, a response that Dan echoed. I might have said something about respectability that's now lost in a Fat Tire haze dulled by the passage of a week's time.

Yet I've been thinking about Stu's question since he asked it. See, there's no guarantee that anything would be better or worse in NYC right now. The investment fund that I worked for was heavily invested in the Russian market and in Eastern European real estate, both of which peaked the very day I left the fund (obviously I was the lynchpin). My replacement was laid off six months later.

The simple fact is that there's no going back. You can't compare the present with anything but itself. There's no "presumed present" of an alternate life, especially three years after the relevant decision point that created the new branch. Nobody knows what my life would be like if I hadn't left NYC, not even me. You can only live the life you're living.

Am I satisfied with this current life? Well, there are levels of satisfaction. I doubt I'd be completely satisfied with any life. I'm constantly looking to improve things. But as I look both ways up and down the road, am I happy where I am now?

You know, it's been a long time since anybody asked me that. I'm great. Thanks for asking, Stu.