A long time ago, I discovered some folks at my work had a regular card game. Poker, it was, not Hearts, which is the card game referenced in the title, & which I once knew how to play but don't now, & which will not at all be the subject of any of the songs on this week's show, which is a Valentine's Day show, so the songs will be about the sort of hearts which one thinks of when one thinks of love & Valentine's Day, & probably there'll be some discussion about anatomical hearts, but we all know don't we that the heart is no more the seat of emotions than the liver is the seat of the soul, which as far as I know no one ever believed but which seemed like the right thing to say at the time, where was I? oh yeah, they played Poker not Hearts.
These weren't my friends but I was friendly with them & I wondered why I wasn't invited to their weekly poker game. Indeed, even if it were small stakes, it seems like it would be fun to hang out with people - some of whom, come to think of it, I used to bowl with - & play cards & have male friends in my 40s. When I asked, I didn't get a satisfying answer. In fact, I don't remember the answer I got, but the answer basically said, "You can't play poker with us."
The person who rejected me - a co-worker - he didn't consult any of his poker buddies, but perhaps it was his game at his house. He lived nearby at the time - walking distance, even on miserably hot Texas days. Or nights. But he unilaterally decided that I was not to be one of the poker people.
Interestingly, this guy had the habit of telling me, not all the time, but enough of a time that I noticed, stories from his poker games when we ran into each other at work. "You'll never guess what happened last night at poker," he'd say. Or: "Let me tell you this funny thing one of the guys told me on Poker Night." He didn't seem to remember that I had hinted at one time that I might enjoy playing poker with the guys & he said no. Or maybe he did remember, & he was just being a dick.
It didn't mean that much to me, not getting invited to play. I had been excluded from things by people my entire life. One gets used to such things. He told me that it was a rule that one person picked all the music for one night, & one of the guys always played stuff everyone hated. That would have been too much pressure for me. The deejay in me would hope everyone was digging what I played.
Anyway, I thought about Poker when I thought about Hearts & I had hoped as I wrote this to come up with a clever ending which said something about "breaking Hearts" or "lonely Hearts" - oh I know! I could have said, "I never did get to play Poker with those guys, so I spent many hours in my darkened room playing lonely Hearts."
Not bad. I wish I had thought of it before I got to the end, though. It remains just an idea that never saw proper exploration.
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