I’m a sheep at the card table, just waiting to be fleeced. I’ve got no poker face, for starters — everything comes out in the eyebrows, and in the smirk I simply cannot erase. Add in a general fogginess on the actual rules of most card games, and you can see how I’d spend a rainy afternoon getting fearsomely bluffed by a five-year old in multiple hands of I Doubt It.
But as a writer, I’m in love with the language, with the music of the games, with double down and shoot the moon, with five-card charleys and busted flushes and inside straights, with one-eyed jacks and suicide kings. There’s romance in that language, and it has run like an underground river through folk and popular song for centuries before Lady GaGa was born.
