Hagar and I saw our relationships collapse around the same time, and we vented to one another from 6000 miles away.
"So you were quoted on the radio," she told me Saturday night.
How's that?
"A friend of mine has a talk show, and I'd told her about your 'last chip' thing, and she liked the analogy so much that she shared it with her listeners."
Fantastic. Now I'm a whiney loser in three hemispheres. I should have whined to a co-worker in South Africa and gotten the quadfecta.
The "last chip thing," in a nutshell: in recent years, it's felt like life doles out a stack of chips to each of us. These chips are for us to gamble on love as we see fit. Some people yell "Whoo hoo! I'm rich!" and rush straight to the cashier. Others gamble on relationships, watching their stacks dwindle for a while before saying "Nuts to this" and cashing out after a modest win that helps them recoup some of their losses. And then there's people like me. Decade after decade, I grind it out at love's gaming tables, hoping to hit it big, instead watching my stack slowly, inexorably vaporize. Sometimes I lose a mass of chips all at once; occasionally they replenish; usually they just erode.
Nevertheless, since high school my stack has whittled down to a nub. I can hold my remaining couple of chips in one hand now, and I hold them tightly. Recently, my stack took a big hit when I walked up to the roulette wheel and said "Half my stack on 00!"
Interestingly, people under 22 don't get this analogy. People over 30? They wince.