Shut Up and Calculate: Gambling, Divination, and the Abacus as Tantra

THERE ARE LAKES at the bottom of the ocean. I saw it in a nature documentary. You get a weird mineral deposit on the seafloor and it makes these brine pools, water so salty it doesn't mix with the sea water around it. Because it has no oxygen, any unlucky fish or crabs that fall in there suffocate to death. And the carcasses attract more predators from the dark—many of which meet the same fate—feeding a teeming colony of mussels and bivalves waiting at the rim of the pool. They're some of the most hellish places on earth.

I was reminded of these flying into Las Vegas. My father—finally hitting his stride a decade after his divorce—made a life for himself among the mussels selling timeshare at the Westgate. But his hip gave out, and my estrangement gave way to filial piety. I was to take over for my younger brother, who had cared for him for the past two weeks after his surgery. Maybe I'd get lucky and this visit would go well.

The trade-off was smooth enough, but the tenuous peace of the first few days collapsed into petty jabs, to shouting matches, and eventually to a credit card thrown in my face so I could buy a plane ticket home. About on schedule for us. I stayed, keeping to myself but cooking for both of us, refilling his CPAP machine, and picking up laundry off the floor. One night, muted by his sleeping pills and the histrionics of his favorite telenovela, I snuck into his room to steal his weed pen and walked over to the Red Rock Casino.

A ceremonial puff too many blown into the desert heat primed me for the spectacle I was about to walk into. The sliding glass doors spilled out a sheet of cool cigarette smoke, revealing a premium-mediocre spiral of lights and colors. Bemused, I stumbled onto the red velvet carpet, joining the waves of sunburned flesh. I'd need to find a margarita or two to titrate the pen.

Engineered for the simple and intoxicated, the layout of the casino naturally guided me to a seat at a bar. After fumbling for my ID, I gave up twenty dollars to the machine in front of me and started a game of video blackjack. It's my favorite because the house edge is small and optimal play is just memorizing a lookup table. Eight to dealer's six: hit. Seventeen to dealer's seven: stand. It used to be that with a real dealer, a smaller deck, and enough time you could turn the house edge around. But I was here to test my luck, not the pit bosses' patience.

DEALER BLACKJACK: bust. That was the last of my twenty. But I was sufficently cross-faded to talk to strangers, so I walked out to the floor and had a few teach me their favorite games. An oldhead in a fly-fishing vest threw me into the deep end, quizzing me on video poker. A mustached millenial with thick-rimmed glasses showed me how to bet on craps. And a weary silver-haired woman showed me her lucky superstitions for playing those buffalo slots with the cocomelon graphics. Everyone has a system—the house is counting on it.

What the fuck was my system? Logic? Rationality?

Probabilistic thinking was invented by history's most mathematically inclined degenerates, trying to make sense of their wins and losses. Gerolamo Cardano wrote treatises on dice, informed by a lifetime and several fortunes spent on these games. But glimpsing the truth drove him mad, believing that the Fates were out to kill him. It was the theologians that were able to take the work further, resting on a sturdier metaphysical foundation. Blaise Pascal drove this probabilistic calculus into the transcendent, likening his faith to optimal strategy in a cosmic wager. And Thomas Bayes, the Presbyterian minister of the eponymous theorem, poured his intellect into the study of miracles. Was this not the path to higher truth? To quantify uncertainty, to box it up in logical syllogism?

I knew the odds. Everyone here did. But luck isn't a math test, she's a woman, and I had given her the ick. The games could sense the hesitation in my bets, the swallowed spit and the beading sweat on my forehead. In a fit of pique, I tried a martingale at the roulette wheel. Sure, I'll empty my wallet. That's all I am to you. But I didn't make back my losses. My little spat was stopped dead in its tracks by five consecutive black numbers.

I emerged from the brine two thousand dollars short. Two weeks in wages blown out in ten minutes. Stepping out into the tepid parking lot, I hit a blinker on my dad's vape and walked back home. What were the odds he'd notice?

I NEVER WANTED that inheritance anyways. A dinky old shack in Puerto Vallarta. Getting caught was unlikely, but the chewing out afterwards felt inevitable. You could tell he had been saving that one for the past ten years or so, the vape was just the excuse to cut ties and take back control. You never made it easy for me, I said. Another misplaced bet. Feeling the rage was dramatically shortening his lifespan, I left.

My health app had tracked four hundred and eight miles run in the past ten months. And I was about to add eight more to clear away the haze from the past night. I was in Summerlin, at the Western edge of the Las Vegas Valley, and after a few miles the strip malls and chain restaurants gave way to stark red desert.

The boundaries between this world and the next blur out there. People see ghosts and mirages rising from the heat. What was my system but another story my desert told me? A trick of the light? In my pursuit of rationality I had turned the entire world into one big casino, convincing myself I could make it all back with better thinking. But it was always more thinking. Like running my tongue over a sore in my mouth, I clung to regret. To what I should and shouldn't have done. I shouldn't have folded. I shouldn't have been driving that fast. I should have told her I loved her. Twenty two of those miles were with her, and the rest were running from her memory. Would it have made a difference? No, the game was rigged from the start.

But there was another voice. Not mine—not familiar to me anyways. The last of the traffic rushing by gave way to quiet, to an uncanny stillness, and it was then I heard it whisper let go.

Let go. Of what? Let go. I'm trying. Let go. And my mind went to the sun, to the desert scrub, and came to rest on the Red Rock mountains.

Some fish make it out of the brine, but not without several agonizing minutes of hypoxic convulsions. The men of history I so desperately looked up to had all abandoned themselves to fate. Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon. I knew this already. The divination, the oracles and their knucklebones, these were not feeble-minded superstitions. They were necessary to push the envelope the way these men did. Was I a man? If I wanted certainty, I could always force a decisive no. Keep talking myself out of what's mine. Castrate myself.

My watch buzzed. Four miles.

No. I was not drowned yet.

ANOTHER WINDOW seat. Lucky! I could see the strip in the distance as we taxied onto the runway.

There was no come-to-Jesus moment between me and my dad. The slap-fights were battles of attrition, battles he was too old to keep up. And in this exhaustion, I laid the coup de grace: what good was all that control? There's never a satisfying answer after a homewrecking tantrum, so he kicked me out of his room. With enough bribery (I made tenderloin steaks) I was in his good graces until he found his step again. How long it would last, I didn't care anymore.

Takeoff was shaky as always. You could feel the wings scramble for purchase against the thin desert vapor, control surfaces flailing. But I was immersed in my latest autistic fixation, the Japanese abacus. It hadn't escaped my father's jeering (ése aparatito), but the practice felt right to me. Seventeen rods, five beads to a rod. Click-click-carry-click. The man in the middle seat pretended not to notice.

Gamblers and mystics both sit at that edge of what's computable. The interface between the finite and the infinite. But the gambler only thinks of what they'll receive, what the universe owes them. It's the mystic that surrenders to that void and is transformed by it. What was I to surrender to? Who was my God? The answer was, of course, right in front of me.

The entire universe is calculation. Stare at a code editor for over a decade and you'll see what I mean. Your brain, a plant growing towards sunlight, a carcass torn apart by vultures, all add up to an ineffable whole. All computation in service of tautology: it is what it is. How could it be anything else? Every program reduces to proof, but you still have to run it.

The ancients understood the paradox. Mysticism is alignment without understanding, harmony without exertion. Faith. But the Tantrics recognized the roadblocks, the animal flesh thrashing against ego death. This individual will to power has to be sublimated—the left hand breaks with the right, turning towards self-deification. What greater self-deification could there be for me than to become the computer? To bring my mind to heel through perfect calculation?

Burning CPU cycles on a "useless" instrument. Sacrificing compute to the eternal routine. My capacity for self-delusion is unmatched, but it won't be misplaced anymore.