Just One More

I can hear the theme music in stale and still air. Even with my eyelids closed and sleep on the horizon, it’s there. Hunting without terror, a lingering spirit calling me closer to the edge. Obsession in synthwave, dancing in 7/8 time, taunting, teasing. Enticing. I read a post, somewhere, about how it’s nice to have Balatro — the massively poker-themed rougelike video game created by a game developer in Saskatchewan known as LocalThunk — as a kind of safety net for addicts. That you can’t get so lost in playing it that you emerge into the light once more after days missing with blood on your face and goons repossessing your house is a positive. Finally, here we are at the fountain to drink and bathe in the joyous thrill of addiction without any of its poisonous after-effects.

This is true, depending on your angle in. But it's also something different.

I’m going to be very clear from the outset that I’m not an expert on addiction. I don’t have the right answers, and I don’t have the correct pathway through. I know what I have lived and I can describe what I have felt and that is all. Addiction, like so many decisions we make for our lives, is what we make of it and what it builds of a life, and for each of us it’s different. In its own terrible way, this is beautiful. That we are all so hurt and scarred in so many disparate ways but can come together to share how we got those that show on our skin.

Sometimes I dream about drinking. Sometimes, in my dreams, I have control of the whirling blades of my problems and I can have a single perfect Old Fashioned or a glass of scotch poured in a rocks glass I used to have a complete set of in the cupboard of a kitchen I have long abandoned. Sometimes, in my dreams, I have just the one and that’s enough and it tastes just as bitter and sweet as I remember and it’s all I need. Then I have a glass of water maybe, and I’m safe. Sometimes, I dream a nice little lie, and when I wake up the sweat has pooled on the back of my neck, and I think about how I could make a river of bitter, sweet drinks flow swiftly into my blood.

Just one more, my brain says.

I became obsessed with Balatro the same as anyone. I heard about it in passing maybe, through a podcast or idle conversations online, but I was intrigued enough to try it and I was hooked enough to keep going and in short order I had played, failed, played, failed and I could feel the scars start to appear on my skin as the loop continued. I won my first run, and when I did I knew I would play until the veneer peeled off and I could see the bones below. It felt so good to win. It felt so good to feel so alive, and it always feels so good at first.

It always feels so good, but only sometimes. It sometimes feels terrible, but only always.

I didn’t have a problem with drinking, I could control it, I felt fine. I always felt fine, sometimes. I felt terrible, always. I blacked out. I forgot days, people, appointments. I forgot commitments, I spent money in the night when my brain had turned off but my body soldiered on. Once, I got a box in the mail and the packing slip said the contents were taxidermied man-eating giant tarantula from Thailand. I don’t remember ordering it, but there it was on my eBay history, right next to the searches I had made for vintage collectibles, a Jonathan Taylor Thomas locker-sized poster, and a sheet of acid. I vaguely remember thinking it would be very funny if you could buy acid on eBay. I still don’t remember if I ever found out. But it always felt good, except for all the times that it didn’t.

Balatro became my little morning routine, the way all my addictions become little rituals. I’ve made peace with the ones I needed to lay to rest, but I still hold on to the systems of unshakable things. I make coffee every morning, the same way, every morning, the same time, every morning. If I forget, if the order is off, my brain turns on me a little and my day becomes harder. This is addiction and a brain with wires crossed and disconnected leads conspiring against me, I know this, but knowing doesn’t fix the problem. It just gives it a name and a purpose.

In Balatro, there are a series of decks. Each deck gives you a different set of parameters. Red gives you four hands, and four discards. Red and Black only gives you hearts and Spades. You can find Jokers that add to the depth of field in the game. A joker that retriggers the first card played, a joker that gives the first face card you play a x2 multiplier in scoring. You can see how both of those might work in tandem, and a system comes into view. I unlocked every joker, even the hard ones, even the impossible tasks, because I had to. I woke up, started coffee, walked Bowie, fed the pets, poured the coffee, made toast, played Balatro. Just one run, but maybe two. Maybe just until I win. Maybe just until it feels good. I had work to do. I had writing to do. Just one more though, just until it feels good, the way it felt good before. The way it sometimes still did.

Sometimes I see someone having a single cigarette, and I think about a thousand cigarettes all being smoked at once. Like the fountain of the Bellagio at the end of Oceans Eleven, each perfectly inhaled and then blown out in time to create something beautiful. I think about how good it feels to have one, and I forget about how bad it feels to have one. This is how it works for me. Think about how good it feels to have just one, think about how good it feels to have just one, walk half a block, think about how good it feels to have just one, think about how good it feels, wait for traffic. Think about how good.

Think.

I quit smoking four times at least in my life, and hopefully I never will need a fifth but the calendar in front of me is longer than I can imagine, so who knows. I think about having just one, and how perfect and beautiful it is and how good it feels and how nice the image of my future self having just one cigarette is. How happy I am in this future photograph, already weathered and tinted yellow by time that has yet to pass over it. In my own visions of the future, I am already worn through, but it feels so good. I bet it feels so good.

There are stakes on each deck in Balatro. A varying degree of difficulty that compounds on the one before it, until you reach the Gold Stake, the hardest one. I had to beat each on a deck before I could let myself move on to the next one and this held me in place for days sometimes. The gold stake on the Black Deck (+1 Joker slot, -1 hand per round) enraged me, and I sat at my computer in the morning muttering expletives at the screen quietly enough that Lysh couldn’t hear me losing my patience with a video game when I should be doing something, anything, better with my time. It feels so bad sometimes, but only always. It took a week for me to finally beat it, and when I did I felt hollow like a chocolate Santa you buy at the drugstore. Then I started a new round on the next deck, and avoided all the other things I had to do that morning for just one more.

I don’t think ill of the body of my addictions. I don’t think they’re bad habits or attach a morality to their pleasures. I’m happy for people who can drink, who can smoke, who can feel good and happy with them and who feel just the slightest bit of terrible the day after their gone because that is their purpose. That is the dance as described and written down, and for those who can follow the steps I’m a little jealous. I, like many, have invented my own dance that follows a rhythm that isn’t really there but it doesn’t mean I hate the beat pushing in the background. I just hate what it does to me, I hate how badly I always want it to feel good, and I hate how badly it always felt. I wanted to find a new way to feel good.

It always felt good, except when it didn’t. I am always thinking about how good it felt once, how good it felt the times my memory tells me it felt good. I don’t think about the material thins I lost, I think about the rhythm it inspired in my body. The actions my addictive nature has driven me through, some of which I don’t even have access to the memories of. Some of which are just black holes burned on the photographs that I am ostensibly in.

I beat all the decks in Balatro, I unlocked all the jokers and found all the things and then all that was left was the challenges. 20 in total, each with their own little task. This one starts you out with 4 Egg Jokers, but you make no money to purchase things when you win a hand. This one turns all the cards into glass ones you can’t replace. I beat each in turn, relying on my problem-solving and critical thinking skills to navigate them and I felt like the game had turned me into a great and beautiful machine moving through the world with grace and skill and it felt so good. It felt so good. It felt so good. So good.

I hit the final challenge, to beat the game Jokerless, that is to say learning how to only play the cards and never the jokers and beat a run and was harder than anything I had done before and relied on luck more than skill and it felt so good once, and it felt so good when I got close, and then it felt bad but I couldn’t shake it. Suddenly it had been an hour, and I still had the game in my hands. Then it had been two. It felt so good, once, I think, but now I wasn’t sure. Then it was the next day, and I was still playing, and then it was the next day, and I was still playing, and time seemed to become something new, something amorphous, something like water, moving swift, pushing along with dangerous purpose. Suddenly it was the next day again. It felt so good. Once. Didn’t it? Does it still? I started to get annoyed, flustered, angry. My heart beat faster every time I edged on victory. When I lost I swore under my breath and I felt bad and started another round. I told myself I would only play one more, as the hours melted away. I felt so bad, but I kept going, because I had to win and I had to claim victory and in doing so I would feel so good again, the way I had before. When I finally sat it down to focus on other tasks the music haunted me and the clicking of buttons haunted me and I thought about how good it probably will feel the next time. I thought about how good it felt before and how good it might again and I needed it to feel like that, just once more. I didn’t notice my teeth grinding against each other as I thought about good it might feel.

I don't think video games are bad, I don't think video game addiction is a universal truth. I've played video games all my life, and I've been addicted to things all my life, and the two don't often overlap. There is nuance and individual nature in there, these beautiful and dangerous things that build a life, and instead of numbly stating that video games are addictive, I wonder if we could instead consider the nature of addiction. Think about how we learn to protect ourselves when we feel it eating away at us, and how we carefully consider that not everyone shares the same problems the same way. Its always hard to talk about an idea like addiction, because some will become protective, an others dismissive, and so I feel inclined to overtly say that just because I felt this anxious thing in my chest eating away at me doesn't mean everyone, or even anyone, else will. This is just how it moved within me, and I would never weaponize my individual relationship to complex things against anyone.

I think Balatro is a beautiful, wonderfully designed game. A swirling soundtrack that repeats but never gets old, a challenging game that you can learn and adapt to over time and within it grow wiser than the greyest owl in a forest of trees that saw the world break that first time. Clever and striking and captivating. It’s for many an all-time great video game, and it was for me, but it also has grown to be something more, and it has grown to be something I recognize. I know it's a wonderful thing, but I know that it does something to me it won't do to everyone, that addiction that eats at my frayed and tender wires. Even though the gambling within it doesn’t strip me of any material possession it nonetheless hounds my anxious heart and it made me think about the nature of addiction and the desire that drives that need to feel good and whole and perfect, the way I’m sure I did once and the way I think I can surely feel again. There I am in the photograph of a dream, looking so happy, but already worn through.

On Sunday afternoon, the sun peaking through the shades drawn on the windows, I sat on the couch, half-watched Gilmore Girls with Lysh and beat the final challenge of Balatro and for a brief shining second it felt so good. I showed Lysh my victory screen and I did my best to smile a worn through little smile, exhausted in triumph, and I felt nothing. The bones revealed themselves to me and I saw what it was the same way I saw drinking and smoking. I thought about how good it felt once, as my finger went to move to play one more I thought about how good it felt once but I still just felt nothing, hollow, empty. I wanted to feel anything, didn’t it feel so good? Remember how good it felt, erase the bad parts that ate away at me. I deleted the game as my finger hovered over the decision to try and chase that feeling just once more, and I thought about how my morning ritual was going to be different now, and maybe how that is always the point of moving on. May all our mornings grow to become something different when they start to feel bad more than they ever felt good.