How to Lose Your Mind at the Cosmic Casino (and Laugh About It Anyway)

18 Aug

Rule 62 is a relic of AA folklore: “Don’t take yourself too damn seriously.” It was born from a committee’s doomed attempt to engineer the perfect recovery program—binders, bylaws, the whole bureaucratic circus—until the whole monstrosity collapsed in a heap of absurdity. Out of the wreckage came one scrap of wisdom: Rule 62. A reminder that real freedom lives in letting go of everything you can’t control. And from my vantage point, only two groups seem to have cracked that elite code—the mystics and the idiots. The mystics float above the battlefield, the idiots stumble blissfully through it, and both seem equally immune to the disease of self-importance that rots the rest of us from the inside.

The other day, I was on the phone with a friend, detailing the slow domestic apocalypse in my house. Jacques, my loyal old wolf, had grown twitchy and miserable around Maisie, the new chaos agent I dragged home from Ensenada. He’d drool, pace, retreat to another room like a man dodging shellfire. He was an absolute wreck and there I was — the cause of his trauma — unable to coax him back to the endlessly-playful puppy he’d been only days before. I was eaten alive with guilt, convinced I’d torched his spirit by bringing in a second dog too soon.

So I start telling the story, and before I even hit the hard part, my friend detonates into laughter. Not a chuckle—a full-body, rib-cracking howl. And I was seething. Here I am, drowning in anxiety, convinced I’ve broken my best friend’s heart, and he’s laughing like I’ve just workshopped a new stand-up bit. I resented the hell out of it. I had to slam the brakes mid-lament, justify my problem, and crank my stress to an operatic pitch until he sobered up and realized I wasn’t joking. He got it—he always does—but not before I’d knotted myself into a cheap, overweening performance of my own misery. All I wanted was to be heard.

The irony? I didn’t even need advice. Jacques’ wise and capable trainer had already given me the cure: patience, routine, time. I didn’t want a solution, I wanted a witness. But that’s how it works: friendships aren’t built upon perfect rhythms. Sometimes your people miss the beat. If you can’t allow that, you’re the one sucking the air out of the room. Which means—you guessed it—I was the bastard taking myself too damn seriously.

And that’s when the cosmic casino clock kicks in. The universe has been spinning its reels for 14 billion years. Earth showed up around 7:48 a.m. Dinosaurs didn’t swagger onto the stage until 11:39 p.m. before an asteroid cashed out their chips at 11:59:46. And us? Homo sapiens stagger in at 11:59:58.3 p.m. Two seconds before the house lights blow. So dinosaurs puttered around the planet for twenty minutes and us? Our 300,000 years of existence represent only two seconds. Imagine standing at a slot machine in some busted Vegas dive at 3 a.m., neon sputtering, ashtrays overflowing, one last quarter in your pocket. You pull the lever—and time runs out. That’s humanity on the cosmic clock. A jackpot that never pays out. A slot jammed on the final spin.

Even a cursory review of my week is a highlight reel of absurdity met with rigidity. Tiny vignettes, dumb little corners of my life where the universe lobbed a cream puff and I swung at it like it was a mortar round. The coffee machine sputtered and stalled, so I cursed it like it had orchestrated a conspiracy against me. A driver cut me off on 5 South, and I carried the insult around like a flaming torch, replaying the scene long after the other car had vanished. Each time, something benign—or at the very least, something wholly out of my control—landed in my lap, and instead of letting it roll off, I doubled down. I stuck out my chin and dared the cosmos to take another swing.

The pattern is embarrassing in its predictability. A life lived on edge, bellowing with outrage at shadows and spilled milk, clenching my jaw as if indignation were a badge of honour. And what did it buy me? Not dignity. Not power. Just another hour shackled to irritation while the clock kept ticking toward midnight. Because the truth is, almost everything in this world is outside my control. The weather, the traffic, the people who laugh at the wrong part of my story—all of it is the slot machine spinning. And every time I demand that it pay out my way, I lose.

So today I’m choosing Rule 62. I’ll do my best to laugh, to let the mystics and idiots remind me what freedom looks like. And when I feel dismissed, ignored, or laughed at in the wrong place, I’ll remember: it’s not about me. It never is. Because in the last two seconds before midnight, you can either curse the jammed slot machine—or laugh like hell at the absurdity of playing in the first place.