Poker Night Blues "Lay it Down on Me"

Wednesday nights are poker nights in the Ben Den. 5-10 dudes/gals playing hold em' with a 10 dollar buy in, listening to records, and our guilty pleasure poker station on Pandora, "Jelly Roll Morton." These evenings are strange and mundane. We sit around a round table adorned with a knick knack looking glass blown dragon passed around while we breath and blow fire and life. Our Minds teetering and dancing in the astro-planes, swooping away from incredibly fucked up down to the deepest concentration and back up again like a playful kite. Our hearts like drums beating through our ears, head veins and beating out the sweat beads on our nose, faces red from the noise. They vibrate my whole body. Our eyes wonder and wander, like ancient mathematician wizards, counting, counting, looking for patterns, reading each other's minds, then counting again. Just like the posters with dogs playing poker, we are animals. Hunting each other, ready to pounce on the slightest weakness, and kill. Yet, like them we are civilized enough to wear hats and clothes and drink good beer and tuck away our fangs when we talk about a "funny thing happened to me today," and "are you going to the show this weekend" because we are friends after all. It's just a game, and it's not. It's fun and it's serious. It's a fine quality of Zen.
Before my game last night I got into a big big big huge fight with my girlfriend about something really stupid. So dumb in fact, that I got most upset that it had escalated to that point. After I got off the phone in my car parked outside the Ben Den, I SCREAMED to myself, and went inside. This affected my game incredibly. I couldn't focus, I couldn't let it go all the way and eventually lost. It may have been so noticeable in fact, that at one point when I was not playing a hand, I slouched back in my chair and sighed "Dammit!" to myself out loud - forgetting where I was. Somebody said, "What?" and I replied "Nothing..."
Poker is a very introspective game. You really learn how to look inside yourself in a competitive way. You have to control your heart (beat and feeling), you have to know when when to make a stand, when to let go and when to give in. Even if you know you are right, even if you know you have the best hand, even if you got 2 aces in your hand and everyone in the world knows that you should win, but you still don't. You let the hand play out when it shouldn't and you loose. Should've gave in, should've folded the best hand, and stayed in the game. But I give it all to the Queen, or should I say, the pocket queens with a queen on the flop. The metaphor stuck with me. Get yelled at - lose my money there is nothing left for me to do but write this blues song called "Lay it Down on Me."
Here Listen, download, or whatever

I spent a great deal of this weekend playing with different slide guitar tuning methods, and teaching myself how to play slide guitar. This is the first song I wrote in a slide open tuning, wrote it in 10 minutes 10 minutes ago. Though it's only 1 verse and chorus, I'll give it some more thought tonight when I get those dog (playing poker)-gone blues again.


"you may be wrong
bout what you say
but darlin i let you lay it down on me anyway
what do i know?
what could i say?
i just give you my hand, humbly your man, and let you lay, let you lay, let you lay it down on me
lay it down on me
can't you see
I'll always submit my heart and plea
that you lay it down on me"