Clearwater River Casino and Lodge | American Casino Guide Book

When you are young, old people will tell you that life is short. I've never found that sentiment convincing. Time does indeed seem to move along faster as we age, but the thought I'm struck by - as I pass the bulk of my 31st year sitting in a cubicle and trying to move the minute hand on the clock with my mind - is that life is unbelievably, astoundingly, tediously long.
Because life is so long, a lot happens in life. Very little of what happens around us is anything that we would consider miraculous, save for (perhaps) having a life in the first place. Mathematically speaking, though, it would be unlikely for any one of us who has survived into adulthood to go through life without witnessing - at least once or twice - something somewhat miraculous, or at least inexplicable, or something, in any case, that might be considered a glitch in the matrix. Mundane things happen all the time, but there's so much mundanity that the odds are very much in favor of our experiencing events so improbable that we'll have to loosely call them "miracles," I guess.
During my 31 years on earth, I have witnessed five such loosely called miracles, and I will detail them here. None of them are especially impressive. This leads me to think - because of how long and tedious my life has been - that true according-to-Hoyle miracles are exceedingly rare, or perhaps don't happen to anyone at all.
Miracle #1: My freshman year of college, I won a scholarship to study abroad in Berlin. This is not the miracle I'm writing about, though it was fairly miraculous given what a lazy-ass I was (and remain).
My classmates and I were hustling across some metro station or another to catch a train. I am prone to lateness and walk very slowly (even when hustling), so I'd fallen behind the rest of the group. I had time to glance over the banister of the stairwell and see that, two stories down, there was a gypsy sitting on the floor, playing a squeezebox for chump change. Following some impulse I still don't understand, I reached into my pocket and - as my classmates yelled at me to schnell the fuck up - I took out a fifty Eurocent coin and flicked it over the railing.
The coin dropped two stories and split the stairwell perfectly such that it landed in the general vicinity of the busker without hitting anything on the way down, and without hitting any Germans on the bottom floor, either. But I'd missed the accordion case by a good ten feet. Then, as I looked on, the coin bounced off the floor, leapt into the air, clinked off the wall above the busker's back, clinked off a second wall at the busker's side, and landed smack dab in the middle of his accordion case.
He kept playing, without noticing the coin or wondering where it had come from. None of my classmates had seen it, either. We wound up missing the train. I was one miracle richer but fifty Eurocents poorer, and everyone was pissed off at me for the rest of the night until they got drunk enough to forget.
Miracle #2: As a pizzafaced teenager, I used to work as a warehouse slave at a local zoo to remain nameless. It wasn't such a bad gig, being a warehouse slave. I got to drive a golf cart around the zoo in summer and ogle skimpily clad females of my own species, and other species, too. Free lukewarm chili dogs for lunch. When no one over the age of thirty was around, I got to lock myself in a warehouse, play with walkie-talkies, and nosh on all the animal crackers a boy could dream of. Life was good.
On one such dicking-around-in-the-warehouse sort of afternoon, I invented a game to amuse myself. I'd stolen a yellow highlighter pen and was drop-kicking it, catching it, and drop-kicking it again. The challenge was to kick it as high as possible, and then to catch the highlighter in increasingly acrobatic or challenging ways: behind the back, with my eyes closed, sitting on the floor, and so on.
On the drop-kick in question, I'd managed to punt the highlighter way up into the rafters of the warehouse. I lost it in the light and had no idea where it was going to land. I shielded my eyes like an outfielder and backtracked over the warehouse floor to make the catch. Nothing happened. I didn't hear the highlighter land. Neither had I heard it get lodged in the rafters. I was genuinely baffled for a minute or two. Then I glanced down and saw that the highlighter had latched itself perfectly to the rectangular plastic nametag on my chest. Again, nobody had seen what had happened. We'd run out of animal crackers so I spent several hours squeezing mustard packets into my mouth. I was a growing boy.
Miracle #3: You've probably noticed a trend by now: nobody witnessed these miracles other than me. Nobody witnessed Miracle #3, either. Other than me, of course. I could be making this all up, but you have to admit: these would be some pretty lame miracles to be lying about.
It was late, 1 AM on a Saturday night in summer. I was still a pizzafaced teenager and had done something or other to cheese my parents off, so there was no leaving the house. I was dicking around on the internet, probably trolling Yahoo! Chat for cybersex (as was the style at the time), my 4800 baud AT&T WorldNet connection firing on all cylinders, two Netscape Navigator windows sending my 386 motherboard into convulsions of exhausted delight.
In those days, the internet was as empty and unkind as the universe itself. There was no Reddit, no Huffington Post, no Instagram or Facebook. There was only Yahoo! Chat and the faint possibility of cybersex, and I wasn't having much luck that night. Everyone was elsewhere, getting actually laid. So I was sitting there in my boxers, twisting up paperclips into avant-garde blobs and pitching them at the trash can. I do have good aim when it comes to throwing objects in an unathletic capacity, so I seldom missed.
The paperclip in question, however, I'd let fall way short of its target. It landed two or three feet in front of the trash can. But instead of dying there, it rolled a full and complete arc, then it skipped up off the floor, tumbled end-over-end through the air, and landed in the trash can.
I brought this up to the men pretending to be girls in chat, hoping one of them would cyber with me. It impressed them even less than you'd think.
Miracle 4: Finally, a miracle that doesn't involve projectiles.
I must have been in college by this time. I was driving a shitty maroon 1993 Plymouth Acclaim. I'd stopped to fill it up with gas.
I did what most men do when they're pumping gas: I tried to guess the gallon total. I'd been doing this for years and I'd never fared very well at it. I'd guess three gallons and the car would suck up thirteen. I'd guess thirteen, and the pump would click instantly: the tank was already full. This time, I decided to up the ante. I made a wager with myself. The devil has cut you a deal: you guess the total exactly, down to the thousandth of a gallon, or else you go to hell. If you're correct, you go to heaven. If you're off one hair, even by a thousandth of a gallon, you go to hell. And that's that. Well, okay, I thought.
I watched the numbers scroll higher and higher. 6.389. 7.552. 8.310. I've never been superstitious or religious, but I started to get a bit nervous. Perhaps I shouldn't be gambling my immortal soul away at a Conoco station. They have Indian casinos for that sort of thing.
9.016. 10.113. Here we go. This is it. The moment of truth.
The pump clicked.
I'd guessed 10.786.
The meter read 10.785.
Perhaps the reader, at this point, is thinking: well, I can see how it might be miraculous if this dingus had guessed the total correctly, but how is it miraculous for him to guess incorrectly? That's just it. In making my little deal with the devil, I'd made sure to have him specify that I couldn't miss, not even by a thousandth of a gallon. And I'd missed by a thousandth of a gallon. So I was going to hell. There was something especially sadistic about the way it had turned out. I liked it.
I entertained the idea of squeezing out one last squirt of gas, to see if I could bring myself up to the total necessary to get into heaven, in the hopes that the devil wouldn't notice. But that would've been cheating. And there's a special layer of hell for dudes who cheat at the gas pump.
Miracle #5: After a long dry spell - Miracle #4 happened when I was 21 or so; I am now 31 - the miraculous crept back into my life just a couple months ago. I've actually shared this one with /Glitch_in_the_Matrix before, and I think I've typed enough today, so I will repost my description of the fifth Miracle, at the risk of being called a faggot.
I call this one the Classic Creedence Clearwater Revival Glitch.
"I hopped in the car and fired up the engine. I take after The Dude himself in that I'm a total lazy-ass with an undying love for Creedence Clearwater Revival. So it shouldn't come as too surprising (given my CCR-to-CD/R ratio) that Creedence popped on the car stereo. Song: 'Up Around the Bend.'
As I backed out of the driveway, I hesitated and decided that I was a bit burnt out on CCR and ejected the CD. The stereo switched over to its default channel, the local oldies station, and check it: 'Up Around the Bend' by CCR was playing, which fact alone wouldn't have been a coincidence worth mentioning, but the song picked up exactly where the CD had left off, John Fogerty's quintessentially Fogertian YEAHHH! at the 1:27 mark, just before the guitar wankery. It wasn't quite a perfectly seamless transition because of the half-second it took to switch over to radio. It had the feel of a CD skip. But thinking about the sheer odds involved in it all creeps me out in a way that nobody but Ween is allowed to creep me out."
I am running out of characters to type. I didn't expect to sit down and write all this out. Thanks for reading.
With no further ado, - Carl Peligro