Long Time No See

A personal note

“No price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.”

― Rudyard Kipling

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Any Number Can Play

In Mervyn LeRoy’s 1949 drama, Any Number Can Play, Clark Gable stars as Charley Kyng, a successful casino owner who finds himself on the verge of ruin as his personal and professional life unravels. Through a series of setbacks, Charley realizes his ambition is a double-edged sword and the underground empire he has painstakingly built over the years will cost him his health and family. When a high-stakes poker game tests Charley’s deepest loyalties, Charley ultimately chooses life and love over the allure of gambling and walks away from the casino.

Charley’s path to redemption begins with a glimpse of his own mortality, followed by various temptations that reveal a conflict between his values and ambitions, forcing Charley to decide. It’s all about time. Charley is running out of tomorrows, and every gamble only raises the stakes and takes him closer to that last hand. To cash out, Charley must dig deep and sacrifice something: money, control, friends, excitement, acclaim. But in return, he gets a second chance; he gets time.

Any Number Can Play isn’t a great film, but Gable delivers, and the story resonates 75 years later because its themes are timeless. It’s pure Seneca, repackaged in a postwar melodrama that could be summed up with this ancient warning:

You squander time as if you drew from a full and abundant supply, though all the while that day which you bestow on some person or thing is perhaps your last.  You have all the fears of mortals and all the desires of immortals.

We all enjoy a good redemption arc, but outside of Hollywood such stories are rare. Redemption is hard. It requires sacrifice and a conscious decision to live authentically in the face of limited time. We tend to go along and ignore the clock until the last hand plays us out. But at some point we notice that every moment we waste also wastes us, with each roll of the dice more costly than the last.

All that to say, a series of setbacks over the past several months have put me in Charley Kyng’s shoes, and apart from interrupting my writing, it’s forced me to rearrange my priorities and make some sacrifices that will surely impact my activities here… but all for the better, I think.

Last November, I started writing an analysis of the 2024 Election and speculating about the future—which, six months later, still looks bright. The essay was long and disjointed, and I finally tabled it, but one of its points is relevant here:

Everyone knows the information ecosystem has transformed dramatically over the past several years, with legacy media no longer holding unquestioned power over politics. For the most part, this is a good thing, and credit is due to X for its role in accelerating that evolution. But for those of us who’ve navigated these waters for years and welcomed the new landscape, there’s a tendency to assume we’ve reached stasis, or, to paraphrase my friend Matt Cloud: now that we’ve achieved a desired result, the game stops. But this is wrong and can lead to disaster, as players are free to adjust or adopt new strategies, rules change between rounds, and, above all, the game never stops.

Ignoring these realities may offer comfort and an illusion of control, but like Charley Kyng, whose winnings masked a life slipping away, we risk catastrophic defeats in the future by misreading the game and squandering precious time—and time is the real stake at the table.

This is a season of second chances, a time for exploration, growth, preparation, and strategy. The information regime of the past six years—if not the past six decades—is no more. Everything is different now. A platform like X, which increasingly resembles an open ocean, may have sent the wave that finally disabled that regime, but it will be the small enclaves and communities beneath the surface that will shape the game’s next iteration. And a healthy, vibrant coral reef takes time.

As for me, I’m ready to fold on distractions and rededicate my time to nurturing real-world relationships, investing in my community, developing professional skills, and taking my writing and research to the next level. Therefore, I will be taking a bit of a hiatus from X to focus on my work here. What that means for you is more subscriber content, beginning with a new Cold War series. Stay tuned, and thanks for reading.