I’m My Own Red Headed Step Child

It really is not my week.

I exaggerated the facial psoriasis thing just a little bit, but not by much. I was red and blotchy, and I am showing the signs of peeling just a little tiny bit, but I don’t really look anything but just a little bit dry at this point. Of course, I know better. This is how it begins.

So I have been aggressively treating it, using the topicals that my doctor had prescribed for the other patches of psoriasis I have, and have added twice-daily head-to-toe moisturizing to my routine, as per my doctor.

Here’s me, Tuesday afternoon in the grocery store, perusing the moisturizer section and feeling like I’m losing just a little bit more masculinity with each passing moment. Whatever, I just don’t want to end up feeling like I look as presentable as John Merrick if I let this get out of control. The peeling is bad enough, if I were to let it go beyond the dryness, it moves from there to “festering lesion” status, unless the dry skin coalesces into a rigid and nearly unpickable scab.

It’s really enough to know that it’s there, and that there’s a possibility that somewhere down the line, despite my best attempts to treat it before it gets bad, that it’ll crop up and decimate my face over a short period of time before I get it back under control.

I really don’t deserve this.

Let me ask you a question, which will segue into my next couple of paragraphs of whining lamentations… Let’s say you’re playing Limit Hold ‘Em online, and you’re dumb enough to cap it pre-flop against a guy from the SB who was the first one to raise the pot, and re-raised your attempt to drive him out. And you’re holding a King and a Ten that don’t match.

The flop brings a Queen, a Ten, and a Four. The guy from the SB leads out, you raise, he re-raises.

Isn’t it about time to lay the hand down?

What about when an Ace hits on the turn. I know you’ve got a straight draw now, and with no flush possibilities you might maybe have the odds for that. But don’t you figure the aggressive SB guy, who hasn’t played a pot in almost 30 minutes at your table sitting right next to you, for something that has to have you beat at this point?

Why are you calling me down with King Ten off?

So I didn’t have you beat. I was on a stone bluff, and you can save me the “you can’t bluff the players at these low limits” comments below. I know. Believe me, I know. His call on fourth street with that Ace when I led out told me he was weak, and probably on a draw. When that blank hit the river I figured he wouldn’t call me again.

No, not the guy who was basically flashing neon billboard size warning letters above his head that read I have a huge premium hand and your third pair is no good here. Not the guy who was regularly folding his BB to two-bets because he didn’t see a goddamn hand worth playing in two hours at the tables last night. Don’t you have to figure that if someone is re-raising your middle pair, and then gleefully leading the charge with that Ace on fourth street, that your goddamn motherfucking third pair is no good?

Embarrassingly enough, I showed down a Six Five of diamonds. No pair. Not even a diamond draw.

This was my last hand in the two hours I sat $1/$2 last night, finishing the session down 8BB. I dropped five of those big bets on that one hand alone, so basically I was just treading water for two hours and getting blinded down.

I’m really at a breaking point with poker online. Well, no I’m not. I’ll be back on, probably tonight, but for the purposes of my venting you’ll have to drink the Kool-Aid here for a second. About three weeks ago I found myself doing relatively stupid things on the 25NL tables because I have no patience. For every solid/monster session I had, there’d be another time where I’d chase TPTK all-in against a guy who was obviously advertising something better.

So I had to back it down a little bit.

I figured I would move back to Limit. I like Limit, actually. $2/$4 especially. It’s just “expensive” enough to allow for a big pot every now and again. But I really am getting frustrated with the cold cards I’ve seen playing Limit across my last four sessions.

Last night I had Abdul’s openers in front of me, and committed myself to “playing properly.” It’s great, in theory, if you can get hands dealt to you that require a peek at the list to see if they’re appropriate to play in whatever spot you’re in. I think across two hours I played two hands, the bluff one included, that required me to make any sort of decision whether or not to see the turn. I did flop a full house with AT once, properly waited until the turn to make a bet, and got the four who chased into the flop with me to fold. I’m not counting that one. That’s a no-brainer.

These are the types of sessions I’ve been having lately. Last Friday I had a two hour BBJ session that ended +$40, and on Saturday my first session of the day was one of those three hour rides on the variance roller coaster where I only ended down about $8 after all was said and done. Since then? Four sessions of at least two hours each, and a long procession of missed flops and cold cards.

I don’t know which of the following scenarios get me more frustrated…

Feeling like I’m folding for three hours straight

Missing every flop with every marginally good hand I’m dealt

Showing down a ton of second best hands and losing big

Watching someone across the table constantly in the mix getting premium cards

Helplessly watching from the sidelines while a fish plays any two cards into three re-buys in twenty minutes while I get nothing playable and everyone else makes a killing.

Let me break this down so that everyone can understand.

Feeling like I’m folding for three hours straight is like going to a bar full of attractive women, all of whom are presumably single, but none of whom seem willing to so much as make eye contact with you.

Missing every flop with every marginally good hand I’m dealt is like going to that same bar and landing what seems to be a prime seat – the one right next to the place where everyone walks up to get their drinks. You try a few lines, get a few polite smiles, some quick blow-offs, and aren’t able to strike up a decent conversation all night long.

Showing down a ton of second best hands and losing big is when your pride gets wounded. Say you manage to actually talk to a beautiful and interesting woman for a few minutes. A few minutes turns into a half an hour. Then she finally cuts to the chase when your quiet and brooding Luke Perry-esque wingman hits the head and she asks what his “situation” is.

Watching someone across the table constantly in the mix getting premium cards is like going to the bar with that friend of yours who wears the shiny shirt and knows exactly how intentionally mussed his hair is supposed to be. You make more money than he does, you drive a nicer car, you’re even a nicer guy than he is – but he’s the one going home with the stewardess, and you’re the one left picking up the tab.

Helplessly watching from the sidelines while a fish plays any two cards into three re-buys in twenty minutes while I get nothing playable and everyone else makes a killing happens when the bachelorette party of drunk aerobics instructors comes in to the bar, takes every guy within shouting distance on to the dance floor with them, and you’re stuck playing wingman for your buddy with some self-absorbed woman who can’t stop talking about her cats.

So that really doesn’t help me answer my own question. Which of those scenarios gives me the most frustration? Well, it’s not showing down second bests, because at least I’m gambling. To quote myself, “I didn’t come here not to play cards.” It’s also not when I see someone else getting “all the good hands.” He’ll get his eventually, and hopefully I’ll be around to sop up the mess.

It’s the inactivity that kills me. But while I might be bored to tears folding on a super-tight table that hasn’t so much as seen a three handed pot to the turn in forty minutes, I get far more frustrated being a spectator to a free money bonanza at that same table. Just once I want to be that guy who flops the nuts on the first hand in the SNG and gets three people who think they’re superstars pushing all-in (and, just to add, I’d like that hand to hold up) against me. I want to be that guy who manages to push a few premium hands on a ring game into one of those dizzying rushes, busting some jackalope with his mom’s credit card into next Tuesday along the way. I want to be the reason someone is rebuying. Again.

It’s been so damn long… At least it feels that way.

I’ve been more than a little grumpy this past week or so. I don’t know what my problem is. I am on week three of a new cholesterol medication that hopefully won’t tweak my “trick liver*” the way the other one did. I think there’s a sincere possibility I’ve got some side effects brewing. No, I’m not growing man-boobs, and my erections aren’t persisting for six hours or more requiring immediate medical attention.

I’m just really, really tired lately.

*By “trick liver,” I’m not insinuating that it can stomp its hoof to answer the “how many carrots am I holding up” question, nor does it jump a motorcycle off a ramp and over sharks. It’s actually more complicated than that, and something the Doc** is watching for me.

**By “the Doc,” I’m not referring to Pauly. God knows there are 249 million people in this country I’d ask for medical advice before Pauly, but less than a dozen I’d lean on as an amateur pharmacist before him.

By “really, really tired,” I mean that there hasn’t been a ten minute period in about a week where I couldn’t have just put my head down and slept soundly for three hours. I’m getting enough sleep too. I’m actually getting plenty of sleep. Save Friday night’s 2AM poker marathon, I haven’t been up “late” in over a week, and on most nights have been in bed before 10 and asleep well before 11.

I’m not sure, however, if I’d trade the “epically tired” feeling for persistent six hour erections. I think that’d have to be filed under the header of “water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink.”

By the way CJ? Just so I don’t forget to put this up today, my favorite search term that found me this afternoon was “what to expect in aging shih tzu.”

To which I answer, “If you’re going to age your shih tzu, the key ingredient is time.”

Har. Har. Har.

There are a couple things I wanted to talk about, both of which I’ve just been dancing around these past couple of days. On one topic I’ve put the metaphorical pen-to-page no less than three times this week, only to scrap the text a few paragraphs in because in my general grumpy malaise I’m coming off sounding like a conceited dickweed.

And there’s really no need for that.

The other topic I’m having a difficult time putting into words. Sure, I can give you eleventy jillion words a day whining about some guy correctly calling me down with third pair, or why MS Word will spell check “eleventy” but not “jillion,” but when it comes to everything else lately, I’m stuck.

So let’s get unstuck, shall we?

I’m 100% sure where my heart is and where my heart isn’t at this point, by which I mean to say that I’m “over” my ex-wife.

Not that this is news. It’s been a long time now that I’ve felt this way, but this is what we storytellers like to call exposition. Now, regardless as to the timeline as to when this “over” took place, it took me a fuck of a lot longer to feel remotely friendly towards her at all. Actually, let me quote something from a few months back that “tipped the scales” for me and helped me understand that it was actually okay to harbor the grudge and still be friendly at the same time:

And I’m shaking my head at six in the morning that even in dreams I am left alone again. That what was unique and special and intense didn’t seem to matter.

But it does matter. And that’s why I wanted to write about this today. Moments like those aren’t “meant to be,” they simply are. They happen. Moments like these don’t exist as credits and debits, accounting for a sum total of value for the people in your life. What is unique and special and intense lives only in these moments. It’s up to you to decide if and how you want to remember these real and honest times you spent with someone.

I’ve put them away for too long. I’ve been bitter, and still am. What I dealt with was unfair and prolonged, and I didn’t deserve it. No one does. But while I can use that time of my life to justify ending a marriage and destroying a friendship, I realize that I can also remember what was good. One thing doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the other.

Like I said, one thing doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the other.

I think, to some extent, I understood closure at that point. Achieved it? I don’t know. Probably, and possibly at some point before this day. Maybe even well before this day. It’s also a possibility I haven’t claimed it yet, and maybe I never will. I’m not sure anyone can really pinpoint that single moment where clarity hits and emotions balance properly for the first time since whenever. The head and the heart don’t usually understand the direction in which they’re pulling each other.

But I understood.

I haven’t had a conversation outside of email and instant messaging with the ex-wife since the day our divorce went official. Since that time, our contact has grown more and more infrequent, and that’s both a good thing and expected. It took me an awfully long time to cut her any slack at all in those conversations.

Three years solid of yelling at her and demanding justification and truth got tiring.

And then I was done. I didn’t have anything else I needed to scream at her about, she had heard it all a million times anyway. And this brings us back to November of last year and the quote from above, which was typed up just before I contacted her to tell her that I was sorry. Not for what happened in the marriage, that really wasn’t my fault. Rather, I was sorry for not heeding her constant encouragement over the past few years to try for god’s sake to remember that things were pretty damn good at certain points along the way.

For the first time in nearly five years we had a nice conversation that absolutely, positively wasn’t loaded.

Which brings me to yesterday. I sent her an email that contained a snippet from the Bahamas trip about apologizing to the girl in the red dress for sucking out, but playfully telling her I took satisfaction in the suckout because she shared my ex-wife’s name. Normally, she’d send me an email back soon thereafter.

Didn’t get one.

So for the first time in a couple months, I popped online with the IM ID she knows about, and asked her how she enjoyed the story.

We exchanged pleasantries.

I asked her about her family. She about mine.

Then…

…nothing.

I’ll talk to friends on the IM all day long if I can, and it’s lively. We chat, I try to make them laugh, hopefully it works. I’m rarely at a loss for words.

I was at a loss. But so was she.

“It’s funny you caught me today,” she said after a prolonged lull in the conversation, “I woke up a couple mornings ago and realized that we hadn’t talked in awhile, and that it really didn’t bother me that we hadn’t.”

I think about her less and less frequently too, but I can’t deny that it does maybe sting just a little bit to hear someone say that about you instead of vice-versa. What’s funny is that I’m not even really dwelling on that part of the conversation.

Instead, I’m really still processing how someone who was my absolute best friend on the planet for as long as she was could have possibly slipped to the point where I couldn’t even bring myself to make small talk for ten minutes without wanting to wave goodbye and walk away. I’m not sure if I’m bugged by that or not. Chagrined by that or not. Relieved by that or not.

Absolutely done giving a fuck because of that or not.

All I really know at this point is that it has never crossed my mind that there’d be a friendship dredged out of all this mess, but that doesn’t mean I don’t notice that it took an awfully long time to die on the vine.

And I’m not really sure how I should be feeling about this.