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Screwed on the turn
Sep. 14th, 2007 05:38 pmTwenty-Nine years ago, on the eve of my birthday, I was planning to go to see an Everly Brothers concert featuring Paul McCartney at the Hammersmith Apollo. I made it as far as Hammersmith, but then things began to go awry. I started drinking and playing darts in the pub on the Hammersmith roundabout (later featured in Alexei Sayle's "Comedy Roots") and got into a really good session with Peter Purves and the guy from Fingerbobs. I ended the night deciding to hit the Vic and was about 30 quid up as closing time of 4am approached, only for my rolled-up trip Queens to lose to a player's KKK, all in the hole. To this day I remain convinced that the dealer and the player were in collusion and that it was a cold deck ... :-)
Today could have gone better as well. Sterling got sent into a tailspin by the Northern Rock announcement (which shows how irrational the currency markets can be and how pointless it is to worry about fundamentals on any short-to-medium-term basis). That wiped out the nice profit that I was sitting on.
Then I went to the dentist and, as she tightened the wires on the "exposed and bonded" teeth, both chains came off the teeth. Yes, both of them. I could have cried. I'm not sure that I can face having the gums sliced open again, not with the surgeon being nought for three (he's already had a couple of goes on one of the teeth). My dentist, bless her, tried to be encouraging, saying that I should gently brush the little bits of teeth poking through the gum to encourage "eruption", but I got the horrible feeling that she was clutching at straws. She said that the failure rate on exposure and bonding was about 3% in her experience, so 0 for 3 is dispiriting indeed. Is it me, I wondered.
Oh well, I'm back in two weeks, but now I know how people who've had chemotherapy say "if it comes back, fuck it, it can have me". In no way am I copmparing myself to such brave people, but at least I can now understand their point of view. It's not the pain of going through it, it's the pain of going through it when you have no idea whether it is going to work.
And now Hellmuth is wittering on the WSOPE live stream, even though he got eliminated yesterday. Fuck me, can't you get rid of him, even when he has no chips?
But at least at poker I've crawled back into profit for the month, although there's no guarantee that I'll stay there. Miserable times. I feel old and alone.
____________
Today could have gone better as well. Sterling got sent into a tailspin by the Northern Rock announcement (which shows how irrational the currency markets can be and how pointless it is to worry about fundamentals on any short-to-medium-term basis). That wiped out the nice profit that I was sitting on.
Then I went to the dentist and, as she tightened the wires on the "exposed and bonded" teeth, both chains came off the teeth. Yes, both of them. I could have cried. I'm not sure that I can face having the gums sliced open again, not with the surgeon being nought for three (he's already had a couple of goes on one of the teeth). My dentist, bless her, tried to be encouraging, saying that I should gently brush the little bits of teeth poking through the gum to encourage "eruption", but I got the horrible feeling that she was clutching at straws. She said that the failure rate on exposure and bonding was about 3% in her experience, so 0 for 3 is dispiriting indeed. Is it me, I wondered.
Oh well, I'm back in two weeks, but now I know how people who've had chemotherapy say "if it comes back, fuck it, it can have me". In no way am I copmparing myself to such brave people, but at least I can now understand their point of view. It's not the pain of going through it, it's the pain of going through it when you have no idea whether it is going to work.
And now Hellmuth is wittering on the WSOPE live stream, even though he got eliminated yesterday. Fuck me, can't you get rid of him, even when he has no chips?
But at least at poker I've crawled back into profit for the month, although there's no guarantee that I'll stay there. Miserable times. I feel old and alone.
____________
