I'm a man given to strange passions and odd fancies.
Or so it says on my police record.
My life is punctuated by intense little bursts of dilettante interest that usually
flash and die as swiftly as they arrive, but occasionally blossom slowly to take
their place alongside more longer-term obsessions.
It's too early to tell which path poker is going to end up going down, really.
It's not playing the game that's enamored me - I understand that blushing furiously
at the slightest hint of an untruth would make me briefly popular with other players,
but would probably hamper my long-term progress as an aspiring card-sharp. No, what
I can't get enough of at the moment is Poker-As-A-Spectator-Sport.
I stumbled onto it by accident, and probably wouldn't have seen it at all were it
not shown at a time of night when only the unemployed are likely to be watching
and so every other channel falls victim to the government mandate preventing them
showing anything interesting that might give doley wasters a hint of pleasure in
their grey, miserable lives. But the more I see of the game, the more intrigued
I become.
I can sense scepticism. Where's the interest in watching a game that on TV basically
consists of long, lingering shots of unhealthy-looking men thinking? While trying
not to show what they're thinking about? I realise this sounds like the least gripping
sporting spectacle since watching snooker on a black-and-white telly. Or Liverpool
last played away in Europe.
But it isn't. Poker is, without a shadow of doubt, the greatest sport that humanity
has yet devised. And I'll tell you for why.
i) No Bullshit Other than, you know, the game itself. Which is pretty
much an exercise in professional bullshit. But poker doesn't pretend that it's about
anything other than what it's about. It doesn't try to tell you that its players
are there for national pride, or for the glory of being crowned as the best in the
country/world/universe/whatever. There aren't any fawning or damning editorials,
trying to turn poker players into angels or demons. There aren't any moody stop-motion
monochrome adverts backed by moody music by Moby or Massive Attack or Mozart. Poker
players don't think they're embodying some Olympian ideal, or kiss their club's
badge one week then angle for a transfer the next.
No. Poker, y'see, is all about the money.
I realise that most professional sports are all about the money. It's just terribly
refreshing to find one that doesn't feel the need to drench that cold fact in bucket
after bucket of fucking "Clash Of The Titans" hype.
Admiring the honesty of a game that's almost always won by the best liar. You have
to love life's little ironies.
ii) Fat Blokes Can Be Good At It This is an immutable law. For a sport
to be truly great, fat blokes have to be able to excel. No exceptions. Football,
cricket, rugby, American football - fantastic games all, and each features any number
of players of copious girth plying their trade at the very highest level.
Contrapositive proves the rule. Basketball is entirely populated by the freakishly
tall, the freakishly thin and the freakishly tall and thin. And it is, without a
shadow of doubt, the single most tedious activity in the history of mankind. Q.E.D.
iii) It's Egalitarian Fat, thin, tall, short, male, female, black,
white, athletic, wheelchair-bound - anyone at all is capable of playing the game
on a level playing-field. All you need is money that you're willing to lose - and
there are always any number of banks, building societies, relatives and blokes named
Icepick Freddie who're just gagging to give you that.Which leads neatly on to...
iv) Nicknames Great sports need players with great nicknames.
End of discussion. Football has been growing steadily more shit since Stuart "Psycho"
Pearce retired along with the game's last brilliant nickname. I mean, what have
we got now? David "Becks" Beckham? Wayne "Roonaldo" Rooney?
Emile "You Fucking Carthorse" Heskey? Fuck right off.
The Humour. Elegance. Devil-Fish. Come on. How can a game not be great
if there's a bloke playing it who goes by the name of Devil-Fish?
v) It Understands What "World Series" And "World Champion"
Mean To whit, that more than two countries need to be involved. And don't
give me that "Yeah? Well, you put together a better team than the Patriots/Yankees/Whoever"
shit. It's not for me to prove that whoever isn't the best in the world. It's for
them to prove that they are.
vi) Near-Incomprehesible Jargon This appeals to the geek in me. So far
as I'm concerned there's not an activity in the world that wouldn't be improved
by the addition of impossibly obscure acronyms and slang-terms to render it alien
and terrifying to casual passers-by. If I could get away with describing making
toast by saying that I was "laying down a wheatshake in the HGU", you
know I'd be doing it.
Actually, I have several dreams, not all of them interesting or postable somewhere
that my Mum is likely to read. So for the sake of argument let's do our best to
try and ignore all the dreams involving getting chased out of my old nursery-school
by Ring-Wraiths because my shoes scratched the floor or, for example, Jami Gertz
and a carton of black cherry yoghurt and try to stick to the point.
Mmmm. Yoghurt...
Where was I? Dream. Oh, yes.
Ever since I stepped onto a stage with a friend's band as an emergency fill-in tambourine
and inflatable-banana player (yes, there's a story attached to that. No, it's not
worth the telling) and felt the coruscating adrenaline rush that comes with playing
even a small part in the creation of a glorious noise, I knew that I wouldn't be
complete until I'd learned to play a musical instrument.
Well, it's only taken a decade or so of disaffected apathy, but now I think I'm
finally ready to try and overcome my complete and utter lack of anything that could
charitably be called musical talent. Not for me the path of the flamboyant guitarist,
nor the soulful pianist. I eschew the ways of the skillful fiddler and the eclectic
keyboard player. No. If was going to learn an instrument, it needed to be one that
matched my personality - unsophisticated, profoundly unfashionable and, above all,
cheap.
I've heard it said that it takes 2000 hours of practice to become a competent harmonica
player. I'm pretty sure that the next 1998 hours are just going to fly by.
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
Soundtrack to today's outburst: "Oh Suzannah played
loudly and slowly over and over and over and over again, with the bastard fucking
double 6-draw at the start of the third line missed every single bastard fucking
time by such a margin that only bloody dogs can hear the resulting bastard fucking
note. Fuckity fuckity fuck."
[ Blue Man In "Getting Archives Up To Date" Shock ]
If you're at all interested, my Arizona Cardinals/Madden 2004 spectacular, Watch
The Birdie, has finally been brought up-to-date with the rest of the first season
and everything I have so far for the second posted to the archive. Link's in the
sidebar on the left.
I've also re-posted the first season game in St. Louis, half of which had gone mysteriously
missing - thanks for pointing that out, Mike.
The updates will now go up on here at the same time as I'm posting them at GameFAQs
and on the Donkey Sanctuary. Hopefully I'll get this wrapped up before Madden 2005
hoves in to view, and fingers crossed that someone screws themselves up enough between
now and the start of next season that the Cardinals don't end up as unquestionably
the worst team in the game again.
Put it this way - if there's anyone on the face of the Earth who hasn't heard of
Alien, but is likely to be swayed into buying it by the prospect of seeing more
by the bloke who did Black Hawk Fucking Down, well - I'm just glad I don't know
them.
Has our society really garnered such a chronic case of attention-deficit disorder
that it helps more to list a nasty, tacky, almost pornographically violent yet overwhelmingly
tedious piece of shit like Black Hawk Down in the "By The Same Author"
space ahead of, say, Blade
Runner or Thelma
And Louise just because it happens to have been the last thing he did? God almighty.
Still, I suppose it could have been worse. It might have been advertised with the
tagline "By The Director Of G.I.
Jane"...
