Lassitude Lowered

The first stage of my anti-boredom campaign was a simple one: I took a week off from the felt. Between playing with the cat, handicapping the 2016 NFL season, and reading Terry Pratchett’s entire published output, I also outlined a cunning plan for More Fun Poker in 2016.

A lot of the possible solutions, such as dropping shrooms or arriving to each session with a Mariachi band, were quickly ruled out on the grounds they were unlikely to increase my win-rate. I needed a plan that was both enjoyable and profitable.

My starting point was to consider the unique qualities I bring to the poker table and how I might profitably exploit my natural image. I am the first to acknowledge that the raw materials with which I am working are somewhat limited, but I do wear a battered black cowboy hat from which cascades an unruly mess of black-with-a-touch-of-gray hair. On a good day I get mistaken for Alice Cooper, despite being fifteen years younger than him. On a bad day I get compared to Weird Al Yankovic.

If you’ve played with me, however, you’ll most likely remember my cat’s-eye T-shirts, captured delightfully by Doug’s artwork in the banner to this blog. I have forty-three of these T-shirts. The last time I played a live poker session without one was 2004.

You may now be thinking that my “unique qualities” mentioned above start and end with “a few sandwiches short of a picnic.” Frankly I wouldn’t argue with that assessment. And I’ve decided that the way forward is to build on this solid foundation, hopefully leaving opponents in no doubt that I’m not quite right.

When Louis saw me pulling box after box out of the closet it became immediately apparent that he fully endorsed the new venture, particularly when I tipped the contents of the boxes on the floor so he could use them for the purpose that, by Feline fiat, they are intended. Anyone peering into my living room may have been puzzled by the mound of notebooks, small flower pots, commemorative spoons, dream-catcher accessories, tiny toothpaste tubes, and guitar strings. That’s their problem. I had found what I was looking for! My collection of rings and cat collars.

How the rings are worn is hopefully apparent. What is notable about mine is that they are, almost exclusively, chunky silver numbers in which the basic outline of a cat has been ingeniously manipulated into words such as “PURR” and “MEOW.” If you saw them in a ring catalog you would likely exclaim “who in the hell would wear THAT?” Now you know.

The cat collars require a bit more explanation. Many years ago, before cell-phones were invented, I discovered that I could remind myself that I had something important to do, like go to work or fetch my wife from the airport, if I wore a cat collar as a bracelet. Since I don’t jingle naturally, the ringing bell on my wrist was unusual and ideal for jogging my memory.

An equally serendipitous discovery was that How-Do-You Mike in the Ameristar 3-6 game didn’t like cats or bells. Mike got this handle by constantly asking “How do you call with that?” and “How do you play that?” and a range of other semi-rhetorical questions all of which were designed to demonstrate that Mike was a Good Player and everyone else was an idiot. One evening I was wearing a collar to remind me it was Thursday and was sitting next to Mike. I noticed him glaring at my cat collar whenever the bell jingled. Since he wasn’t being particularly obnoxious, I filed the information for later.

I turned up at the next session wearing four cat collars with particularly jingly bells, muted on arrival by pulling my T-shirt sleeve over them. It wasn’t long before Mike, again directly to my right, got into it with a perfectly harmless truck driver whose primary purpose that evening seemed to be giving money to the regulars.

“How do you pull to a gutshot?” wailed Mike, who had just been beaten out of a pot by the truck driver on an ambitious draw. He continued to berate the guy despite multiple pairs of eyes giving him standard “STFU Mike” glares.

And so I literally rolled up my sleeves and unleashed my bells.

“How do y…” Mike’s head snapped to the left as I jingled my bells while appearing to be engrossed in a stain on the far wall. I realized immediately that I could enhance the effect further by tuning them, but the sheer volume had stopped Mike in his tracks.

“How d…”

Jingle.

“H…”

Jingle.

I redirected my attention from the wall to Mike who was redder than usual and alternating his attention between my wrist and my nose.

I smiled and jingled.

“Does this bother you?” I asked, punctuating the inquiry with a particularly vigorous jingle.

“Yes,” growled Mike between clenched teeth.

“Oh,” I said.

You may be wondering at this point how annoying fellow players is consistent with my More Fun Poker quest. In the years since Project Bell was instituted, I’ve discovered that my cat collars can be used for far more than diverting clowns like Mike from tapping the aquarium. I think of it, with the full support of my psychoanalyst, as yet another example of personal growth.

I’ll explain how it all works in my next post.