by TC
If you play poker anywhere outside your home game or your country club (should any T-Nation members actually belong to one), you often play with the dregs of society.
It's just the nature of the game. Poker is about allegedly easy money and, more often than not, booze. There are periods of extreme risk and extreme reward. And you can do it without even getting up from your chair.
It's an adrenaline rush for the slothful.
As such, playing with drunks, addicts, thieves, adulterers, and snorky-pork humans in general is pretty much de rigueur.
And tonight's no exception. This game is in downtown San Diego in the basement of an immense, rundown Victorian house. The house might have been worth millions in any other neighborhood, but it has the misfortune of lying directly underneath the flight path of approaching passenger jets.
The planes roar directly overhead about every 60 seconds. They're so low to the ground that a solid baseball player could fungo a baseball into their underbellies. The timbers of the house, even the chips, shake a bit as the planes roar by.
Players who aren't in a hand wander out to place bets on the identity of oncoming planes.
"Ten bucks says it's a United!"
"Fuck no, Southwest!"
You can easily pick out the sleep-deprived residents of the house from among the players. They're the ones with drawn faces and circles underneath their eyes whose hands shake ever so slightly as they draw on their cigarettes. They look like the PTSD guys sitting outside the psychiatrist's office at the veteran's hospital.
Angie is no exception. In fact, she might have fared worse in that the months (years?) of sleeplessness seem to have morphed her into pretty much a dude. She's big and beefy with hands the size of Easter-dinner hams. Her scraggly black hair, streaked with grey, covers her pug-dog face as she squints at her cards. It's possible she hooks on the side, but I bet you 20 bucks she always has to pull down her pants first to prove she's not sporting a smegmaceous dick.
She's in a particularly good mood tonight because Larry, her husband, is about to be released from prison; that, plus the fact she's just earned her ten-year sobriety medal from AA.
She proudly slides it over the threadbare felt to show it off to Alabama Joe, who's sitting to her left. Alabama appears to politely give the medal its due respect, but then it happens.
"This thing's a little dirty Angie. Let me clean it up for you."
And then, then, he pours some beer on it!
Angie grabs the medal from him. She stares at it and her face is the very definition of despair and grief. But rather than crying, Angie goes berserk. She's simultaneously swearing and crying and yelling.
That was her award. It was her sobriety medal. Now it's been... defiled. She'd purged demon alcohol from her life. Now her symbol of that battle was tainted with the very demon she'd purged.
It's as if Sergeant Nutcracker just got a Congressional Medal of Honor from having endured a North Vietnamese concentration camp and then when he puts it down on the table to show somebody, "A fuckin' slope comes out of the shit to take a dump on my CMH!"
You can never look at the medal the same way!
For a moment it looks like she's going to calm down. Part of you thinks she's going to swoop up the beer-soaked medal and start to greedily suck on it like a lozenge. Ten years on the wagon down the tubes! She's got to start all over!
"Hi, I'm Angie and I'm an alcoholic. I've been sober for 5 minutes."
But then she erupts again and flips the poker table over. The colorful chips fly into the air, hover briefly, and then crash to the ground in every direction like nerve-gassed butterflies. You half-expect her shirt to rip open while she turns atomic green.
She-Hulk not only destroy you, she come over the top and destroy your family, friends, and house pets, too!
If she were a man, or maybe a little less scary looking, we might have stopped her. Instead, we watched in rapt fascination, all except for the chip leader who's mightily pissed over seeing his mountain of chips scattered all over the room.
As unsympathetic a character as Angie is, I can't help but feel bad for her because we all carry some version of her sobriety medal.
For me it was my silly little book, a compilation of some of my best articles. I don't want to talk about myself too much, so I'll make it short.
If you're a writer, you're put on this earth to put together a book. Getting an ISBN number is a writer's way of proving to the universe that he exists. So I did. So what if it was essentially self-published and put me in debt?
It's also standard practice to thank some people in the foreword. I did that, too. I listed most of the friends I had, living or dead, as a little token of affection and/or respect.
The trouble is, I later found out that a number of people I'd listed in the foreword didn't even bother to read a single page of the book. They apparently had such little respect for me, or such little regard for my work, that they hadn't even looked at the damn thing.
They poured beer on my medal. They shit on my CMH. They pissed on my head. They didn't know they'd done all that, but they had. I didn't go berserk, but I sure as hell took them out of my will, or at least plan on doing so when I write it.
For others, their sobriety medal is a high school football trophy, their diploma from the Pinkerton Auto Repair Academy, or even the ceramic turtle they made in goddam art class. It could be the promotion they got, the child they raised, or even their crabgrass-free lawn.
We humans may think ourselves evolved, but we still tend to cling to our talismans whether these talismans be tangible or intangible, and woe be to those that disrespect them.
And for many people on the site, their hard-earned muscle is their medal. But I'm pretty sure none of them get much respect for their work. I'm pretty sure their family and friends largely ignore their accomplishments. Their odd little habits, the packed Tupperware lunches, and the near-daily trips to the gym are usually a source of puzzlement and sometimes amusement rather than admiration.
And that's why it often puzzles, me, pains me, when someone posts pictures of themselves on the site and they get anally raped and eviscerated and then have their steaming entrails pissed on by people who you'd expect to have a little more insight, a little more understanding of the path we've all taken.
No, they don't have an amount of muscle that's in the same universe as an accomplished lifter, but it's considerably more than what they had. That one inch of added muscle or that ten pounds of hard-earned bulk is their medal. It may represent years of training or dieting, a long painful trek from pencilneckedness or from fat bastardness, and then some pudknocker comes along and pisses on their accomplishment!
You don't have to applaud the pictures. That would make you one of those muttonheads who stands at the finish line of a race and screams, "You're all winners!"
By the same token, it seems a little odd, a little malicious, to go out of your way to savage them; sort of like walking ten steps out of your way to stomp on a ladybug.
Since seeing Angie go She-Hulk, I've grown convinced that most of the world's sore feelings, its conflicts — be they between people, organizations, or countries — are caused by defiling talisman with metaphorical beer or verbal excrement.
This is not meant to be a kumbaya moment brought to you by TC. It's just an observation that may shed some light on why someone has just thrown a drink in your face, hit you over the head with a 2 by 4, or thrown a flaming bag of dogshit at your front door.
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