A Legend in
his Own Mind
|
A Legend in
his Own Mind |
|
Carlo's Table
|
Don’t Worry! Be Happy! -Or- I'll butt heads if you look at my shot! Damn I hate it when I get an attitude. Send me a buck if you are now humming that goofy island song which repeats incessantly: Don’t worry, be happy………… Ok, Ok, pool IS a competitive sport and I certainly am as competitive as most about the game but there is no reason to get all twisted and torque faced about a situation. I have had a pet peeve for years about guys who would run around the table after missing a shot to line up to see if they hooked you or you got a cute little keyhole to peek through. They have missed and there is absolutely no chance of the ball making it to any hole, but they dive at the table to see what happened. Sick-o pervert-o masochists, all of them. They will run me off the road trying to get to the proper vantage point. If, perchance, they are fortunate enough to lock me up (accidentally, I might add) they perform the traditional “Yes!” maneuver pulling an imaginary truck horn lanyard or their own pud. If not, they give me a dirty look as if it was my error in blowing the shot that led them to ALMOST accidentally hooking me. Sheesh. I wait until the ball stops rolling, and then, by God, it is MY table. All balls have stopped. No balls are lip hanging. You have missed now sit down or at least get away from the table! Get your head away from my table! Nope, not pool players. I approach the cue ball to see if I even have a clean path and what do I encounter, my opponent coming around for him to view if I (I repeat, I) have a shot. He even leans forward to get his head on line before I get there! That would be called an Error. His error, if he catches me in a head-bonking mood. I am liable to lean forward, too, placing my head on a collision course with his head which is occupying the point and time in space I need to occupy to determine if MY DAMN SHOT was possible. Now here I come and he knows it. He is intent on getting a peek at the line of the ball. I have other intentions. I am targeting a spot on his head with the hardest portion of my cranial anatomy that is also relatively bereft of functional nerve endings. I am going to Coco butt his butt, from the other end. A Coco butt is a head-bonk maneuver like those silly rams do up on the mountaintop battling over those lusty ewes. But my head-butt is outside my nosey opponent’s cognitive patterns. In pool player speak, I’m gonna ambush him. I’m going to ring his bell for being in my airspace. I’m going to blindside him. It is my shot. It is my table. It is my airspace. It is my headspace. It is my turn to look at the cue ball, so there. If we bonk, he can’t possibly know that I was not looking at the cue ball and the whole matter wasn’t just an accident! I clobbered one guy (20 years ago) and as he dropped to one knee from the jolt he said, “excuse me,” as if it were his fault. What ill-shaped chromosome would make me so territorial about the table? Now, I honestly do believe in the death penalty for anyone who constantly lines up looking back down your shot, or someone who puts the chalk with the hole down (trashing the table with dust,) or anyone who broadcasts his hatred of you for a lucky roll, or anyone who sets a drink on a table, or someone who lights a cigarette just as you are about to pull the trigger and a couple of hundred more pool death penalties. Get real. If Bubba wants to see what I just got left, so what? Now I let him scope it all he wants, “Yesssssss” himself into frenzy froth or berate my heritage because I have a clean shot out of the traffic jam. It matters not. If I’m hooked, I’m hooked. If not, then not. I ended this testicular aberration regarding head-butting when I was playing a close friend. I had not been getting any extraordinary rolls but he had not gotten a good roll since he walked in the door hours ago, maybe days. I wouldn’t even stand close to him for I was sure a drive-by-shooting 20 miles away would somehow deliver a lead ricochet to HIM. The pool gods were punishing him for some infamy and I was the day's beneficiary. Now this close friend is as cool and nice of a guy as you can imagine. A true buddy, you know the kind, always getting stuck loaning somebody a few bucks and never seeing it again. He came around to see where the misfire was going to land and I barked at him. If I had had as many bad rolls as he got, I’d be playing darts or chugging rotgut whiskey on money from the sale of my cue. I barked at him for taking a look to see if he finally had gotten a roll. I almost put on him my forehead battering ram having had already marked the impact zone with my laser targeting sight. It was a fleeting thought, never to be actually implemented, but I hope NEVER to have such a thought again. What do I care if he wants to dive to see if the ball is lying good or is in jail? It is what it is, and nothing more or less. Now I must admit I’ll move to verify that there isn’t some mystical thumb coming into play to adjust something out of my vision, but the out-going player now has an extended opportunity to view the remains. This situation doesn’t arise very often, and when it does, normally the opponent can see the outcome and get his caboose out of Dodge before I even move. Now and then, when it does occur, I’ll let the nosey pushy impatient opponent get his peek, dance to his joy or his woe, and withdraw from the table without fear of cranial fracture. If he cries about the leave, I’ll just ask if I have a shot? If he chants to his good fortune I’ll bemuse how I made that shot only last week and practice makes perfect. (It drives them crazy when you drill a jump shot or kick to an even uglier safety.) Either way, I’ll enjoy the game more, my opponent will not risk a shiner, and his morbid curiosity will be satisfied or tormented as befits the outcome. Maybe I used to see the gotta-take-a-look move as a sharking move and developed the head-butt response out of pure cuss-ed-ness or as an anti-shark projectile. I don’t know. It was infantile of me. Maybe I wound up doing the time-honored self-shark I thought of patenting years ago, and was frustrated enough to consider planting my noggin firmly against an opponent’s temple trying to kill their better pool-playing brain cells. Maybe I though that all was fair in love, war, and pool. Maybe a fermented chromosome DICTATES that I defend the turf, mark the bushes, offer sex to waitresses and bonk heads. It made me listen to the little evil voices commanding me to batter-ram the approaching skull and tell them to visit me no more! Hell, I’m an Aries, maybe that is it! I'm a Ram by birth. I REALLY think that I just grew up just a teeeeny bit more and I finally figured it out that is was really, really, really stupid to bonk heads. Naw. I just got tired of waking up with 2 or 3 head bruises and one helluva headache. Yup. That’s it. That's the Carlo that I know and love. Carlo |
Nobody paid me any money to put these links here, I just thought they deserved it. Tell them Carlo sent you, maybe they'll buy me a beer.
|
|
|
(c) All Rights Reserved