Tao of Pauly

Fall Back, Fall Back

By Pauly
Melbourne, Australia

Daylight savings time happened last night. I lost an hour of sleep. In the middle of covering a poker tournament, that's crucial. I needed every free minute I can to rest up, relax, and sleep.

My neck bothered me the last two days. When I was in London, John Duthie (creator of the European Poker Tour and former British TV director) and I had an odd conversation about necks and backs. Whenever he plays poker, it's not unusual to see him playing with a masseuse rubbing him down for several consecutive hours. He said that he's on a laptop a lot and spending a substantial time in an editing room and those two things affected his neck, shoulders, and back. His doctor knew right away that he spent too much time at a laptop since our bodies aren't designed to do that type of work.

No wonder I'm so achy after long assignments.

My neck had been flaring up the last few days. It's stiff and sore. I popped 1.5 Vicodins last night before I went to bed to help soothe the pain. I think that attributed to more weird dreams.

I've been popping something every night before I crash. One night it was a muscle relaxer. A couple of nights it was Xanax. And then Unisom and Ambien. The combination of the pharmies and the mystical energy of Oz combines and the result are vivid dreams.

Earlier this morning, I had several. One involved taking JoeSpeaker's son, AJ, to a Yankees game. Except it was old Yankee Stadium from back in the day when Mickey Mantle played. I kept losing AJ, only to find him after a frenzied search. I caught a foul ball and threw it back on the field. A fat guy next to me made fun of the way I threw.

I also had another dream where I went to a dive bar in downtown Seattle with BG, Bobby Bracelet, and Bobby's girlfriend Lil Bitchmore. I ordered cheese nachos with bolognese sauce... and extra cheese. I went to the bathroom and the urinals were the sink. There was a band playing and they asked me to run the lights and soundboard because their guy was arrested at the last minute for being a deadbeat dad. I kept dropping the bass player from the mix and his girlfriend would not stop bitching at me to turn him up.

The last dream I had involved a friend from college. Gitty drove an old white Colt. We were driving around in the rain and he was making the most precise hairpin turns. We were making deliveries of some sort. The addresses would pop up on my iPod screen and we'd go to drop off the packages that cluttered in his back seat, underneath old fast food wrappers like Taco Bell and Burger King. One time, we got lost in a housing subdivision were all the houses look the same, kind of like the housing development in Weeds.

No spottings of Hugh Douglas in the latest dream sessions.

Anyway, back in real life, Saturday was the first time in a week that I had more than one meal! I ate a healthy breakfast before the work day began. I also ate a ham & cheese panini for dinner. My dessert was a chocolate canoli. It felt good to have a proper meal schedule once again.

I've been betting a lot the last few days on Australian hoops and on hockey in Sweden. Don't ask. My mutual funds had a great week. Finally. I'm up for the week,e specially after I did a coin flip for $2,000 with Schecky. He had just won $30K after winning one of the preliminary events in the Poker News Cup and offered up a coin flip. Like I had been doing in the past, I requested a coin that had kangaroos on one of the faces of the coin. Then I picked kangaroos. It came up kangaroos and I won. Again. It's been a good week, despite the lack of sleep and food.

By the way, I posted some photos that I took yesterday. They look good only because of Shronk's amazing camera. Head over to Tao of Poker to see my poker photos.