Time to Quit – Watching the Second Hand

My wife was watching public television the other day… it’s not something I encourage, but I have to live with the fact that our tastes in TV occasionally diverge. If I get up from the sofa to take a leak, you can bet that by the time I get back she will have grabbed the clicker and not only will she have switched to something to her liking but she will have become so engrossed in it that it will break my heart to make her switch back to what we were watching before my bladder call. Anyway, she was watching public TV and she heard someone say that four hours of second hand smoke is equivalent to smoking 17 cigarettes. Right away, this gets me to thinking about bar tournaments.

I haven’t been playing in as many as I used to. In fact, lately, I’ve only been playing in one, the Friday get-together at the Hay Loft. A few Fridays back a rumor was circulating that the owner was going to invest in smoke eaters. This was very good news for me who quit smoking back in 1990 so that I wouldn’t have to spend my last moments choking on phlegm. True to their word, the management did purchase four or five contraptions that run like your average ceiling fan and look like spinning black donuts. Unfortunately, they have no effect whatsoever on smoke. I still have a hard time believing that anyone with half a brain would waste their money on such crap. But, alas, somebody did. And that was it for me – I made up my mind not to go back.

So, without bar tourneys, I’m going to be limited to playing pool where it was meant to be played, in pool rooms. The main consequence of this is that I now have to resign myself to not winning, not coming in the money, and to not having a chance. Such is life.

Of course, this can be expensive. With this in mind, I’ve been working on my websites with renewed vigor, hoping to increase revenues enough to compensate for my losing ways. In my latest undertaking, I believe it took me two or three days to complete, I gathered together all the bios I have written – music bios, sports bios, literary bios, art bios – and christened the little corner of the internet they occupy Ace’s Bio-Farm. Will it have an effect on overall visits to my site? Who the hell knows?

As far as my game goes, considering I haven’t been playing as much as I should, I’m not playing too bad. I’ve been doing eye exercises using two ping pong balls on a string while I’m watching TV and I actually think I’m seeing the balls a lot better. I doubt that I’ll ever be able to see them like I could when I was a kid, but I am seeing a lot of shots that I wasn’t seeing before. My stroke – now, that’s another problem.