After six weeks of World Series of Poker diaries, Lee Davy gets back to his usual bitchiness and complaints in his bog standard confessions column, this week slathering on about how hard life is. Poor Lee.
I look around the room. I don’t know what to do. Life is being squeezed out. The machismo part of me won’t accept that I am affected by depression. But what else can it be? There is a feeling of weightlessness. I could float. There is nothing inside. No bones to anchor. The slow seduction of solemnity sickens me.
Music?
Video Games?
Books?
I am reading five books at a time. Last week it was four. Next week it could be six. I am reading a business book, a health book, a fiction book, a book on alcohol research, and a book about the first Canadian to walk in space. Then I watch Penny Dreadful. My heart stops. It starts again. I turn off the TV set and settle down to write.
After a few hours I emerge a new man. The festering disease that slowed me down, only hours earlier, is dead. Famine of thought has been replaced by the need to write War and Peace. Instead I pick my nose and flick the dried blood across the room. It lands on my yoga mat. I hope the cleaner hoovers that. I don’t have a cleaner. I don’t have a hoover.
I am like a sponge at the moment. I need to learn. I can feel my life expectancy lengthen each time I turn a page. It’s like someone has shoved a cattle prod up my ass and pressed the button.
Whilst learning is a good thing, it’s also a confusing thing. So many people think they are right. Not everybody can be right. Who to believe? Who to follow? Who to choke?
I get annoyed easily.
Take this guy Dave Asprey for example. I have been listening to his Podcast whilst I have been running. He is the man who designed Bulletproof Coffee. Today he was speaking to a doctor about health. They were both talking about the battle against the food industry, and how important it is not to have these toxins in their body. Then they started talking about wine, eating meat, and how succulent duck eggs taste.
I am an all or nothing man. The hypocrisy of the world makes me feel like the tenant of a tin of sardines. I can’t move. I am locked into this stare, eyes right next to mine. I can’t look away and it’s terrifying. I don’t want to be a sardine. I want to be a bear. I want to hibernate and when I wake up everything will be normal.
I told my ex wife that I would never speak to her ever again. This of course means I would never text her, e-mail her or Facebook her. Our estrangement had become death.
This death, the ending of things, seems sadly normal. When we broke up we told each other that we would always love each other. That was a lie, a big fat lie. I mean what the fuck is love anyway? I tell my father that I love him and he barely acknowledges my existence. Love is lost on me. Love is like a chemical burn.
Part of the reason my ex wife wants to send me to space and then remove my helmet, is because I travel around the world pretending to work. There are times when I have believed that my decision to be a poker writer has come with tragic sacrifices. But that’s another big fat lie.
I don’t live with my son. He lives with his Mum. This means my rights as a father have vanished. Life has donned a pair of Doc Martens and is kicking me in the balls on this one. Whilst it’s true that I travel to poker events, because I don’t live with him, the net result means I am not allowed to hire him as company as much as I would like.
Example: I arrived from Las Vegas on Thursday. I picked him up on Friday. I took him home on Sunday. Now I am packed in my sardine tin, staring at the wall, waiting for my next visitation rights. That’s 12-days of jerking off. Then I get to see him for two days. Then I have to wait another 12-days. And if I leave this sardine tin. If I dare to breath, if I take a leap of faith and pull my parachute of pain then I am a cunt for not caring.
I feel thin, like paper.
I feel like I have been embalmed, and am just waiting to die. I am a father. Let me be a father. I don’t know what to do. I don’t want to be here. Every morning I wake up and I look outside of the window and I see grey. Grey buildings, grey lampposts, grey pavements and grey clouds. The world is closing in on me. I live in the basement of life. A place where the sun doesn’t shine.
And why?
For those 2 days
Every 12 days.
I scream from behind soundproof glass, like some monastic, frigid, lifeless sap. Is this what sacrifice is? Is this what it means to give everything to your kids? I want to leave. I can’t leave. I want the sun. I need my son.
I asked him if he would allow me to pull him out of school and travel the world with Liza and I. He said yes. He laughed. I gave him that look. He knew I was serious. Then he stuttered.
Of course he can’t leave.
The poor boy is stuck in the same perpetual cycle of confusion as me. He loves his Dad. His Mum hates his Dad. He loves his Mum. His Dad doesn’t talk to his Mum. And I dare to wallow in my self-pity. It’s the boy. The boy is the one who is being hurt more than most. He is dizzy from being loaded into the mortars and fired over the fence. Day after day. Week after week. Month after month.
And the worst part.
I wouldn’t want him to leave his Mum. It would break her heart. I couldn’t allow that to happen. It’s the sole reason I never fought for custody. I would rather suffer in pain, than to know she is feeling it. And yet I will never talk to her ever again because she hates me. She can’t stand me. She wants to line me up against a wall and rip me apart with a Gatling gun.
I look around the room.
I don’t know what to do.
There are nine days left to go.
Daniel Negreanu didn’t make the November Nine.
I will write about that.
