Tim's To-Do List

1) Buy new car battery and brake pads

2) Clean apartment

3) Find monologue for audition

4) Write a blog

5) Work on play for ten-minute play festival

6) Look for a new job

I vowed to get at least five of these six accomplished today.  Well…four.  Three.  No, damn it…I was going to do four!  My work cut out for me and my belly full of determination and Frosted Mini-Spooners, I rolled up my sleeves and immediately…

…signed up to play a noon poker tournament on Pokerstars.com.  Uh, okay.  I have motivation.  But it's early.  And I also have a strong desire to sit in my pajamas and play poker.  For a little while.

"Wow, way to get on top of that "To-Do List."  You're a regular fireball of productivity," Bob commented.  Bob and I have been friends for longer than I can remember.  Literally.  I don't recall him ever not being a part of my life.  I think we all have a friend like Bob.  You know, the friend you don't really like and, in fact, sort of hate.  But you've been friends so long you don't really know how to tell this person to go away.  Also, though you may hate them, you're used to them…and sometimes friendship is more about comfort than the actual enjoyment of each others company.

So I'm playing poker, and Bob is watching me and chiming in with the occasional annoying comment.  The tournament is a $5 entry fee freeze-out which 2,770 people register for.  First prize, according to the tournament lobby, is a cute little $2,100 chunk of change.  And I only have to beat the other 2,669 players to get it.

During the first two hours of the tournament I manage to get all my money in after the flop in horrible shape, then proceed to catch lucky river cards to keep myself alive.  Bob snorts and giggles over my shoulder.

"Jesus, you pretty much suck at this.  Seriously.  You've been playing this game for how long?  Four years?  Good lord almighty.  And you've read how many poker books?  I would hope after four years of practice and study you'd be at least passably good, but I mean, look at you.  You should just go to the casino and play craps for all the good you're putting that $5 to.  Or better yet, just give it to a homeless guy.  At least he would have the decency to buy some good booze with it."

I ignore Bob, grit my teeth, and actually manage to play a couple hours of good poker and squeeze my way into the last 100 players.  For the next half hour I catch a sick rush, and with thirty players left in the tournament, I find myself the overall chip leader with over 600,000.

"Holy crap!  I could win this thing," I tell Bob.  I double check the tournament payout chart.  Yes, it's still $2,100 for 1^st place.  Even 2^nd place is a respectable $1,200.  Visions of paying off my car and taking my family out for a nice celebratory meal are doing the conga, California Raisin-like, through my skull.  Bum-bum bum-bum bum-BAH.  Bum-bum bum-bum bum-BAH…

"You're not going to win," Bob tells me, matter-of-factly.  He leans back in his chair, an annoying half smirk on his face.  "You're getting lucky.  You still have to outlast twenty-nine other people, and you haven't taken one bad beat this whole tournament.  You think that's going to last?"

I ignore my friend of little faith and sit down at my laptop, trying my best to channel Allen Cunningham, determined not to blow this opportunity.  I relax, concentrate, and…

…proceed to figuratively get repeatedly punched in the balls by my uncooperative opponents, who clearly have their own selfish ideas about who should win that two grand.  My downward spiral starts, as Bob predicated, with my first bad beat of the tournament, as I lose half my chips after flopping top pair, putting my opponent with a flush draw all-in, only to see him make his flush on the turn.  This is followed by me going completely card dead and unable to steal because every time I even dare to put in a pre-flop raise to steal the blinds, someone raises me the rest of my chips.  Don't these jackasses know I have a car to pay off?  How rude!

The blinds, antes, and foiled steal attempts combine to whittle away my once dominant chip stack, and forty-five minutes after I saw my name atop the leader board, I am busted from the tournament after my King-high fails to improve against my opponents Ace-high.  I am out in 20^th place.  20^th place out of 2,770.  It feels like 20^th out of 20.  A window pops up to congratulate me and inform me that I have won…$30.

Bob is literally rolling on my bedroom floor, laughing.  "Oh my god, that was so beautiful.  You didn't even make the final table.  You didn't even make the final TWO tables.  You were the chip leader for Christ's sake!"  I point out to him that I did finish 20^th out of over 2,500 people.  "Yeah, did you win?  No?  You suck.  The end."

I'm devastated, and to make matters work, I look at my computer clock and…6 O'CLOCK!  It's 6 pm.  Not only did I not win…it took me 6 hours of my precious Sunday to fail at this task.

"Fuck me!"  I spit.  I go for a walk, to try and work off some of the frustration.  Bob goes with me, not because I really want him to, but because he basically never leaves me alone.  It's just as well.  Left alone in my apartment, I'd be worried he'd try to steal something or pee in my food.

Walking around my apartment complex, I try to think how to salvage my day.  I decide going to buy a car battery and brakes, which should be a priority, is out.  I'm just not in the mood to deal with that crap now.  To be honest, I am probably just using this as an excuse to put off something I really don't want to do.  I've never changed a car battery before, and I figure there is a minimum 15% chance I will electrocute myself during the task.

"Holy shit, you call yourself a man?  You can't even change a lousy car battery?  Here, I'll give you a hint: the red plug goes into the red socket, and the black one goes into the black socket.  The end."  Bob is shaking his head.  "Your grandfather owned an auto shop.  Jesus!"

Having walked myself into exhaustion, I go back into my apartment and see if I can find something to eat.  I open my freezer to find water spilling out of it onto my floor and a compartment full of half de-thawed food.  "What the hell?"  I ask Bob, who shrugs.  A quick investigation shows that some ice build up has been preventing my freezer door from closing all the way.  It has been hanging open for God only knows how long.

Bob is cracking up.  "Hilarious," he says, wiping tears from his eyes.

I wheel around to him, angry.  "Dude, how is this hilarious?  I have a freezer full of food that isn't frozen.  I have Lake Michigan on my kitchen floor.  I have nothing to eat.  What part of all that fits your definition of 'hilarious'?"

"Oh, well...," Bob composes himself.  "Well, you're right, that's not funny. That's all kind of sucky, man.  Very tragic.  But, you know…it's happening to you, so…that's pretty funny."

I decide to start doing dishes, determined to get one thing on my list done and figuring cleaning is about the only thing I have the emotional energy for at this point.  A disturbing stack of empty Smirnoff bottles sitting next to my sink provides an uncomfortable reminder of my burgeoning alcoholism.

"Oh, please!" Bob rolls his eyes.  "Don't flatter yourself, sweetheart!  We're talking about the guy that has two stiff drinks and ten minutes later is rolling on the floor with a stomache ache.  'Oh, oh, it hurts.  Its hurts.  Wah-wah-wah!'"  Bob proceeds to cry and writhe around on the floor in an unflattering but admittedly accurate impersonation of me.  "You have about as much of a chance of being an alcoholic as you do of screwing Jessica Alba," he tells me after his performance is finished.

"You know," I say to him as I wipe down a cup, "standing in this apartment, doing dishes on a Sunday evening, getting mocked and harassed by someone who doesn't even exist…"  I rinse and put away the cup.  "I think I might be cracking up."

Bob removes himself from my kitchen floor and looks at me seriously.  "Dude, you're not cracking up.  I am merely an invention of your conscious mind, which has been conditioned by your upbringing and environment to process everything around you with a bitter, insult filled back-and-forth dialogue, rather than the more traditional stream of conscious monologue most people maintain.  I exist, essentially, so that you always have someone with whom you can debate the events of your life."

I squeeze the water from the dish rag and look at Bob suspiciously.

He breaks into a grin.  "Nah, I'm just messing with you, dude.  You're totally cracking up."

I continue scrubbing dirty dishes, thinking what else I might be able to accomplish from my list today.  Find a monologue?

"No one will ever cast you in a play, kid.  You look like a drug-addicted Tobey Maguire, without the talent," Bob informs me.

Write a play?

"About what?  You spend your weekends alone in your apartment scrubbing dishes and losing poker tournaments.  That's a Greek tragedy…but it's not a play."

Look for a new job?

"What the hell new job are you going to get?  You don't have any skills."

Write a blog?

"You don't have anything to write about.  Though a quick perusal of your previous blogs shows that hasn't stopped you recently."

I decide to stick one of my half-thawed frozen pizzas into the oven for dinner, figuring it would either fill my stomach or kill me, and I wasn't sure if I was terribly interested which.

"Do you know why you never get anything done?"  Bob asks me.  I ignore him, but of course he continues anyway, as I knew he would.  "It's because you spend all your time thinking about doing things, rather than actually…physically…doing them.  Let me ask you something, seriously…do you ever stop thinking?"

I think about it.

"Right," Bob chortles.  "I win."

As my pizza heats in the over, I plop myself down on my overstuffed blue chair, and think about turning on the TV.  I don't do it…but I think about it for a good long time.