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#656 – News From the Michael Craig Desk, Part II – Wide Awake in Dreamland
I have a backlog of blogs to complete but you’ll have to excuse the interruption. I haven’t been on top of my game the last few days. It started with a dream and ended with a nightmare.
I’ve been feeling some pressure to step up my poker game lately. I won’t go into the details but (a) my livelihood depends on making money playing poker, (b) I’m contemplating playing more live tournaments, with the increased cost if I fail, and (c) Full Tilt has a lot of red pros, and a lot more quality players who want to become red pros.
My mental problems haven’t been at the tables. I finished 2008 on a positive note on Full Tilt and then had an excellent January, highlighted by finishing 6th in the HORSE at the Southern Poker Championship and winning the $69 + $6 NLHE $40,000 Guarantee a week and a half ago.
But if dreams come from our unresolved waking issues, then the matter still concerns me. Monday night, I had a dream so vivid that, even amid the chaotic events of the following days, I managed to write it all down.
I dreamed that I made a TV final table but Uncle Tilty wasn’t particularly impressed. In fact, the only recognition I received from my exposure was from Professional Wrestling.
They liked my performance and charisma and wanted me to play the role of a “wrestling manager.” I would represent a stable of new “heels” – wrestle-talk for villains – and build their personae as well as my own. All but one wrestler, however, quit when they learned their manager was a lawyer-turned-author-turned-poker-player-turned-wrestling-manager who hadn’t watched wrestling since the days when Bobo Brazil and Haystack Calhoun walked the earth.
So I developed a can’t-miss act with the remaining heel, a kid named Paul. We were going to christen him “Paul Bunyan Junior,” which we decided to change to “Paul Bunion Junior.” His gimmick was that he was a giant, like his namesake. He wore overalls and carried an axe. His blue ox Babe would occasionally appear. He would dwarf the world we inhabited.
The problem was that Paul was only 5′5″. He weighed 350 pounds, but he was about as tall as a 14 year-old girl.
But we worked out all the angles and compensated. I would bring Paul water bottles and he’d finish them in one swallow, laughing heartily about how one quart couldn’t possibly quench his thirst. The bottles, however, would be miniature, like shot glasses, holding an ounce or two of liquid. (One thing Bunion had going for him was his deep, booming voice. In fact, if we didn’t work the giant routine, that voice would have seemed out of place on a person of his height.)
When interviewed, we would talk about the enormous meals Paul could put away. To demonstrate, he would eat a dozen hot dogs in a minute. They would be cocktail franks, though he would make a big show of how they disappeared in his gigantic maw.
And so it went. “Babe” was an Airedale in a blue sweater. His giant axe was a hatchet. The women he would carry in the ring balanced on each bulging bicept were midgets, or pre-school girls.
Our killer move was when he would stare down opponents, intimidating them with his massive height advantage. To accomplish this, I would follow him into the ring carrying a step-stool. Paul would nonchalantly step up, never breaking his gaze – but gradually lowering it as he climbed – on his opponent.
My dream focused on the night of Paul’s first match. We were for some reason in a panic because we never figured out how this would work with a live audience and an actual opponent. It was as if the incongruity of our story and Paul’s diminuitive size had never occurred to us.
I was in a cold sweat as the bell rang to start the match.
And that bell woke me up.
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