HugePoker

Greetings HugePoker BlogFans, long time no see/hear/read/post…

Let me start by saying … it’s my birthday. So that’s good, I guess. Now I’m going to report a whole bunch of bad stuff…

As some of you know, my mom died in November. I’ve reported on her illness here in the past, so I thought I should give that final news, out of place though it may be in my poker blog. It was not a surprise – in fact she had a lot more time than was originally prognosticated, but still hard, of course.

I’ve spent the last 5 weeks with a kidney stone working its way slowly and painfully along my personal plumbing path. Kidney stones are really not fun – drink a lot of water so you won’t share my experience. In the past 72 hours he has been making noises as if he might want to come out, and I thought that would be a special birthday present I could give to myself, but no luck so far. If he doesn’t come out on his own, they will have to go in with a scope & laser & basket to zap, break up and remove the offending stowaway, and I’m really not looking forward to that possibility.

It really has been kind of a rotten 12 months for me, led overwhelmingly by my mom’s illness and death, but then there’s the whole shingles on the face episode last spring, more or less losing my job when online poker was shut down on Black Friday last year, the fact that the startup company in which I invested a bunch of money has gone belly-up, and now this freakin’ kidney stone. Bronchitis was such a mild bump in the road that it hardly even bears mentioning. But amongst all my moaning there is a lot I’m grateful for, and a lot to give me perspective or remind me of my fortunate, privileged existence. I’ve had some icky and painful medical stuff, but in the end it’s nothing serious in the big picture, and my financial stumbles should hardly cause anyone to shed any tears for me as I approach the 20th anniversary of the last day I held regular employment. Even amidst the sadness around my mother’s passing I can find things to be grateful for – we had over a year with her after her diagnosis without a lot of pain or suffering, and in the end a year’s decline from lung cancer really would have been much preferable to her over a many-year slow fading through dementia.

So it’s been a crap year and I’ve barely played any cards. I feel like I need to re-define my relationship with poker, and I’m not sure what that’s going to look like in the end, but if I can just eject this stupid little pain-nugget from my pipes I’ll start focusing on things like that. I’ll be in Vegas from March 4-9, to meet up with an old college friend and to play in some events at the Wynn Poker Classic. And I’ll be in Italy in late March and April to celebrate Team Huge member Maya’s 40th birthday, but I haven’t figured out yet whether I can work that into a poker trip – it is a sad coincidence that the EPT in Campione Italy (near Lake Como) is the exact week when we want to be celebrating in Tuscany, but maybe I’ll still wrangle some poker into the trip somehow. And, again, probably no-one needs to feel too much pity for my being deprived of an opportunity to play poker because I have to spend a week in a villa in Tuscany.

There is one happy bit of poker news to report, though it has nothing to do with me … on Valentines Day 2012, the professional poker community welcomed its first well-known openly gay male member. Jason Somerville, young online and live pro who won his first bracelet in last year’s WSOP, came out in his blog this week, making him the first male pro to declare his queerness (joining Vanessa Selbst, the only openly lesbian well-known poker pro). He’s getting a flood of positive response, and it will be interesting to see if this opens the floodgates for others who have remained closeted. OMG the SANCTITY OF POKER is threatened; we need to CIRCLE THE WAGONS, PEOPLE!!! Joking aside, I’m pretty proud of him. You go, girl!

I hope to return to reporting on my own thrilling and ridiculous and lucrative poker adventures in the rest of 2012, my 49th year. And I hope to have no more painful and disgusting invaders to the temple that is my body. And I hope for luck, success and health to all of you, my loyal readers and fans…

Stonily,
huge

This entry was posted on Friday, February 17th, 2012 at 5:39 pm and is filed under Poker. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.