I'm so over pool right now. I just don't give a shit about it. I lost too many games against D tonight, a guy I know I should've been able to beat easily, and ended up breaking one of my sticks after scratching on the eight ball during our last game.

He promptly left without a word and I went to walk to clear my head. When I returned, Rudi was waiting for me with those wires stuck in his ears. I guess he never cared to look up the headphones I shared with him. No big deal. If he's fine with his wires then so be it.

I shot better with him but I still missed so many fucking shots I know I should've made. Cuts are suddenly so difficult for me. I experimented with both the ghost ball and fractional ball aiming methods while trying to get them down, and after much trial and error I ended up combining them into something that works more often than not. But tonight nothing was clicking. Regardless of how sure I was while aiming so many balls decided to fuck off and steer well away from their intended pockets. It was a cruel joke of the highest order and it made me truly despise pool.

What kind of fucking game is one where the more you practice, the worse you get?

I don't know.

I don't care either.

But what's truly sad is that tomorrow I'm gonna drag my frustrated ass back down to the table and practice some more, knowing full well how likely it may be that my effort won't be enough. At least that's how it feels. At this stage in my pool journey, nothing's enough. No amount of desire, no amount of practice, no amount of affirmation, no amount of confidence. The game's just one irritating fucking joke, and what's worse is that if you were to describe what the fuck I do at that goddamn table the answer would be that I play with balls.

Goddammit.

I expressed my woes to Rudi and he laughed while putting together a tight rack.

"You're getting angry because you think you can beat these guys," he said. "So when you don't, it's the end of the world." He shrugged. "You need to have patience. Patience is the spice of life. Don't worry about beating them, 'cause maybe you can't. When you play for money sometimes you're gonna play against a guy that's way better than you, and when you don't win, what'll you do? Lose your head?" His gray ponytail danced as he chuckled. "For now, don't think you can beat anybody. Just relax and enjoy the game."

I get where he's coming from, but that's also easy for him to say. He's good. He doesn't have to deal with the chagrin of someone still learning the ropes. His skills make relaxing second nature. So I understood him, but I also wanted to tell him to fucking stuff it.

I asked if he'd heard about the abortion issue stabbing the decaying heart of this great nation of ours today, and he said it was impossible not to hear about it. So I asked his opinion on it, and he said that an abortion shouldn't be done once cells came together in a womb to form the human equivalent of a tadpole, a word that started with a p and ended with wog. I don't even know if that's a thing. I guess I'll be researching the human life cycle later.

To him, abortion was usually wrong. It was better for women to always have unwanted children and give them over to the state than to kill them.

"Unless she's raped," he said with a dark seriousness in his eyes. "If she's raped, then I understand a woman wanting an abortion. It's not good for her to have a child from something terrible like that."

I nodded. "So do you think abortion is murder?"

"It depends," he said, "on if a human is alive in there or not. If it's a tadpole then yeah, but I don't know if I'd call it murder." I could tell he thought the word was too harsh, which was funny to me. "But it's definitely killing, and killing an innocent human is wrong."

To be honest, I've never thought too much about it. The perks of being a man, I suppose. I'm pretty uneducated as far as human biology's concerned. I couldn't tell you the phases of a human as it grew from a cell into an infant even if you stuck a Magnum between my teeth. But if I was a woman, I know I'd definitely want the option of an abortion, regardless of the reason.

And I can't really explain why, but my gut tells me that getting rid of a woman's right to an abortion will help to only spell doom for our society, not that we're not royally fucked already.

Most problems always boil down to our innate greediness and selfishness as a species, and I don't think this abortion issue is any different. The rich want nothing more than to control everyone else, and most people are too desperate to fight against the system those bastards lock them in. That's just the way of the world. Everything is about control, and when you can control a people's reproductive rights, well, you're sitting as top dog up on that golden hill, aren't you?