No baller, I

Maybe it's a good thing I don't make oodles of money playing poker. I'm just not cut out for the lifestyle that is apparently expected of such people.

For example, I've been seeing ads for Poker Pens. My reaction has been to think, "That's dumb," and turn the page. But today there was a detailed review of one of their products on a blog I read, here. It doesn't make me want one. It just makes me think, "What the hell?" (The image above is another of the same company's products, lifted from their web site.)

I can't grasp the concept of a pen that costs $300 or more. Granted, I don't do a lot of writing without a computer these days, but there have been large swaths of my life in which I had to reach for a pen a hundred times a day or more. Those coincided with times when I made a lot more money than I do now. But even then, the idea of a $300 pen would have struck me as just ridiculous.

Probably a dozen years ago I discovered the "Dr. Grip" series of pens from Pilot. They're comfortable and they write well. And, even better, they cost maybe $6, with refills a buck or two each. I always have one in my shirt pocket when I leave the house, I keep one at my desk, one at my bedside, one by the telephone, and a spare one in a drawer. What can the $300 one do that these can't--besides cause me a fit when it gets lost or stolen?

Watches are the same way. I used to wear one all the time--a $20 Timex that I bought at K-Mart. It kept time with amazing accuracy; when I would reset it by one of the various governmental atomic clocks twice a year for daylight savings time changes, it had never deviated by more than a few seconds. It was comfortable and easy to read. It sits in a drawer now because I just don't need to know the time very often when I'm out of the house anymore, and when I do, my cell phone serves the purpose just fine. But again, even when I needed to check whether I was keeping to a schedule several times an hour, and even when I could afford something much more expensive if I had wanted to, I would never have dreamed of spending my disposable income on a watch that cost 10 or 100 times as much. I see even more ads for expensive, poker-themed watches than I do for poker pens (the poker room at the Rio has a display case of them), and for the life of me I can't imagine how these companies stay in business.

It's not that I am incapable of appreciating fine things. If I had oodles of money--as in many millions of dollars--I'd likely indulge in a fine sports car. At the moment, I'm kind of enamored of the new Nissan GT-R, but maybe I'd fall in love with a Ferrari, or the long-awaited Lexus supercar (if it ever actually hits the market). I've spent enough time in my life playing pianos that I understand why people who do so for a living will save up to buy a Steinway. Heck, I've even co-owned a Steinway grand myself (Model B, not the big ol' D that you see in concerts), so I truly understand the sound and feel that the extra dollars buy. I don't like champagne, but I've tasted Dom Perignon and some cheap swill side by side out of curiosity, to see if a naif like me could tell the difference, and it was instantaneously obvious why one was considered superior. I can understand one who enjoys wine making the occasional splurge for the good stuff. I have handled and admired some fine, high-end, hand-crafted pistols and shotguns. In fact, I have in my collection a real beauty, a $3000 handgun that was bequeathed to me upon the death of my best friend several years ago. I can easily grasp why people who do a lot of shooting are picky about their instruments, and even why some people just admire the beauty and craftsmanship enough to want to own them even if they aren't used much. That friend was a professional photographer, and I learned from him why he wouldn't consider using anything but a very pricey Hasselblad in his studio work or for shooting weddings.

All of which is to say that my bafflement over expensive poker crap is not due to a generalized inability to appreciate life's finer things.

Come to think of it, maybe it's not the price alone that makes me turn up my nose. It might just be the whole idea of poker-themed stuff. After all, I wrote a piece about my similar distaste for a bunch of cheap poker-themed crap I found in a Target catalog a couple of years ago. ("Is there any crap people won't buy?") I can list my poker-themed items on one hand, I think. I have several baseball caps and a couple of T-shirts from various casinos and card room--all freebies. I have one WSOP sweatshirt that I bought when it was on sale for about 2/3 off ($10), and I would have preferred it if it didn't have that logo. I have a PokerStars sweatshirt and a PokerStars backpack, both of which I got with my player points at no cost. (I decided I might as well use the points for something, and that was before I discovered that I could use them to enter tournaments.) That's it, I believe.

Poker may be what I do, but it's not who I am. I don't consider it part of my identity, so I don't feel the slightest urge to plaster tokens of it all over the items that I own and use. I cannot get myself inside the head of people who want to do so--especially at hundreds or thousands of dollars apiece.

But that's just me. If you want to own a $300 pen with the four suits on it, go right ahead. Lest I sully the thing with my grubby, unappreciative paws, I won't even ask to borrow it, as long as I have my Dr. Grip in my pocket.

Is there any crap people won't buy?

H.L. Mencken famously quipped that "Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public." I think that would still hold true even if we narrowed it down to just "American poker players." You could also substitute "taste" for "intelligence," and still have a valid point.

Look at this assemblage of poker crap I found at just one major online retailer (in this case, http://www.target.com/). I don't know about the rest of the poker-playing public, but if I stumbled into my bathroom in the middle of the night with a full bladder and found myself looking at a poker shower curtain, a poker toothbrush holder, a poker liquid-hand-soap dispenser, a poker wastebasket, a poker tissue-box cover, and poker wallpaper edging, all faintly illuminated by a poker night-light, I think I'd suddenly need to vomit more than to urinate.

In your kitchen, what would compel you to own a poker slow-cooker, poker barbecue utensils, poker glasses, poker swizzle sticks, and poker coasters? Certainly I can see that a flash drive would make a useful computer accessory for some people, but how are you better off for it being packaged like a poker chip?

Undoubtedly, though, there are people out there who would unwrap one of these hideous things at Christmas and react in earnest, "Wow! Just what I've been wanting!" These people must have more than a smidgen of alien DNA coursing through their veins.

I mean, I reckon that I love this game as much as anybody alive. The percentage of the world's population that spends a higher portion of an average day thinking about poker than I do must be very, very small. But I can't imagine my life being made even a scintilla happier by having such tsatskes surrounding me.

Just a note to my friends and family reading this. If you have ever considered getting me such an item as a gift, well, please don't. Neither of us would want the job of cleaning up the likely result.