Just seeing this thread for some reason. I haven't read it word for word yet but I think I will have to just for the memories it stirs up! I have done a bit of hallucinating, lack of sleep only. Pushing eighty thousand pounds down the sled and there is a white two story house in the middle of the interstate! Fortunately I recognized one of my mental waypoints, it sat about half a mile off the road on a hilltop in west Texas. Trickier was a herd of cattle in the interstate. Shit! I have seen a herd of cattle loose on the interstate and four cowboys stopped chasing them. Real or not? They are thick enough in my lanes it is going to be a wreck talked about for years if they are real! WTF, play the odds. I left the throttle locked at seventy-eight, rolling in my cab over. They never did disappear, I just drove right through them without a solid whack!
About playing "savage". A couple times friends nagged me into playing a tournament during my gambling days. Back then my game had at least three gears, recreational pool being dates and friends, local hustlers, road players. During a tournament my thought was to advance with minimum effort. When I met a friend in a tournament it was an eye opener. "You didn't give me a chance!" "Nope." There was a reason the most I would play a friend for was a beer.
If there is any pool goodness to this post this part is it. The only way to make half of a shot, pocket the ball without shape or get shape without pocketing the ball, is to missplan the shot. If the shot is planned properly it is impossible to make half of it. With very rare exceptions when I had to turn loose of the cue ball, I made all or none. It annoyed me to make half, that meant I had missplanned the shot and it never stood a chance of working!
I find it best to think of shots in terms of degrees or vectors rather than distance it can be off and still fall. If the object ball is close to the pocket it might have an inch of slop each side of center pocket to still fall or five degrees either side.(numbers purely for example) The object ball traveling ten inches may have five degrees of vector tolerance and a wide range of speeds that will work. However, the cue ball that is traveling another six feet after contact with the object ball may have one degree of vector tolerance and maybe five percent of speed tolerance. This is why my attention is usually eighty-twenty or more focus on the cue ball's path after contact. If I planned the shot right and executed right to get the cue ball where I want it, the object ball has to fall. I can almost ignore where it is going.
Once I realized that the cue ball was what the game was almost all about I devoted a few thousand hours to making that cue ball do right, often the old oversized or overweight bar cue balls. While many hated the old mud ball, after a very short period of fighting it for what it wasn't, I loved it! I thought of it and called it an eight hundred pound gorilla. I found out that it was easier to control an eight hundred pound gorilla than a cue ball that was equal to the other balls. Anyone spending a lot of time on bar tables for one reason or another needs to carve that in stone. Once accepting the mud ball for what it is, you can make friends with it instead of fighting it for what it isn't.
Oh yeah, a final note circling back to the beginning like I often do, I learned that when I started seeing "gremlins", shadows crossing the road where you have the impression something ran across the road without seeing more than the impression of movement, it was time to park the trucks. In another hour or so I would be into full blown hallucinations and terribly unsafe for myself and everyone else on the road with me!
Hu
Lost the gun for a solid year..after less than a hour. For the entire year when ever I went to the pond with the older boys one of the 3 would hand me their gun for the day.