Lots of deadlines approaching, not least of them the first AIOTM of the new series on Monday, so of course I am playing a lot of Yahtzee on my iPhone. And this morning I almost broke my personal best of 702, though the impressive score snuck up on me somewhat. It had looked like an average game, but then I got three Yahtzees in the last four throws (the final two both being Yahtzees full of sixes, boosting the score even further) and suddenly I had 631 points. In a sense it is more frustrating to come so close and not succeed, but in another sense it is insane that I am still playing this game so regularly in the vain hope of beating a record which is essentially fairly meaningless given that 90% of the game is down to luck. But fuck that. I won't be happy until I have scored the maximum possible (which is something like 1135). It may take me a few lifetimes, but I will do it. And then people will remember me with awe and wonder and not as a massive dick who has wasted the precious gift of life on something pathetic.
Worryingly there is a part of me that believes I am able to sometimes control the roll of the dice with my mind. If I concentrate too hard on it it doesn't work, but if I allow my subconscious to take over and use the sides of my brain to will it rather than the front then the dice do sometimes fall as I command them. It doesn't always work because sometimes I allow my conscious brain to impinge on the work done by the unconscious. But I would say at least one in every six die rolls I am getting the score that I am hoping for. It's pretty freaky. And very occasionally I will throw a Yahtzee in one roll, which is statistically IMPOSSIBLE. So I think I might be magic. And you won't be laughing in my face when I am the multi-millionaire, psychic Yahtzee champion of the world.
I tweeted about my success and my mum emailed me to say "If you didn't spend so much time on Twitter you might actually get some work done!" It was like I was doing my O levels again and my parents were nagging me to get back to revision. This is the beauty of the modern age that it allows mums to keep checks on us well into our 40s. It could make me a bit reserved knowing that my mum is reading everything I write online, but then again she's read my book so has seen a lot worse. I could have emailed her back and said that if she didn't spend so much time on Twitter reading my tweets then she might get more done too or indeed to inform her that AIOTM is pretty much written by stringing together all my tweets for a week (and that in any case I have very rarely got anything written by Saturday morning - it's a show that can only feed on the sorrow and heartache of being done at the very last second). I did a bit of thinking about it, but my brain is still not playing ball, though I couldn't remember any of the catchphrases or running jokes
