When it comes to making money, the gambler’s addiction, as anyone knows, is as efficient as chopsticks in oatmeal. It is an expensive habit and the high the addict enjoys is both horribly rare and demonically short-lived. This is, for the gambler, no small source of pride. Unlike the noble addictions, like those to acclaim, tobacco or capitalism, the high that accompanies a gambler’s win is so viciously overrun by the impulse to plow all that cash back into The House that it is as fleeting as a sixteen year old boy’s first orgasm, although not nearly as furtive.
Not furtive indeed. Gambling is the most public of the addictions, a huge arena-sized orgy of the obsessively hopeful, the ugly, the desperate, the superstitious, and the terribly lonely, bleary eyed comrades who are united but never quite joined in a psychological lubricant of public loss and well-savored self abuse unknown to the lesser addicts of mere booze or smack or sex.
The heroin addict enjoys hours of deep brain chemical nirvana before rousing from a nod to cast a red eye to the neighbor’s TV, scouting his next fix, which can wait, after all, until after a nap. The tawdry nicotine addict can wait however impatiently for his next break and pretend that huddling in a snowstorm with other filtered brand smokers is some kind of real addiction. A filtered addiction is laughable. The boozer swills alone in a crowd, closing in her consciousness until it focuses on the terrible beauty of the glass between her steady hands and the presence of the sympathetic bartender who knows too well the pain that follows the taste. The gambler never has someone to drive him home, nor does he want one. This is why we are the most hated of all addicts; we do not need you, we need an Ace. Pkv Games will provide a unique and different experience to the players while playing in the play station. The players should not be addicted towards the game at the server.
These are pussy addicts compared to the gambler. Their thrill lasts. You pay your dough and you enjoy your show for hours and hours. But there isn’t a living smack addict anywhere who can tear through a thousand bucks every twenty minutes, win or lose, paycheck after paycheck and come back for more. Hell, even the most bumbling beginning gambler can run through a grand or two long before they realize that The House owns their house, their ass, their soul and their future earnings, here and hereafter, amen.
Later, when they do realize it, it will not matter. The House holds “It All” and we want exactly what the House wants. We are The House-at least until it’s time to cash out. We gamblers are, after all, notorious and terminal romantics, caught up in past loves and the hope for our next doomed effort to be loved.
No matter what anyone says, the second string addictions have an abuse ceiling of which gambling does not admit. Beyond the plateau of mere coke or bourbon or meth or Camel non-filters is the forgiveness and peace of death, which is as good a cure as any for the tired chemical addict and maybe is preferred for some of them.
For the gambler, there is no such limit. Three to two odds that we are immortal in the casino; wanna lay a hundred on it? Given a thousand in hand, we will bet two; given a million, we will chase a third. The next roll, the spin yet to whirl, the card not yet turned is The One. Nothing is as addictive as the sweet slurry of mathematics, self-hate and immediate ATM access to the rent money that gambling offers.
The gambling addiction is never directly fatal. The gambler dies in only two cases. He runs afoul of some swarthy, burly, violent non-FDIC banker who works out of a booth in a very small restaurant. Or he bets his life on the next one and steps across the 0,00 divide between life and death by his own hand.
The reality of the situation for the gambler is as distant as the end of his cash and sometimes that’s a long way off.
Never mind that if we were good, we wouldn’t need to win. Gambling is rarely about winning. We gamblers admit that aren’t good and we’re never going to be good, so there is no win good enough to make us say “that was The One, as good as it gets, the big O, the ‘set for life’ score.” We are the most honest of all addicts-it is that honesty upon which we’re truly dependent. The honesty of The House is our goddess, our thrill and our only sure hope.
There is, of course no recovery from hope for honesty, no therapy, no weekend drumming sessions in the woods to set any of us along the dubious path to recovery. How does one recover from hope? What idiot would one want to?
Run another hundred through-the next one, we hope, is the one we’ll talk about long after we’re gleaming and broke and sweaty with the memory of the time the Random Goddess loved us and made us count. She loved us (with no more abandon than The House limits) and it does not matter that it only lasted only a fraction as long as it took to take the thousands into our hands and pass them back over to Her again.
Easy come, easy come. We gamblers do not think-ever-about ‘easy go.’ There are many who have gone there, gone over to ‘easy go.’ They are lost to us because they lost hope. You go there even once and you will not come back. “Easy come, easy go” means She will never love you.
In those few minutes of chance-or few days if you’re lucky enough for a good run-there is a shadow of success at love, a proof of hope, a full pocket of hundreds pressing gently on your genitalia and the ‘come hither’ jingle jangle of the next big score. And among gambling addicts there isn’t one of us who would trade triple sevens for a guaranteed paycheck on our most pathetic day.
