Permanent Possibility

I am a full-blown degenerate gambler. A sell-your-kidneys-to-cover-the-spread maniac. I ruin lives, leaving mayhem and chaos in my wake. 

Except that I don’t. Let me explain. 

My parents met in a casino. At fifteen, I worked in one. My mom did nails in a casino. During the summers, she’d dump me in the arcade with $5 and say, “Mommy be back.” It’s how I got good at pinball. In college, half my dates were in a Casino diner. I turned 21 in a poker room. My apartment was amateur casino every Friday and Saturday night of my college years. We kept books. I’m up.

Half my life ago, I was sitting down with my Buddy’s dad, and he was recounting the one (and only) time he did heroin. After seducing his veins with liquid big tits, he knew he had to swear off the stuff forever. He noted, “There hasn’t been a day in the last twenty years I haven’t thought about it. Everyone is a heroin addict. Some of you just don’t know it yet.” The story has stuck with me for two decades.

If home means Nevada, casinos mean home. I got it bad for leopard print and neon. Call me Skinner, because I’ll crank that dopamine slot machine until my shoulder gives out.  And yet, I remain unscathed. Somehow, I bullet-time dodged becoming an obsessive, compulsive gambling fiend. Thus far, I’ve had a perfectly innocent and harmless relationship with gambling.

That is, until recently.    

In a bout of nighttime revenge procrastination, I got a little taste of heroin. I was doom scrolling my digital feeder bar, when I discovered a guy who was live-streaming his gambling sessions. He sold is Honda Accord ($40K) and wanted to turn it into a Lamborghini ($250K) playing online Plinko. You heard it right. You can gamble vast sums of money on a goddamn Price Is Right game. What should have been a lesson in normal distribution, put the vice grips on my heart rate. I watched the entire 28 part series. It was 3AM and I had to be up in two and half hours. Future Nick be damned. I was all in.

My hands trembling, heart racing, and pupils dilated like they were about to give birth. I was violently and viscerally committed to this insane project. And in the way I knew I was straight long before I ever laid a hand on a woman, all at once, I understood that I am a degenerate gambler. I just didn’t know it yet.

Recognizing our fault-lines helps to navigate the treacherous geography of existence. I’m one bad beat away from trashing everything. I would chase bad hands with good money. I would win it all or die try trying. I am a degenerate gambler, though my bank account would swear otherwise. He lives inside me like a dormant virus, waiting for my constitution to become weak from stress. I exist in an uncanny balance of knowing there is a real unactualized part of myself which has never been expressed. He is I, and I am him. He exists as a fixture of my potentiality, like a rubber band pulled taut. I am haunted by the permanent possibility.