Is that a roll of nickels, or are you just glad to see me?

Hi, it's Kelly again. I've been reading over T's blog to see if there is anything I can riff on that might be of any interest whatsoever to his regular readers.

Let me just interject here real quick before continuing... I just noticed that he mentioned recently that a woman at his job was taking two weeks off for maternity leave. Just WTF she hopes to accomplish in two weeks is beyond me. Silly woman. Either she's got a dozen kids at home and maternity leave is no big whoop to her, or this is her first, and she thinks two weeks is all you need to give birth, heal your hoo-hoo and bond with your baby.

TJ has mentioned that he likes to play the games of chance once in a while over at the Piñon. I think I've gambled there once or twice. Mainly, though, my gambling is restricted to the 10-20 minutes spent waiting for a table at the cafe inside the Carson Valley Inn, the casino down here in G-ville. The hostess gives you a drink coaster-lookin' thingie that flashes and vibrates when your table is ready, and while ya wait, ya gamble. Duh.

My game of choice is nickel video poker. Yeah, big frickin' spender, me. But don't laugh, I've actually won upwards of $17 or so recently on a lowly nickel machine. When you're playing nickels, you can afford to take the crazy bets. I'm a sucker for drawing to an inside straight. If I was playing a dollar machine, I'd play the straight and narrow, lose small and win small.

I did catch some kind of fever once, at the Horizon Casino in South Lake Tahoe, straight up the mountain from me. I was killing time before a movie, and played some nickel slots. Won a sizable amount, maybe $20 or so. Moved up to quarter slots. When I'm not piddling around with video poker, I like to play the old-school Double Diamond slot machines.



No fuckin' around, no cutesy graphics, no options to slip in 45 coins... you just plug in your two quarters, spin the reels, and you either win or lose. Mostly lose. But this one time, after winning on nickels and stepping up to the quarters... I won. About $75. Time to step it up to dollar machines. Lo and behold... I get up to about $220.

Okay, all casino floors have this quiet little area, away from the hubbub. It's the "high stakes" slots. It's basically where all the $5 and over slots are. The carpets are a bit cleaner, the ashtrays are emptied a little more regularly, and the servers' smiles are a little bigger, if not exactly more genuine.

I was hyped and breathless when I stepped into this sanctuary, believing that the gods were on my side that day, that I could do no wrong. I sat down and started feeding $20 bills into machine after machine. I won NOTHING, not a THING, not even spinning a single cherry for an easy two-fer, before the money was gone. I am ashamed to admit, I was so sure that I had been horribly wronged, that something had gone so awry, that I took out an extra $20 from a nearby ATM to try to set things right. Needless to say, I missed my movie, and felt pretty sick to my stomach.

So I guess for about an hour there, I felt the high and low of a gambling addict, and it scared me. I have an addictive personality in the first place, and I can totally see the attraction. But, from now on, I think I'll reserve my addictions for more affordable pursuits... coffee, cigarettes, Jim Beam. And the occasional rush of drawing to an inside straight... when there's a whopping five nickels at stake.