I’ve been to Las Vegas. It’s a monolith, wrapped in neon lights dropped into the scorching sun of a desert moonscape. There is no feeling of reality, no future, no past, only the present. Las Vegas lives one second at a time.
I never got close enough to see the cards, or the dice, or the lever, or whatever device to which they had attached their money. And I never watched for very long; I didn’t have to. It all happened in a flash. I was never close enough to hear the words: it didn’t matter. It was an air of tension, it built, slowly, table to table. A crescendo of pointless hope, mounting, rising, waiting for the last turn. There was an aroma of desperation, it smelled like defeat, mixed with mindless optimism, sprinkled with nihilistic fatalism. It was the odor of dead and decaying dreams.
In one second, you could see it, from across the room. A sudden atrophy. As if their bones went rubbery, and they melted a little into their seat, or stool, or the floor on which they were standing, as they watched their money slip away. It was sudden, complete, exhausting, just to watch.
After we left it took several days to escape the temporal distortion. It was comfortable to be in a place where one second just melted into the next. A stream of living.
Life is a constant adjustment.
I have a friend who bets on football games. He doesn’t bet a lot. He bets a small amount on a “parlay.” A range of games, I think last week he bet on ten games. Betting on parlays gives you the opportunity to win disproportionally to what you are willing to gamble. I’m not sure how much a parlay pays, he told me, and I don’t remember. I know the more games you choose the higher the amount. As far as I know he’s never won. You can bet he would have told me.
When you bet on a parlay every team you choose must win. Though, to gamblers, winning doesn’t necessarily mean outscoring the other team. To “win” a team only needs to lose by fewer points than predicted, they call it covering the spread. If you only had to pick the team that won, it would be a lot easier, in college football there are normally five or ten games with an easy to pick winner. Life is a constant surprise, and you wouldn’t win every week, that’s why they call them “upsets.” But you could win quite a bit. When you add a point spread things get complicated.
I have no idea how they figure those spreads. They are uncanny. Spreads can seem so lopsided people rush to pick either team. Knowing full well the winners will fight hard and walk easily to victory, but that many points is ridiculous. While others are sure the odds makers are fools for thinking the losing team can keep it as close as 35 points.
Somehow it works and the people taking the bets are taking the money, they don’t gamble, and the people making the bets are screaming at the television imploring the coach to kick the field goal in the closing seconds to win by fifteen, instead of 12. Doesn’t he know the spread is thirteen and a half?
Life is filled with highs and lows.
I like to gamble by taking my car in for an oil change. I’m betting the coupon for a $19.95 oil change is going to take me out the door in blissful frugality, only to find out I need new brakes, or tires, or something expensive, ill-defined and crucial. Normally, I lose.
It’s always a gamble to go to see my doctor, or my cardiologist, or dentist. Getting old is expensive. And I should have been more careful in my youth.
Aches and pains now have dollars amounts associated to them, generally, the higher on the body, the more expensive, feet and ankles are fairly reasonable. Stomach problems are about the cost of a down payment on a house. Around the chest it starts to add up. Above the neck, well, if you have to ask you can’t afford it, but they will say, you can’t afford to ignore it. That’s how you got here in the first place.
In our way, we all gamble, and sooner or later we all lose. I guess that’s the real secret to happiness, knowing the odds are not in your favor, and even if things are going your way, sooner or later you’re going to lose. Don’t worry, though, you’ll be in good company. I’ll be there.
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock
