STOP gambling

GOODBYE GAMBLING 

 fragments from a book based on a true story

by Dejan Stankovic

     “There are many factors that influence the categorization of a given form of gambling.  According to generally accepted criteria, there are three types of gambling: recreational, problematic, and pathological, but there are no clear borders separating them which would make them more recognizable.  The borders are so unnoticeable and fluid that no gambler is aware of their existence.

      I’d describe it as a vacuum which is created around the borders and overflows from one sphere into another while maintaining the structure of the previous hopeless sphere.  Therefore, when you cross the border from recreational into problematic gambling, you won’t momentarily change your behavioral model.  Instead, you’ll find yourself behaving in the “old” way in a new sphere, under new circumstances.  This is why your reaction will be significantly late, and the consequences incomparably greater.  It’s important for you to know that it’s a one-way road from recreational to pathological gambling, and that a pathological gambler can NEVER, I repeat NEVER go back to gambling recreationally.  He’ll try, and the members of his family will often turn a blind eye to a series of rotten compromises, but time will always prove what I’m telling you to be true.  I must insist that every new relapse (i.e. new debts, crossing over to more difficult spheres) will be more painful in every sense of the word.”

   
    “Man is programmed to push all of life’s ugly events into oblivion, and remember only the pleasant ones, to which time gives greater significance, thus making them even more pleasant.  Behind us is a past that, regardless of our attempts to resuscitate it, remains dead.  Before us lies an uncertain future, and the moment between the past and the future is life.  Have I lived life, or has life lived through me?  I don’t know, but I do know that everything would’ve been different if only I hadn’t been there that night.  I can just imagine all the scenarios that were waiting for me, and the roles I would’ve played if only I hadn’t played the one, the only, role: that of the Gambler.  It’s all over, I no longer repent, I no longer pine for all those scenarios.

      I met Lady Luck in 1973 at a hotel not far from the Black Sea.  I noticed her immediately in her makeup and fine evening wear.  She noticed me, too.  There were a lot of people on the floor that night, but they were mostly her earlier acquaintances.  I, on the other hand, was visiting this place for the first time.  She flirted with me, and in the blink of an eye, she could transform from an untouchable woman into a naïve girl or a hoyden.  The quickness of her transformations made it impossible for me to penetrate her soul and foresee her real intentions.

Many years later, I discovered that she has no soul, no eyes, or heart, but by that time I was already her slave.  I’d surrendered to the course of events like a young man in the hands of a professional.  That night I drank a poison that kills in a special way, over the course of many years, by selectively destroying only man’s healthy potential, thus leaving him at its mercy.  In time, the poison spreads throughout the body, and when the scale tips in favor of our previously restrained darker sides, its full effect can be felt.  Moments of contrition and reflection are the most difficult.  Only then do we become aware of our weakness, and our futile search for an antidote.