Two articles back I posted some tough guy rant about never giving up.  I think it was called Fight or Die.  Someone wrote that and posted it on 4chan.org/b/ and I was feeling like I actually had a pair that day and was feeling too lazy to write something more original and gripping like my usual garbage so I copied and pasted and added the McFucking Kill Yourself pic and the post was seen by maybe 17 people tops.  That’s not really the point of course.  My point actually has more to do with the fact that I posted some shit about “pain being my breakfast cereal” and how the weak are culled from the pack we call the human race just by virtue of being weak.  The post implied that I am the opposite of weak and all the pussies out there crying into their Wheaties should take notice, be on alert, read my bullshit manifesto and take immediate action to stop their cowardly sniveling ways.  Either that or be prepared for that inevitable “culling” as if some quazi-military outfit was out patrolling the streets of the world, sniffing out weakness in mankind and snuffing out the man exhibiting the signs of weakness.

I didn’t mean anything by the post except to maybe offer some encouragement to people out there suffering needlessly due to fear and to possibly motivate whoever needed the motivation to dig a little deeper to obtain what they wanted in this life instead of curling up at the first sign of strife and rolling over.

I have no place to call my own.  I have no car to call my own.  I have no money to call my own.  I have nothing to call my own except my skateboard and some clothing and a few paintings and other miscellaneous odds and ends.  I am a grown man allegedly.  I have three college degrees, two from excellent universities.  I have had a plethora of different jobs and plenty of money.  Unfortunately all of these degrees, jobs and paychecks were no match for my gambling addiction.

Compulsive gambling is really fucking bad unless you are some incredibly lucky motherfucker which as you all probably know is not very likely.  Common sense should dictate that over time, an individual gambler has absolutely zero chance of winning money and a 100% chance of losing his bankroll. Have you ever checked out a place like Pechanga Casino?  Its located in Temecula, California in the middle of a beautifully appointed highway surrounded by lovely and assuredly expensive  mini estates.  Sort of like a rich man’s housing tract.  Across the street to the right is a wonderful park with all sorts of good stuff for fitness minded people to get into.    The surrounding area of Temecula is very upper middle class and the whole outlying area is also coming up.By outlying area I’m talking about Murrieta, Lake Elsinore, even South Corona.

The casino itself, easily rivals any Las Vegas casino that I’ve ever seen.  For sure.  Its totally massive and very fucking nice.  The hotel rooms are bad ass.  The grounds are bad ass.  I’ve never seen the golf course but I’ve heard its bad ass and it definitely ain’t cheap to play there.  Keep in mind that I know several people who have been going to Pechanga Casino since it was a series of tents with no real framework structure in place.  Let me tell you, its no homeless tent city anymore baby.  Far from it in fact.  There are thousands of slot machines and hundreds of table games and a bunch of restaurants, a food court, several bars and night clubs and a massive poker room up the escalators.  We are talking hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars worth of infrastructure in terms of land and buildings.  I don’t know any sort of accurate number as far as how many people are employed there but its got to be in the thousands.  And that’s just in security personnel hahahahaha.

Ha that’s funny shit but it does seem like it.  They have so many god damn detectives and uniformed security guards and outside roving patrols on bikes and in trucks and Reservation Rangers in 4 x 4′s roaming around the place you would think that the President of the USA worked there or something.  He doesn’t.  However one night I did see Dr. J (Julius Erving) playing the $25 dollar slots in the high limit room (and losing his ass and being a total fucking pompous ass prick, much too good to talk to any of the common folk in the casino) one night.  Like who really gives a fuck right?  Duh.

They have a big sign which reports how much the casino paid out for the day, week, month and maybe even year over on the right side of the casino by the food court kind of and I remember looking at it one day and they had paid out like over six million or some shit that day.  Which has to tell you what kind of money that fucking place is raking in on a daily basis.  Trust me if they are paying $6,000,000 out in jackpots in one day they are profiting $36,000,000 on that same fucking day.  Do the math, be boggled by the numbers and start to let it sink into your head why the Pechanga Indian Tribal Members each get paid $15,000 a month for doing absolutely jack shit nothing and why the whole Southern part of Riverside County is starting to resemble Bel Air more than Home Gardens.

Just staying on the conservative side and saying that the casino has profit of $10,000,000 a day that’s like 3.65 billion dollars a year.  I know that sounds fucking insane but I’m thinking that its got to be true.  That place is straight out balling hardcore.  And what is the product that they sell, which is in such high demand from a huge percentage of the population living within 80 miles of that place?  To be honest that product could be called many things but essentially it boils down to greed and its really quite a complicated product indeed.  In fact its a mind fuck of monumental proportions, one which is everchanging but for the most part based on one of the baser emotions that humans feel.  I’m talking about greed, desperation, extreme joy, crestfallen sadness, depression, arrogance and pride, plus avarice and lust and narcissism and selfishness and self righteousness and indignation and disbelief, and inevitability, and superhuman power.  An array of self centered, frantic emotions very very high to the point of incredible or very very low to the point of crawling underneath a rock and dying.  That’s it.  That’s the product they deal.  Some call it hope.  Some call it entertainment.  Call it what you will it boils down to a human being wanting to get something for nothing, to magically turn $10 into $2000 (which I personally, have done at Pechanga Casino playing Cleopatra Keno).

Everyone has the same anticipatory semi confident, devil may care attitude when they first start off on a gambling extravaganza.  It feels awesome to walk into the casino with your pockets full of money, walk up to a machine thrown in a twenty or a hundred and just start winning.  Machine after machine, every thing you touch seems to turn to gold and you can win thousands so fast it seems crazy and you start wondering to yourself how the casino can afford to be doing this and still make a profit.  You feel like you can’t lose and sometimes I’ve had these kinds of streaks carry on for a couple of straight days or even 11 straight days as I did the first time I visited Melbourne Australia in 2004.  Every single day for 11 straight days I won and won and won and ended up winning 15,000 had my airfare and hotel and about five grand worth of clothes and hundreds of dollars worth of food, drinks and crystal meth paid for.  It was an awesome trip in every way.  I know what those streaks feel like and they are so incredible.

I’ve learned, the hard way though, that streaks like that are incredibly few and far between.  Streaks like that end.  They end badly.  For me they end horribly because I start freaking out and before I know it I’ve given literally every single dollar I’ve won back to the casino.  Plus everything I brought with me that I had just sitting in my wallet untouched up to now,  plus everything I can get from my ATM and every credit card and the money I left in the car and the money I left at home and the money I borrow from all of my friends at the casino, all of it, every single fucking dime of it, right into their outstretched hands.  I haven’t done this once or a dozen times.  I’ve done this literally hundreds and hundreds of times.  So many times you would think I have a fucking hole in my head and all of my fucking brains have leaked out and there is just an empty space there.  That many times.  Too many times.  Way too fucking many times.  And then even more times than that.  And more and more and more and more and more and more and more and more.  To the point where you are sick of reading it, I’m fucking sick of typing it but still I’m not done yet because yeah you can throw in a bunch of more times on top of it all.  Trust me.  I could try to remember all of the times and it would end up only being 25%.  That’s how pervasive and sick and horrible and truly deplorable and inexcusable my gambling problem has been.

I’m a walking, talking, educated, living, breathing example of why Pechanga Casino is so fucking rich that they are basically a law unto themselves and effectively they answer to nobody.  They are so far above the law that you have to just bow down and accept the fact that fair or unfair they are going to do whatever the fuck that they want to do and what they want to do is take every single person who walks through their  doors to the proverbial cleaners, fleecing them, leaving them with nothing but the memories.  They want to clean your clock and somehow convince you that you had fun getting your clock cleaned and that you actually have a chance in fucking hell of getting even the next time you walk through the doors like an Alzheimer’s patient who forgets his name every ten minutes and shits into his Depends every afternoon.  Pechanga Casino is the definition of insanity that makes the most sense to me.  If I literally looked at the online definition of insanity on the Webster’s Dictionary website and there were no words only a picture of Pechanga Casino trust me, I would completely understand and so would millions of other smart, capable, wonderful people walking the planet today.

The truth is that Pechanga Casino and many like it (San Manuel, Pala, Soboba, Valley View, Harrah’s etc) have no chance of losing any money, ever period.  Why? Because gambling is computerized.  All the wins and losses are already preset into the computer program and the false sense that you have actually won any money is only a matter of timing.  In other words walk up to a machine after some poor, stupid fucking stubborn asshole like me has just fed two thousand dollars into it without winning a fucking dollar, throw your twenty dollars, decrease the bet size from max bet of $6 bucks a spin to something more manageable like $1.20 and voila, all of a sudden you are an incredible gambler, on a hot streak.  Retrieve a thousand dollars of my horribly managed bankroll push cash out and be on your way and you are a winner.  Its all just a facade of course.  If you stay on that same machine and play it for 24 hours straight as I’ve done several times, I would stake my very soul on the fact that you have zero chance of being ahead at the end of that time period.  There is no fucking way.

They are computers.  They are programmed in a way that only makes you think you have a chance of winning.  And that so called “chance” of winning is only under very specific circumstances and only for a very short period of time.  Any pattern of play that deviates substantially from this is bound to end up costing the moron pushing the buttons an even more SUBSTANTIAL amount of money.  Its that simple. Long term you cannot win period.  So don’t try.  Short term you may win but hardly ever and never enough to satisfy you if you have a big negative lifetime balance against the gambling institutions of the world.  Hardly ever and never enough.  Two toxic ideas represented by those four words let me tell you.  Especially the “never enough” part.  Basically that means even if you win, no matter how much you win, you are still fucked because you will never ever walk away.  You will think you are smart and clever with your amazing money management skills but trust me the routine you are using is going to eventually break down due to some unforeseen circumstance taking place that you can’t control and you are going to get really red hot ears and a stubborn anger is going to creep its way into your way of play and you are going to go on fucking self destructive tilt mode to the point where you soon enough find yourself with a familiar sinking horrible feeling with an ever shrinking pile of cash and a sense of unease and disaster smashing those prior emotions when you thought you were the great Julius Ceasar of gambling, some sort of modern conquering hero of gambling.  Someone to be admired and patted on the back and flirted with by the desperate fake as fuck greed driven losers who hang out at the casino.  All of a sudden your celebrity, your fame, your stardom, is no longer with you.  All the admirers have left your entourage, except for maybe a couple of well meaning, commiserating bastards with bald heads and the look of vulture stamped all over their shiny little sweaty little sharp and hooded little faces.  They are actually the worst to be honest because you are so pissed off.  You are so pissed off that anything that comes out of anyone’s mouth that resembles a plea to please stop, cash out and run for the exits is something that you have no desire to even hear, and certainly you have no inclination to absorb, comprehend and act upon this advice.  Nobody, least of all yourself, is surprised when a short while later you are broke as a fucking joke and all of a sudden the though that you didn’t stop at the gas station on the way to the casino hits you.  Also those hunger pangs, that unpaid cell phone bill, the realization that you are out of whatever drug of choice you call your own, or some similar jolt back into reality lands on your head causing you bruising and maybe even a bit of bleeding and you really can’t do jack shit about it except join the throng of brain dead walking buckets of sadness and greed walking around the casino searching for money left on machines, even a penny, or waiting for some new celebrity to hit a jackpot in which case you can quickly make friends with him and ask him to be a star in his own little gambling show, verbally stroking his ever increasing sense of ego, so that when he does get paid his jackpot, if you are sly enough you can quietly make it clear to him that you are a little tight just at the moment and wow, twenty dollars would sure be appreciated and  hell, its only a tiny fraction of the 2,356 dollar jackpot he just won and since he is so swelled with the “golly gee willikers i’m some smart and greatgambler” syndrome, 8 times out of ten you can squeeze at least a twenty out of him. A lot of times you can get more then that.  If you are willing to invest a little more time into the effort and you are a good speaker as I tend to be, and the moron you are talking to is getting pretty fucking lucky you can get several hundred dollars over the course of a few hours.  Hopefully one of those twenty dollar bills you finnagle off of the crowd of temporary winners turns you into a temporary winner again and a good portion of your bankroll is restored to you magically and boom you are off an running on yet another gambling spree.  Of course this one is going to end up like all of the others, except only quicker now because by this time the meth is wearing off, in fact you can’t get any higher, you just want to sleep but you’re down money still of course.  Surprise surprise right?  Not.  Fuck no its not a surprise although you are insane so you could have easily have convinced yourself that somehow or another you are not a loser and this could be the time where it all comes together for you and you are going to be both lucky enough to earn those thousands you so desperately need but also you are going to smart enough this time to know when to walk away when you are ahead.  Yeah.  Uh huh.  Sure you are.  You forget that you haven’t slept in three days and you find yourself nodding off to sleep like the world’s laziest heroin addict.  You find yourself sleeping in front of some stupid ass machine and its 11 a.m. on Monday morning and you’ve been at the casino since 4:30 p.m.Friday afternoon and you have terrible breath and a pocketful of money but you keep falling asleep so you keep vacillating between this angry toxic obsessed crazy gambler cussing and hitting the machine hard, even bruising up your thumbs and knuckles and spitting on the machine and just being a horrible and scary and psycho idiot between periods of waking up and hearing yourself finish a snore as some fucking moron in a suit is asking you, “are you okay sir?” as if he gives a rat’s fucking ass if you are okay and as a matter of fact you are very much NOT okay at all but you don’t tell him that you just smile and say yes sir and sorry about that sir I’m just a little tired but really you are way more than tired.  You are completely drained,I mean wiped out.  In every way.  Mentally, physically, spiritually, financially, emotionally.  In every fucking way.  You need to stop and salvage what you have left and find the strength to get off your numb fucking ass and the courage to walk away from that fucking hell hole soul stealing heart breaking, cold toxic unfeeling whore of a place Pechanga Casino and you need to do it five minutes ago.  But youcan’t drive how the fuck are you going to drive and besides you are losing now and you are so pissed off that you didn’t leave earlier when you had several chances. No you stuck around and got more and more outrageous with your bet sizing and your judgment and boom.  In no time flat you are broke broke broke broke TILT Tilt TILT yet again and either you jump back onto the track of finding free money or you finally give up and realize you are fucked and its time to get the hell underneath that fucking rock you emerged from four days earlier full of quiet confidence and brimming with cheer and tidings for everybody you run into.

Do you get the picture of what I am describing here people? Itsfucking convoluted and confusing, a total psychotic episode inducing mind fuck guaranteed to reel in the best specimens of the human race.  Its called gambling.  Specifically its called morbid or compulsive gambling. My name is Anthony Mandich and I am a gambling addict who has squandered away every portion of of my life that was worth anything and I’ve driven away every single person I have professed feeling of love and admiration for in the past.

And I nothing whatsoever to show for it except a battered heart and shaky sketchy depressing existence.  Living in a self created corner of hell.

Don’t get started because it will finish you in the end my friend.