Laughter is Immortality

Came out of retirement this year to light the fires again under my stories betting career. As far back as I can remember I cant recall a steak this brutal.

I’ve been beat every which way you can fathom. The buzzer, the whistle, the late game collapse.

And it doesn’t matter the game. Vulcanized rubber, hard ball, soft ball, leather ball.

Far and wide I’ve seen just about every possible outcome (& on the losing side to add insult to injury) materialize in a condensed spectrum here.

Gambling, or any risky big decision for that matter is the ultimate durability test. Sometimes you place wagers you’re iffy on and as soon as you release the tension from launching you instantly know you made the wrong choice.

It just hits you like a bolt from the great divide. You’re positive you just screwed yourselves. & so you watch the event unfold, and even when you’re up by 20 in the 2nd quarter-you know the divine is just playing a cruel joke on you

Sure enough, when you check back an hour later, you’re down by 8 with a minute left in the fourth quarter.

But you can’t release your chute. You’re at terminal velocity & all you can do is grin and bare it.

Life is very much a product of this. You’ll make big boy choices and after they’re made you’ll know it’s not gonna end pretty.

There’s a redemptive aspect about sticking it out anyway-

The value of not turning back in fear is that you have no clue what windows of opportunity await you after you take your licks.

Your hormones are charged and gushing, you want to avenge your misfortune. So pathways and corridors you never knew existed start to stand out to you.

I’ll never forget a particular gruesome beating I sustained this year. I locked my bet in early on a chick in tennis.

She jumped out so far ahead that when I checked the live betting odds she was -100,000 at one point. In layman’s terms that means if you bet on her at that moment in time you’d have to lay $100,000 to win $100. No typo. Her opponent was something like 60:1 to win.

I was in a national forest at the time. Phone in one hand, cig in the other, trading billows of smoke with the clouds.

When you’re a -100,000 favorite you’re on god mode. The margin of error for your player to lose is so drastic you could interdict the game and install your grandmother in her place. And you’d still win easily.

Not so fast. What I was witnessed was demonic intrusion. No other way to explain it. I knew the check I bet on was a headcase to begin with, but after giving away a few tight points the wheels and compartments just started flying off like a stage 5 cyclone. She started fading quickly.

Heart started thumping. Is this really about to happen? And it did. 45 minutes or so later the match was final. Fat L.

I distinctly remember chuckling as I tracked a soaring hawk with my eyes spiraling down into the woods.

When you can laugh in the face of your executioner, you can be defeated. Never destroyed.

The thing you have to understand is high civilization gives you all the freedom you could ever want to take big risks in life.

In the old world, if your hut burned down or your resources were raided, you had no recourse. Time was much slower back then. You’d have to mobilize your entire family back on the frontier and brave the hard scrabble wild to get back on your feet.

In today’s world, it’s neurotic to freak out when you get hammered chasing your thrilling destiny. It’s too easy to build new ships and new homes. New machines. If you have an iPhone you can literally erect a new business fully operational over night.

It’s never been easier to “move on”from sour ventures and dreams that haven’t panned out.

Everything is at your finger tips. The one never changing variable is you will always have to deal with yourself.

No matter how high you climb the ladder of success you better be damn sure you’ve taken stock and inventory of who you really are and what you stand for along the way.