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Other essays on this theme
Essay: "Gambling"by Delvin Diles You know these slot machines in casinos? How the columns of numbers and icons flip and flip until they all line up? Sometimes they match, most times they don't though. So there is a higher losing percentage once you pull that lever. But nobody thinks about that. People go on vacation from slaving at work all year just to drop their hard earned money in that ol' slot machine hoping to win. And that's okay in my eyes; as long as you don't play stakes that'll leave you broke.
When I was growing up though, I had other ideas. Like, so what if I'm unearned, unmasked, and unprepared for the possibility of someone with an AK-47 laying wait upstairs, I'm still going to break into this apartment. I knocked on the door, and no one answered, so why not kick it in? Or even though I've never seen this friend of a friend of a cousin's friend until tonight, I'll hit a blunt he rolled an hour ago when none of us was around. It's probably not laces. Dude would say so, right? I was always making choices as if the stakes didn't matter. As if I had dice that never crap out. But on the flip side, when is there ever really a time when there are no odds against you in life? Some probably ration for a homerun ball to hit you in the forehead, crack you cranium, killing you right in the middle of the 5th inning. Or one of God's stray lightning bolts frying your ass at the bus stop. Or while you're sitting in a Mickey D's diner chopin' on a burger, some dude in bomb vest barges in, and blows him, you and Ronald McDonald's statue to a million pieces. There is no mistaking it: in the gamble of life and death, the Reaper holds all the chips. -Delvin Diles |