Chapter 9 – And Now for Something Completely the Same

While glancing over my cliff notes I noticed an annotation from my editor (me) that I wanted more information on my life “Pre-morbid” – a delightful term I picked up from one of the various letters that doctors have written about me and sent to other doctors at various stages of my life.

I also would like to depart from stories of my latter gambling and booze fuelled life to something a bit earlier…

Around the age of 8, as best my memory recollects, I noticed I had a talent for most things creative- I started doing paintings that didn’t end up on the fridge but hung in a nice frame on the wall of not only my house, but relatives houses, I played piano for a long time and then guitar when I had to switch to a cooler instrument for high school, and I’m even writing this book- the first thing over a few hundred words I’ve ever tried writing.

I attribute most of this to a few attributes- relatively high intelligence, good observational skills, reading a lot and a long standing major depressive disorder. There’s nothing that makes it easier to take yourself seriously than being totally self-absorbed, and like I would always say when painting with pastels, it’s easiest to work from black.

Around the age I was old enough to realise my parents were not only regular human beings with their own lives and faults each locked into a loveless and often spiteful marriage I started drinking quite heavily, I was around 14 and became something of a legend, or a spectacle, amongst my friends- a Hodge podge of the not-cool-enough for the cool group and too cool for the nerds (this was before nerds were the new cool).

We borrowed a row boat from somewhere, probably someone’s cool uncle, and freighted two cartons of beer (this is Australian beer, 32 standard drinks to a carton), a bottle of gin, a bottle of Midori and several tanks of nitrous oxide over to a small island on the river. There were about 8 of us at most but I somehow managed to drink an entire carton plus another 4 beers from the second carton and half the gin.

I didn’t vomit, I didn’t even have a hangover. It’s one of those stories that no-one believed except my friends and myself, and I even doubt it myself somehow- despite being there and remembering it in pretty vivid detail (at one point I fell face first into the river, which I noticed the next morning was filled with rocks covered in oysters).

Now as liberal as Australia is with its liquor regulation there’s not a venue in the country that would let a 14 year old into the gaming room, and indeed as I mentioned near the beginning of this story I didn’t start until I was 18. But they have something to cater for the young gambler-to-be: The Skill Tester.

For those who know them by a different name, these are the claw machines filled with stuffed animals or watches or candy. You put in a dollar (20 cents back then) and move the claw into position over your intended prey where it then descends and gently caresses your desired item before moving back to drop the thin air it’s grasped down the chute.

I’d wag school to go play these things, I’d play them in the lunch break at work while I was working in my father’s pharmacy, sometimes I’d throw in some fishing line with a hook and bypass the troublesome claw and niggling requirement for fresh 20c pieces until I eventually had bags full of these toys which I would then take home and blow the crap out of with magnesium and deodorant cans.

My long term memory has never been particularly good, my short term is fine- my girlfriend is endlessly asking me where she left her mobile phone or keys and I can usually tell her where I last saw them, not that I’m looking or that she ever leaves them in the same place- I just recall visual data well, for short periods.

Memories of my childhood were vague even when I was still a child, like cheerios floating around in a bowl of milk. After ten years of dedicating my life to the routine of getting up hung over, going to work late, gambling, drinking, passing out and repeating until the weekend when I’d usually sleep for 40 hours straight the cheerios are now mostly soggy ruins sitting at the bottom of the bowl. But here are a few things I do remember well:

The cheat codes for Wonderboy III: The Dragon’s Trap.

My mother was very keen to get away from the house when she could and loved horses, or horse clubs at least, she was able to rope my brother (older than me by two years) into going to pony club (I went when I was young but gave up after a horse decided it would be easier for me to clear the jumps if it threw me over them) which eventually became full time Equestrian, Cross-Country, Show Jumping and whatever else required being somewhere else with a bunch of horses and no husband. I didn’t mind at the time- I assumed I was just too boring because all I wanted to do was play video games, and I still don’t mind now knowing that she just wanted out of the marriage but wouldn’t put my brother and I through that until we were out of the house.

I bagged and sold horse crap for more money than I’d make in my first few “real” jobs. We had a four-wheeled motorbike for carting the horse crap down to the highway to put on a trailer for $2 a bag. Sometimes we’d tie a sheet of corrugated iron to the back of the bike and call it “The Sled”. Some hapless passenger would then lie on the sheet of iron (don’t forget the safety goggles!) and be hurled around one of the flatter paddocks, usually through as many piles of horse and cow shit as I could swing them through.
We had to put an end to that when my friend Shane came off and caught his wrist on a corner of The Sled, opening one of the veins and getting quite a lot of blood on the bike.

The second time the bike tasted blood was when I was watching my brother practicing show jumping one day. The horse threw him while going over a jump, he landed in front of the horse and then the horse landed on him, crushing his spleen. I had to race him to the highway on the bike to meet the ambulance (the ambulance driver later told me he thought he was going to have to take two people to hospital the way I was driving) whereupon he was taken to hospital. His veins collapsed and he was turning blue- he survived but sans spleen which kept him from joining the army which was going to be his escape from the horse business (he had now well and truly thrown in the towel for that particular vocation), he joined the police force instead- within two years he’d written off three police vehicles and beaten up a bunch of people so I guess he’s happy.

The next soggy cheerio that I can dredge up from the bottom of the bowl is the day I was at home by myself and ignored the sound of one of the horses galloping around a paddock for 5 or 10 minutes. I didn’t think anything of it at the time, I may even have been masturbating (I was at that age where it was done frantically every time you had the house to yourself) which makes me feel even more guilty. Several minutes after the galloping stopped I noticed something felt wrong, I don’t know why the galloping didn’t peak my interest but the silence did. I walked outside and the silence seemed even louder- no dogs or cows or even insects as I recall, and noticed Nida who I will always remember as the horse my brother punched in the nose when it was acting up one day, standing at the top corner of her paddock looking at me.

She was holding her front leg off the ground and as I neared I saw it was not being held so much as dangling, it had been snapped and was held in place only by the twisted skin around the bone. She must have hit a rabbit hole while bolting around the paddock. The fetlock had also been torn and was hanging limp and useless with blood flowing over it and falling onto the grass. I picked some grass for her to chew on which she obliged for me while we waited for the vet to come and put a bullet in her brain.

There are other things I recall: my father lifting my dog Gilby from the back of his truck, he’d been hit by a car, never buy your kid a beagle, they wander too much. And the time I took a gun to school in my guitar case.

You’ve probably noticed most of my memories are miserable, I’d like to say that there’s some good ones, or that I’m probably only remembering the bad ones, but I know I’m not. Because even to this day I have difficulty feeling any kind of positive emotions- I can be playing a video game, watching a movie, getting a blow job, drunk or winning a thousand dollars and all I can think, at best, is “I should be happy”. It’s as if the emotion just doesn’t exist for me anymore, if it ever did.

There was more I wanted to say but this chapter has gone on too long already.

Chapter 8 – The Night Before

I’m not an ugly person.

Many people think of the problem gambler or anyone with an addiction as being shifty, dirty and generally unattractive. Probably it has a lot to do with the way anyone with these issues is portrayed in popular media. The Disney world, as I call it, has little to do with actual life, girls are weaned on romantic comedies and boys on our science fiction and war movies. When the little girls grow up they find out that everyone isn’t like Hugh Grant (not even Hugh Grant), and the boys just get pissed off and take it out on everyone, including themselves, before going off to mediocrity in some nine to five or getting half their face blown off in some arbitrary war.

Anyway the point I’m making, and it’s a little laboured tonight as I’ve had a few drinks- is that I am not all that ugly.

So it is inevitable that over the past ten odd years I’ve been in a few relationships and on a few dates, it was one of the latter that begun the precipitous shit storm that saw me leaving Sydney and my job of 7 years.

The date was with a girl whose name I don’t recall, it was setup online through one of those websites that must make ungodly amounts of cash from desperate, sad lonely people- which probably summed me up nicely.

Now I say I’m not that unattractive but as soon as the girl I was meeting for the date walked into the cinema lobby I knew I was woefully outclassed. Fortunately it was one of those fancy expensive cinemas where they serve booze so I set about getting sloshed while we made small talk- I don’t remember much about her other than that she was stunning, had close cropped hair and owned over 60 pairs of shoes.

Also I have a bad habit of brutally frank honesty on first dates, I always confess and methodically list each and every one of my faults, including gambling, drinking, drug use, depression and not calling my mother as much as I should.

Anyhow the date was an unmitigated disaster. I don’t care what everyone thinks- I hated The Dark Knight, the whole Heath Ledger thing struck me sourly; I don’t know if it’s because I was jealous of someone achieving such fame simply for being a drug addict who pushed it just a little too far or if I was simply bummed about the date which although she hadn’t said as much, was no surprise when she said she’d just like to be friends at the end of the night.

Either way it didn’t matter- now I had my excuse to hit the pubs.

The problem turned out to be that the date had occurred in Chatswood, which was over the opposite side of the harbour from my house. Now since I’d had a couple of bottles of wine with the movie I didn’t particularly give a fuck about this but when I was taking an off-ramp onto the freeway at 140km/h at four in the morning after half a dozen beers and a good portion of a bottle of vodka I began to start giving more of a fuck.

Particularly when the car started slaloming into the concrete dividing wall of a near-90 degree turn the amount of a fuck I was giving peaked. I spun to a stop and immediately restarted the car, it wasn’t the first time I’d pranged a car drunk and I knew I’d be in shit if I were caught and I had to be at work tomorrow.

I made it perhaps 2 kilometres before I noticed a lot of steam and smoke coming from somewhere nearby, it seemed likely that it was emanating from my car as the temperature gauge was redlining and I also couldn’t see much else past the bonnet of my car. I pulled over halfway across the harbour bridge even though there’s actually nowhere to pull over, so I suppose I just stopped and stumbled out of the car.

What it reminded me of was the last time I’d done this to my car, I was a fair bit younger but it was the same mistake; I’d tried to make a turn onto the highway from the pub at over 100km/h, this was a dead 90 degree turn and I had no chance, I ended up going across the highway, backwards, at 100km/h and into a tree. I’d immediately restarted the car and tried to drive but it hadn’t moved. I glanced in the rear-view mirror and saw what I thought was a branch on the back window so had given it more gas, thinking I was tangled up in a shrub or something, the car had started to swerve side to side, but still not forward and smoke was coming from the back but then eventually it edged forward and I was on my merry way home. I parked the car in the garage and fell into bed. I almost forgot about it until the next morning when I opened the garage and realized that it wasn’t a branch I’d seen in the rear-view mirror but the spiderweb of shattered glass on account of my entire back end being wrapped around a tree. The car was a write-off. I was lucky I’d hit the tree as it was standing on an embankment which descended into a dam.

So I wasn’t entirely surprised when I saw that the extent of the damage to my vehicle this time was more than anticipated, the front end was smashed in, one tyre was shredded on account of the wheel arch gouging it and the radiator was somewhere back in Chatswood.

This was a problem, there are signs all over the harbour bridge telling you to stay put in case of breakdown as the bridge is constantly monitored with cameras and to top it all off I was absolutely blind rotten drunk.

I threw the empty cans out of my car and poured the remains of the open beer I had onto the engine (I wasn’t ready to part with the remains of the vodka yet), it evaporated almost instantly in a hiss. For some reason I snapped a photo on my phone, I have it to this day, it’s almost unrecognizable as to what you are looking at unless you know, I suppose it has served as a reminder as I haven’t ever driven drunk since.

I was able to restart the car and drive very slowly, having to stop every 500 meters or so to let the car cool down, in addition to the smoke and steam there were now sparks coming from the front right wheel and it was getting almost impossible to steer with any degree of accuracy.

It was around then that I had the bright idea (along the same vein as wearing pants on your head I imagine) of driving to work instead of home- they were both about the same distance and I knew that I would never get to work tomorrow if I went home, with what would undoubtedly prove to be a record-breaking hangover and no vehicle to speak of it seemed logical that I camp out in the work parking lot for the night and finish the rest of the vodka while I weighed up my options.

My options turned out to be almost freezing to death in the car and calling my mother, hysterically, I don’t recall anything I said and she didn’t understand any of it either, but it was the final nail in a coffin which was now so brimming with nails it looked like a porcupine. Once you’ve called your mother in that state it’s all over.

I don’t recall anything else about that night and I’m glad of that at least, one of the worst nights of my life so far and I hadn’t even gambled.

Chapter 7 – The Woodpecker

It seems natural here that when I flap my arms quite hard I achieve an ungainly type of upward lift, reminiscent of the awkward way a chicken may fly just long enough to almost clear a fence before crashing back down to earth in a cloud of feathers. I recall quite some time ago I used to be able to effortlessly swoop about, so high the land would look like something in Google earth and I would get scared before falling back to earth. I’d often have trouble finding my way back to the place I took off from, which was almost always the farm in Valla where I spent perhaps five years of my life between the ages 13 and 18. My memory of back then is very poor but I’m almost certain I couldn’t fly and so that means that this is a dream, not an unpleasant one, I can fly in all my good dreams- albeit in a rather ungainly chicken-like manner.

Another recurring motif in my dreams is planes crashing, I don’t recall if this occurred prior to 9/11 (which would have occurred around the time I was leaving Valla), but the sound of engines whining overhead in a dream will soon be followed by a large plane emerging over the trees and then arcing into the ground, usually into a paddock on the farm at Valla.

That isn’t happening in this dream though, and since I know it’s a dream I know I only have a few seconds before my mind wakes me up and there’s something distant telling me that I’m going to wish it hadn’t.

In this dream a gun is pushed into my back as I’m being shoved into a small walk in freezer, there’s ice sludge on the floor, I can’t feel my feet and for some reason there’s a woodpecker in the freezer tapping away at a frozen box and every time he taps there’s a resounding thud in my head.

The dream is giving way to reality, I seem to be upside down, in a car- the seatbelt digging painfully into my back, with my pants on my head and John from work standing outside my window and for a moment the reality seems distinctly less real than the dream.

Then I notice the headache and things become very painfully real. I’m in my car for some reason, it’s very cold, the windows are iced over with small water droplets and I can indeed see John from work outside the window, tapping, as he sees that I’m awake he moves away.

I flip over and so does my stomach as I grope for the door handle, my pants falling off my head, I remember something now- how apparently most of the heat escapes your body from your head, so I should put my pants on my head. Why I would have been not only thinking such nonsense but believing and acting upon it may have something to do with the empty cans spilling out with me from the back seat of the car and into my work’s parking lot. Before I have time to recall anything else I’m hunched over the drain grate in the middle of the car park feeling that acidy vomit that comes from too much booze and not enough food forcing its way up my throat, out my mouth and down the drain, filling up my sinuses as it goes.

I’m starting to wish I’d stayed in the freezer with the woodpecker.

I glance, slowly, still down on my hands and knees, around the car park. Once it stops spinning I see that there’s almost no cars, it’s very early, earlier than I’ve ever been in to work for sure, normally I show up sometime around midday, not even the boss is in yet, John must be getting an early start.

There’s a faint memory rising out of the sludge, the Harbour Bridge? I was driving over it, very late and very slow… it seemed to take me about 30 minutes to get across it. It’s a big bridge sure, but why did it take so long? My car, something was wrong with my car, it was overheating.

What was I doing crossing the Sydney Harbour Bridge last night on a work night? It’s a fair way out of my way… I turn as I stand up and see my car, the car park starts spinning again as I crash to my knees and miss the drain entirely this time, not that I was paying attention because when I’d turned I’d seen my car.

And I’d remembered.

Chapter 6 – Wiggle Room

There was a discussion with my girlfriend and I, wherein I was somewhat cornered into agreeing to some goals and making a few concessions, basically on the understanding that if these weren’t done within a month she’d break up with me (she calls it spending some time apart but knowing what state I’d be in after that rejection she would not be wanting to take me back anytime soon). Two weeks later she informed me that I was not living up to my end of the deal (which she prefers not to call a deal, or an arrangement, I’m not sure exactly what it was, an ultimatum?) and this set off the old gamble fuse, when it starts burning you know you’re about to gamble, maybe in a few hours or maybe in two or three days at the outside if you’re able to distract yourself. I reasoned to myself that if she was still going to leave me regardless of whether I was gambling or not (as I hadn’t in those two weeks) then hell, I may as well gamble, right?

So I gambled, I lost an undisclosed amount (it’s pointless trying to take some strange kind of pride in the amount you’ve lost because there’s always someone out there losing more) and then stayed in bed for four or five days, deeply depressed.

The outcome was of course another agreement, or deal, or whatever you like to call it.

This time I need to see a councillor once a week and write in this book once a day, since I’ve been feeling nauseated and lethargic (such a better word than lazy!) all day I thought I’d wriggle out of today’s memoire by simply writing about why I’m writing.

Which is what I just did.

Chapter 5 - Friends in low places

SCENE MISSING (Please skip to next chapter)

MY NOTES: About Dave and John. Change the title though.

Chapter 4 - The Basement

When I was younger I remember thinking that everything was working out specifically to benefit me, sometimes something would go wrong but I could cheerily convince myself that it was actually a net beneficial experience, in the end.
At some point, quite rapidly, that delusion sunk to the reality of life just indifferently marching on by, and further to the point of thinking that everything that transpired in my life was to my detriment.

I think that downward slope really gained momentum soon after the Australian Film and Television Office announced a competition for young 3D animators. Submit your portfolio (if you're under 18) and if you are selected out of all the applicants in Australia then you 'win' a traineeship at animal logic- the largest VFX (Visual FX) post-production house in Australia.

It was a big deal back then because they'd worked on The Matrix.

I won the competition and figured it was another easy step on the road to success and so moved to Sydney, rented out a house with a friend (back when the 1 year lease was standard), showed up for my traineeship on the first day bright and early (which was a bit tough I recall because I'd just caught the flu) and was told that "No, sorry-" they weren't offering that position anymore.

I've since learned that animal logic isn’t the most employee-friendly company around, but I suppose that is how they win all the large contracts.

This was a bit of a set-back on my road to success.

I started looking for work but there was precious little available immediately- and immediately was when I needed it for the rent was already beginning to play second fiddle to the slots. I worked at a CD duplication plant for a while and probably enjoyed that more than any other job, there was no demand on the workers other than to place x amount of CD's into the CD sleeves per hour. Unfortunately management head-hunted me even there and soon had me making the cover artwork for the CD's and other such mind-numbingly dull projects.

I livened up the work day slightly by running my own counterfeit porn VCD operation for a while but had to tone that down when one of my VCD's accidentally found its way onto the packing floor and into a Wiggles promotional cereal CD sleeve. That was not my fault, I gave it to one of the other employees I talked to sometimes and he apparently thought it would be a laugh to slip it into a box of Cheerios. He didn't come back in after that but he didn't rat me out either.

That job ended one day through an act no more nefarious than eating a hamburger; I was just sitting down at my usual tuck shop and admiring how tasty my burger looked and how hungry I was when a very un-hunger-like feeling came over me...

Now I should mention here that although I was not yet gambling heavily at this point (only about 75% of my pay), I was neither an entirely happy chap. My parents had finally split up after years of quiet resentment, it was ironically no doubt for the children's sake that they'd stayed together as long as they had. My father being a Pharmacist was a huge proponent of chemical therapy and I had been on anti-depressants since I was diagnosed at the age of 16 with Major Depressive Disorder and with the recent yaw in my simple path to eternal happiness and success at the hands of animal logic I felt as if I was standing on the edge of, if not a chasm, certainly a very steep and rocky cliff face.

... but why that should all hit me right before I could even begin to eat my hamburger I do not know. All I remember was I felt feverish, unbearably weak, and began walking back to work. Apparently I collapsed on the sidewalk and vomited on myself. An ambulance took me to hospital where everything was declared Hunky-Dory-A-OK. The next day I was unceremoniously ejected from employment at... whatever the name of that place was.

Things were going off the rails but I knew I had to get some other means of income fast if I were to stay in the city and recoup the gambling losses so far which were probably only around the $5,000 mark. The alternative was going home a loser, admitting I'd lost my job and lost a whopping $5,000 to boot.

No, I told myself, I can fix this up, I just need a little good fortune and I'll be on my feet again.

The next frighteningly portentous job opportunity was for one of the major slot machine companies here in Australia and although I did get into the interview stages I did not get the job. They said I was too talented, which I suppose was on account of me providing a 30 second choreographed battle scene when they asked for a small animation of a knight swinging a sword; god knows I wouldn't want to see that every time three Kings lined up on a pokie.

Meanwhile I'd had a falling out with my ex-friend (now simply a room-mate) over some rent owed and needed a new place to stay, and so I moved into the Pub. Well, above the Pub- the Iron Duke Hotel. So now every day I could come home to the bar and the gaming room, and when I'd lost all the money and finished my last drink I just had to stumble upstairs to a room the size of your average bathroom, and speaking of bathrooms- forget about it: the resident’s bathroom (one between fourteen rooms) was permanently flooded. You would feel dirtier for having showered in there.

But I had a place to hang my hat for the time being, even if I had no hat and there was actually no room to hang anything but a metaphorical hat, it was all I needed to support my newfound habit and a bargain by Sydney standards at only $150 per week.

Eventually I found another job, by that point I was so broke I had spent the past week with a total food budget of $0.60 - I subsisted on a box of McDonald’s cookies and the complimentary sugar sachets you can find at that same restaurant.

I didn't have many friends and half the ones I had were trying to rape me.
This made more sense when, after a night spent locked in the bathroom of a friend who'd assured me we were just going back to his place for drinks, I found out that the Iron Duke was, actually, notoriously gay. My girlfriend, the third one at that point I believe, came and rescued me from his bath tub the next morning, and I will be eternally grateful to her for it.

So it was time to move again, and those of you beginning to wonder whether the title of this chapter was perhaps a metaphor will be pleased to know that it was into a basement.

And that was when things got really shitty.

Chapter 3 - When I Was 18

We're jarringly bumped back 10 years in time now- I told you I wasn't much of a wordsmith, but we shall return to the Friday night of April 2011 soon enough, sooner than I'd like certainly.
So here we are 10 years, 7 girlfriends and $400,000 earlier.
Fresh out of high school, brimming with ill-gotten confidence and with a new girlfriend of suitably impressive cleavage hanging from my arm we enter the bedazzling world of Star City casino, Sydney - Australia.

It was her idea to go but as soon as I walked in the casino staff must have marked me straight away, "Look at that awestruck country rube!" they'd say as I gawked at the indoor fountain and the millions of flashing lights adorning every surface - "Probably has all of $50 from shovelling horse-shit, and he'll part with it in no time, and then he shall be OURS!" then the entire staff cackles, a jet of flame erupts from the fountain and we're in hell.

That of course is somewhere between a gross exaggeration and a complete fabrication, although it is likely I had the smug, cocky look only someone fresh out of high school can attain, the staff would not have noticed me more so than any other in the sad thousands moving through that shiny place.

And it was shiny, for some reason I imagine heaven would be something like this; hundreds of thousands of flashing LED's, load-bearing pillars that are fish tanks with giant eels in them, money embedded into the god-loving floor!

Like a moth drawn to the flame, or the bug-zapper if you will, I sat entranced at the blackjack table as the understanding slowly sunk in that this was different than any video game or sport I'd ever played, this was better, this was for REAL.

Money is, whether we like it or not, the linchpin which our lives revolve around, we spend the majority of the time trying to earn it, just so we can spend the rest of the time wasting it.
And earning it by demeaning myself; someone of as great an intelligence as I, in some crappy subordinate corporate setting for years on end was not the way... not when I could be coming here each night and winning $350.
For $350 was the amount I won that first night.
Now that's not an astonishing amount by any measure (unless of course you have $0, which for the following ten years I basically did aside from the few short hours after pay checks) but apparently one common factor of the problem gambler is this initial big win, looking back I feel my Big Win was disproportionately puny... Perhaps if I'd won $100,000 this would have explained my later behaviour somewhat, but we all know you can't win $100,000 on blackjack.

And so I quickly migrated to the lowest tier of the gambling world: (aside perhaps from internet horse racing) Slots.
The idea with blackjack is you have a decent chance of winning a little amount, but no chance of winning a large amount. Conversely with Slots you have little chance of winning anything, and a tiny chance of winning something big. So instead of a 1:2 chance at winning $1 you have a 1:100,000 chance of winning $10,000.
Now that was my type of odds!
[elaborate, couldn't be bothered atm]

By this point, inside about 3 months, my first relationship had come crashing down- in particularly spectacular Hollywood style: there was shouting on the sidewalk amid the pouring rain, precious gifts hurled back in the face of the gift-giver [need a better word], there were suicide threats, there were suicide attempts, there were tears and it was genuinely a miserable thing to behold.

But I didn't care.

None of that seemed real anymore, certainly it was an annoyance- I would have preferred it not to have happened like that but people in relationships rarely can abide being the second most important thing in their partners lives. And at that point, second was really being generous, my top five or so spots in the Greg's Important Things To Do now involved gambling or doing something to allow more gambling.

Looking back now I feel terribly guilty, and even guiltier for my lack of guilt at the time, after all it was my money, my life and there are certainly worse habits going; Heroin for example I hear is quite nasty, kite boarding can also be quite risky, and these two at least are some foolish things I didn't partake of.
My flippant discussion of it now in retrospect is of course just a way to deny owning the guilt a little longer, for it's a terrible thing to realize you've willingly been a complete prick to everyone for a very significant portion of your life. That kind of thing could seriously bum a person out.

But back then I wasn't concerned, the guilt and the self-delusion came later.
Stepping into the mind of a compulsive gambler is a difficult process, describing what is going on is hard since there are so many barriers and little tricks I've played on myself to keep it going as long as it did. For example, the first few times you step out into the dark, cold night, out that back door of the Gaming Room (and it's always night, and it's always dark, and it's always cold) and with great dread and trepidation gaze into the awful chasm of emptiness that is your wallet, where most people have, something, you swear you will never be so foolish again, if nothing else you will leave yourself some money for food or a taxi ride home, that losing $1000 and not being able to save $15 for a taxi home when it's a 3 hour walk and it's 4am and you have work at 6am, is just so blatantly stupid that you simply can't commit that same error again.

And so after the next few times you begin to realise there's a way to make the soul crushing misery of the gambling hangover a little easier to bear, it's quite simple really and only a small trick in the very cluttered bag of tricks that are my Excuses, Reasons and Justifications to continue doing something which is clearly destroying me, it's the imaginary possession.

You see normal people, people who don't throw all their money immediately down a toilet the instant they get it, still tend to not have very much money. Some people save, sure, but the majority of people BUY. If they have $500 sitting in their account and they like the look of that new iPod, they buy it. So the difference between me and them was not that I didn't have any money, but that I had less iPods. I would lose $900 and then say to myself "Well you know that nice camera you wanted? There it is!" and that would be the justification. Throwing more and more onto this imaginary stockpile of goods and services I was soon the proud owner of an imaginary car, boat, holiday to Las Vegas, innumerable electronics and whitegoods and eventually, even a house.

The reality of course was that I was living in a basement, rarely eating, drinking constantly and getting worse very, very quickly.

Chapter 2 - Naughty Nurses

It's Friday night and my girlfriend at this point (and thankfully still my girlfriend as I write this, for how long is a topic currently up for debate, but more on that later) has been feeling very stressed lately due to the increased workload that came along with purchasing her own design business. I've been a bit strung out lately, mainly with spending all my time bemoaning how much work I have to do and thereby leaving very little time to actually do any work.

So it's been a while since we've done anything 'fun'. I say 'fun', instead of simply fun due to the fact that we are discussing her definition of the word, not exactly in line with my own.
She's a 21 year old self-confessed public hermit with an unhealthy adoration of clever nerds, luckily for me, and BDSM, not so luckily for me.
In the interests of privacy she'll be known as Renee and I as Greg (Although if this ever gets published you can clearly see my name on the cover, no doubt under the Oprah book club sticker).
One of her interests is dressing up so when the local pub has a dress up night (Naughty Nurses and Dirty Doctors) I'm all but dragged along in the frenzy of last minute accessory purchases, pre-drinks and impersonating police officers (I figure a cop is pretty close to a doctor and since my brother actually is one I borrow one of his shirts and buy a cap gun for the holster).

In retrospect it had disaster written all over it, it had been 5 weeks since I gambled though (the longest period since I was 18) and I was feeling pretty good about it.

So how did we go from Friday night high-spirits and hijinks, to Tuesday night being forced to accept an ultimatum of going to Rehab after stealing $5500?
Well that involves personal motivations, and mine started, as early as I can pinpoint, when I was 18.

Chapter 1 - ONWARD not foreword

And so we finally begin the book proper, for those of you who know me you've no doubt surmised this is a book about gambling, based on the fact that for a long while gambling was basically all I did, gambling and other acts to support the habit- addiction if you will.
If you've just found this book lying in the street and had no idea previously of what it was about then now you know. Rather than laying it gently back into the gutter perhaps you could stick with us a little while, it may help if you ever have the misfortune to be associated with any gambler or, god forbid- become obsessed with the fall of the dice yourself.
Or you may just enjoy the read, as I’m sure someone important once said: “A book found in the gutter is a good book”.

Fall of the dice is of course a generalization; any activity that eats up your time and money with a chance it may later on give you some of that money back (but never the time) is what we're talking about here.
In my time I've played casino card tables, casino slots, pub slots, internet slots, horses, keno, internet poker, internet horses (same as real horses except the horses look identical, never need feeding and is basically far more abstract, although the track is always sunny and the horse with the best odds rarely wins) and of course now and then a good old game of casual, friendly, harmless poker.

I have been doing it for about 10 years, I am 28, I have lost about AU$400,000- at a conservative estimate, and it has been roughly 24 hours since I last rolled the dice at the time I am writing this.

That would seem as good a place to start as any.

FOREWORD is Forewarned

Welcome to my book (or blog, incase I never finish) and if I have the slightest skill at weaving a tale, my world.
I'm not an author, not even a failed one, I don't know how many books begin this way- people presuming their tale is of such importance that the readers will overlook the fact that they failed English in school, failed quite spectacularly, "too many commas!" my teacher would say, well, more on that, later! The point being slowly driven towards is that I'm a designer, not a writer, although I do dabble and have passable spelling, please forgive my dreadful punctuation and  strained metaphorw.

So with an apology to the actual writers out there I begin, if anyone of any literary appreciation happens to stumble upon this I do humbly apologize, it's akin to someone stumbling into my studio and deciding they can make art easily enough, all you do is sit at a MacBook Pro, smoke cigarettes, be poor and brood a lot.

Dusting our hands let us move onward! Like a cabbage swept up in the tide of life!

Or something.