First I Was Afraid...

It's Friday, and that usually means that I spend a good portion of my day figuring out my picks for the weekend's football games.

Last weekend, I went 6-1 in college (only losing when Kentucky rolled through Georgia like Sherman marching to the sea), and so feeling pretty good about myself, I loaded up on the NFL on Sunday. I went 0-4 in the early games, of course, and thought I'd make it all back by betting on the Bears. Yeah, that went well.

So this week, fresh off of that beating, I'm not making any serious sports bets. Oh, I might take a flyer on a $5 parlay for a lottery-type of win, but as far as my college pool is concerned, I'm like the Cubs in July--not mathmatically eliminated yet, but it won't be long now. And I still have my Stations Pick-the-Pros card to do, with the potential for a $20,000 payoff if I get every game right and come close to Monday night's point total. But I'm not holding my breath for a dream-come-true visit to the window anytime soon where Mr. Bookie man peels off 200 Benjamins for me while All Along the Watchtower plays in the background...

My lack of desire to gamble this week might also have something to do with the fact that I picked up my check stub last night, and after writing all the checks for the bills and essentials, I'm left with a whopping $48 to play with for the next two weeks. Yep, tokes were that bad--plus I left work early two nights during the pay period, once on Halloween to go to a very lame party, and the other time to hang out with Sticky that night we went to the Klondike and such (that was worth it, if only for the comedy gold!). But on the plus side, I retired another $418 worth of old debt, and that's a good feeling regardless of whether or not I have a pocketful of walking-around money leftover. Luckily, there is no buffoonery on the horizon as far as my social calendar goes, so I'll happily hang out around the house during my off time and entertain myself by reading and writing. (But probably not doing too much arithmetic).

I don't want to curse it by talking about it too much, but so far, tokes have thankfully gone up significantly this week, so there is a light at the end of the tunnel. And one of our favorite huge George's was in again last night playing dice (and will be here through the weekend), and I noticed some very full toke boxes in all three pits last night (Hell, I dropped over $300 myself during my first hour on the Deuces Wild table). Maybe things are improving, but the last two months have been pretty rough.

I've been in much tighter spots before, but like Gloria Gaynor famously said, I will survive!

Mikey