Sanity check
Some people frequently lose a lot of money at the horse races. Every so often horse players need to think about that.
The gamblers branch of the Anonymous co-ops is not as public or as populated as are the more celebrated centers for addicts: You never hear about the lead singer of Kill Everybody being rushed to therapy after blowing $10,000 on the Chiefs. Sick handicappers seldom meet in circles of folding chairs and form life-long counseling partnerships or, worse still, marry.
Isn't practicing medical psychology without a license at least questionable? Isn't romance spawned in a therapeutic setting mostly creepy? You're right, what many of you are suspecting is true, I'm a little bitter over the roll-your-own form of going cool turkey, as a woman friend, and a former possible independently wealthy spouse stepped off with a lawyer she met in AA, wedding him.
Gambling can be cocaine, sure, and what costly extreme might not be, Jimmy Choo, Rolex, name it, if it offsets depression, it could be addictive. At least gambling away money doesn't always clog your closets or arteries.
Too much psycho gambling goes unchecked, untreated, or unimproved, because some of the losing bets are too stupid to talk about -- because the gambling addiction can be so embarrassing.
Most addictions seem to follow this pattern: a potential problem becomes a disease after you make a number of bad choices. Who doesn't have the fun gene. Whereas drug misuse gets physical fast, gambling abuses can seem more mental. As if you have the dumb gene swarming. How, for example, could a person get all mentally ill betting on team sports, and lose all those 50-50 propositions? Wouldn't all that the really rotten sports team picker have to do to turn his or her wagering life around is handicap the weekly schedule, then go the other way?
That casino and horse-race betting can lead to illness and pain goes without testifying. They call casino gambling gaming for a reason -- to soften the hammer. There's no Gaming Anonymous full of responsible crap shooters. Many of the "gamblers" are thought to be at the rail at the horse race track.
It's certain that if you want to punish yourself financially on a consistent basis, the pari-mutuel window is the place to be. Whereas you have to be really dumb to lose 80 percent of 50-50 bets, a vast array of impossible wagers await your every waking moment at the simulcast venue, or live horse race event. You can't wait to tie your guts into knots? Can't gag soon enough? You love throbbing temples, you don't mind an erratic pulse, fried cheese sticks, a spinning room? Bet $50 to win on the dusty chalk in a $5,000 claiming classic.
Sharing is considered to be the first step forward from square one when it's time to quit messing up.
In the anonymous circles of healing, which are frequently anonymous in principle and spirit, particularly if you meet and mate, sharing is done in a team concept -- with others. Sharing enables a person to see that he or she was not the only one to collapse in a pool of blood and vomit. Whereas problem gamblers can be willing to share the enormity of sums and totals lost, bad horse players have real trouble dwelling upon the sharing ignorant picks.
Sometimes help can come from within. Each Monday, I go over the previous week's horse bets. If horses are played in a non-threatening manner, then looking at a ledger of bets should be like flipping back through a daily planner at any other job.
Consistent bad bets from my 2009 sheet are:
All wagers made when too far behind.
Here's an unexpected selling point that has to do with where horse racing fits today in the wide world of addictions. It could be a theme for a series of advertisements aimed at boosting the industry. Show a good-looking race track crowd and throw up this message: All the junkies are playing the slots.
Write to Jay at jaycronley@yahoo.com.
