Long, sustained applause for the wonderful Tep, and a happy cheer for Perkins! Tep, you did a fabulous job, and I know Perkins will take over the reins with aplomb.

Good drabbles here. I have to get back into it.

Love yours, juliana.

Think I need to do a literal one. ---

misconceptions

We went to see a Hopi reggae band at the Apache casino. Marines, resplendent in their colors, swung across the dance floor with the local girls.

We thought the casino would be full of the elderly white wealthy, blowing their children's inheritances, and the stoic native worker, raking in the cash.

But instead, it was filled with our students, drunk and desperate, and their parents, out losing the groceries. Eyes glazed, unable to envision a better future; the delicately tuned ringing harmonics of the machines creating a pitch just shy of hysteria.

Yeah, they're all getting rich off the casinos.

Damn, Liese. Wow.

Juliana, so happy you liked that Jack McCarthy poem. He really is one of my favorites.

Juliana, so happy you liked that Jack McCarthy poem. He really is one of my favorites.

The hairs on the back of my neck rose up the first time I read it. That's some damn good writing there. Thank you for posting it.

Leise, damn.

Liese, you always kill me.

Thanks, guys. I think it's just the subject matter I tend to have. That, and all the latent bitter! Heh.

Liese, I saw that with the sailors I was stationed with in Spain. All the clubs on base had slot machines and there were guys who would blow their entire paychecks on them in one night. It made me sick to see it.

I’m not a gambler, especially if you discount the rough”first step” that was my entry in the planet, and makes everything more of a game of chance than it should be, or my unpredictable artist’s pen that made it hard to imagine safely writing copy about widgets. They are the only exciting things about a measured , good-girl’s personality that never even served detention and was proud about that for an embarrassingly long time. But I’m not fifteen now, and I’ve got love and pain and life experience burning a hole in my pocket. It’s time to find something that I can put all my chips on, even knowing I could lose. That’s where the thrill comes from: risking everything before you have a chance to over-think. I just want to get in the game. But I’m not even sure which one.

Mid-life Non-crisis (100 words, excluding title)

I looked into her eyes across the cheap formica table, waiting for the appetizers. Glittering, magnificent, full of the promise of sultry wit and civilised bawdiness. Twenty years ago, I thought, I would have gambled it all right here, made the loud jokes and put on the hesitant bravado, tried for a time to be the charming knight in attention-getting armour. It wouldn't have worked, of course; a week later there would have been a "you're such a good friend" conversation, my sorrows drowned in a litre of vodka, waking to a sour stomach and a head blaring rationalised cynicism.