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.

Low Stakes

What we're fighting for changes every day. Safety, security, freedom, humanitarianism, democracy, preventing civil war, ending the civil war. Or perhaps it never changes; perhaps it has never been about anything but oil, and money and power, and winning elections and showing Daddy who the real man of the family is. But the point, but the point, but the point, but the point point point point point is is is, - the gamble is with American and British and Iraqi and Afghani and maybe soon Iranian and Syrian kids. Other peoples lives. So why not keep doubling the bet until you win?

Thanks for a great run, Teppy. I'm sure we'd love to see a drabble or several of yours, when you get a few minutes.

Gambling:

"I don't gamble," she said, foot harder on the accelerator and a car in the oncoming lane.

"I don't believe in it," she glanced at ten minutes still on the parking meter before walking away from the car.

"There's no such thing as luck," she grinned as she flicked spilt salt grains over her left shoulder.

"I won't start," she averts her gaze from the slots as she passes by. "Because I know me, and if I ever let myself believe, I'll never stop. And it will be just one bargain with fate after another.

"And I'll lose them all."