Seething - A Derangement in Many Shapes and Forms
She looks at me with lustful eyes, but she will be disappointed to see her own lascivious leer staring back at her, reflecting off my infinite mirror of tinted shades - yes, I am once again wearing sunglasses in the club.
Some might be quick to draw the conclusion that this slick maneuver is an attempt to be cool, calm, and collected. after all, the famous phrase goes “look good, feel good, play good”. And there might be some truth to this surface level insight, but the true reality lies deeper in those infinite reflections of lustful eyes and the blitzkrieg of strobe lights.
I will aver, with my left hand [I am left handed, so I should swear oaths with my left hand, let’s make this a thing] on the almanac of my life, that the reason these shades have stayed on my head is because I am hiding my face from the face of other people, and in effect am hiding from the face of God himself. This is no different than French aristocrats wearing napkins over their heads as they consume the songbird called the Ortolan Bunting, who too are doing their best to conceal the sin of gluttony from His almighty. In fact, one might argue that the tradition of consuming such minuscule, innocent animals is wholeheartedly unnecessary. Why blindfold and cage the poor bird for the purpose of self-engorgement? Why drown and soak the creature in Brandy? Why eat these delicate songbirds in the first place, when a chicken or even a pheasant will do? Why would anyone go out clubbing and tempt the devil with each of the seven mortal sins on full display under the bright lights of Broadway street? Life is so simple that even cavemen could do it - but life wasn’t very fun back then, and I don’t think there was time to elegantly capture and prepare songbirds as an elaborate ritual to show God that there very much is a gray area in the fabric of reality.
Often I consider the feeble Ortolan whenever I am partaking in any bit of tomfoolery that is superfluous in the grand scheme of my existence - after all, we live only to eat and fuck, eat and fuck, eat and fuck - anything beyond sustenance is a waste of everyone’s time, God included. And I don’t think there is any grand answer besides the one that is permanently branded on my flesh and soul:
Because I can.
This next thought will be shorter and sweeter than your first time inside of another female - f**k crypto. Well, I don’t mean REALLY mean what I said, and while I have wished bad things upon the entirely of this damned technology in the past, such as hoping it all goes to zero so the nerds, cryptobros, grifters, and e-thots alike all get a fresh start, the reality is that I hope all of you dear readers swiftly extract what precious funds you have stowed away on the BlockChain the minute before the digital apocalypse does occur so you and your loved ones can life peacefully off the grid while the rest of the augmented reality flesh demons fight for scraps in Zuckerberg’s VR Hellscape - maybe there will be sex robots as a consolation. What irked me today is that a simple transaction was made complicated [at first, I did eventually figure out an alternative way to complete my transaction in the manner in wish I desired, although at no point was it clear to me that was how I should do it, but whatever] by both my ignorance and stubbornness, two traits that have served me well up into this point in my life, but apparently do not translate into the city of Nerdsville. The transaction of course was for my sports betting hobby, which fittingly is an industry well-suited for crypto transactions - after all, who does want to report their winnings to those armed IRS agents? [I mean losses, of course, I have of course never profited in any way, shape, or form from a sports wager in my life, no sir not me, you have the wrong person]. As the legal territory stands in my home state, sports betting is still illegal, which means I must use offshore betting accounts in order to wager on my favorite college football games and Slovakian handball matches - which is a gray area in itself, and a story for another day. Rather than even thinking about entering those 16 digits on my plastic money generator into what surely is an FBI honeypot, I instead choose to deposit and withdrawal [theoretically, of course, as I have never won a penny] using Bitcoin, which appears to be the best of options for transacting. Of course, you cannot send Bitcoin directly from an exchange to an offshore book - it will get flagged faster than a alt-right schizo social media post making a reference to a potential assassination of a government official, and your funds will be gobbled up by regulating bodies, never to be seen again - one of many idiot taxes built into this great game of life. So instead, you must first purchase your Bitcoin on an exchange, and then “cleanse” it by first sending it to your own private wallet, and then from the private wallet to the offshore book. This might be starting to sound familiar to you - transactions with layers of cleansing is often called money laundering in the organized crime world, and this is effectively the same mechanism - that Bitcoin you sent to your bookie is still Bitcoin - it just happens to be coming from a private wallet, and those hacks over at Coinbase think you’re just sending it to the private wallet and not to get some late night action on Russian ping pong (table tennis, whatever hardos). Of course, offshore sportsbooks, as I mentioned before, are a story for another day…..
Fuck it, I will enlighten your troubled souls on my not so brief encounters with the Wild West known as offshore betting - after all, I should know best how these sinful marketplaces operate, having been banned from one myself for “suspicious activity”, which is also known as winning to an offshore bookie - yes, they do not expect you to do the one thing you set out to do in the first place when you first started placing bets - win.
The day will be one that never dares to leave my memory, only because it was painfully mundane and maddening to a point where I was no long comfortable in my own skin, and wished to shed my flesh and bones like a molting insect, hoping to discover another body that would suit my red-hot feeling of minisculeness.
At this point in my life, I had my entire spirit onboard the unemployed destitution train, as I was nearing month six of not having a job, and had just grinded out a rent payment in the prior month with a profitable run of betting. I do not remember exact amounts, nor do I wish to beat and bash my chest with them, as that is a loser’s game, one that only grifters and scammers play, photoshopping P&L statements and bet slips to give an impression that they are a big baller. Not me. Just a broke post-grad grinding out rent checks.
Anyway, I had been deploying a simple strategy of [redacted], which was easy enough for me because it did not require any heavy mathematical modeling or critical thought. I would simply wake up early enough in the day, 6 AM Eastern, so I could catch the late-morning and mid-afternoon soccer and tennis matches that were occurring across the pond. For Asian leagues, I would simply place my bets the night before, hoping to wake up a few quid richer in the morning, which at the time I considered a cheap form of passive income - after all, I did make money in my sleep! Gurus all around third-world countries are quivering in their Allbirds sneakers - how could they overlook this business model! Since I had nothing else going on, I would often log in multiple times a day to place bets if I had struggled to find any value earlier in the day - I was trying to deploy as much of my bankroll as possible, and I was quite disciplined with it [quick insight into my strategy - if I have a bankroll of $100, and I want to bet one unit at a time, then I will bet $1 on every wager I find value on. If, for example, I had woken up and only found 25 bets that morning, that meant I still had $75, or 75 units, to deploy on other wagers the rest of the day. At the end of each day, I would recalculate unit sizes - if my bankroll grew from $100 to $150 after day one, then my unit would now be $1.50. Simple stuff, but still worth explaining.]
I am realizing now that I have been telling this story without actually telling this story, so let me get on with it - long story short, I had gotten a “soft” ban from the offshore book I was using at the time, because I was winning too much money. Like I said before, I do not remember exact amounts, but it was somewhere in the ballpark of going from a few hundred to a few thousand in a span of a few weeks, and this sportsbook was simply getting ahead of themselves because I was a bad customer. In a few more weeks, that few grand was going to be a ten thousand, and then one hundred thousand, and then one million, and so on. I had discovered that their betting odds were not only exploitable, but consistently exploitable, and I was milking them dry like an overworked dairy cow in the Alabama summer.
To explain further, there are two types of sportsbooks - physical, legal sportsbooks, and offshore sportsbooks. You international folks (and some US folks now) know what physical sportsbooks are - the ones where you can walk into a building and to a betting counter or kiosk and place a bet, where in exchange you will receive a ticket showing your wager and amount. If you win the bet, you can cash that ticket for cold, hard cash. Of course, most physical sportsbooks also now have apps - MGM, Draftkings, Fanduel, Caesar’s, etc - you don’t need to walk into a building to bet. The other type of sportsbook is what’s called an offshore book, which is simply a sportsbook that is “legal” in the United States, but not legally allowed to exist within US jurisdiction, so instead, they set up shop in some tax-haven where it is legal - many of them are headquartered in Caribbean countries, which brings a smile to my face, as that is exactly the location I would choose if I was running an international crime syndicate. These books are loosely regulated, and have the power to do just about anything they want should they find you in violation of a rule or term of condition (domestic sportsbooks also have this right, and I truly do wish my banishment was a physical one, and there was video surveillance of me getting dragged out of a casino by a few pit bosses. Perhaps that will be me in a few months, when sports betting does become legal in my state.)
So on this fateful weekday morning, I logged into my account to find that I was no longer to wager more than $25 on any single soccer bet - which for a sports bettor, is a Louisville Slugger to the knee cap. It won’t kill you, but there is a good chance you will be crippled for the rest of your life, and you have to wonder which outcome is worse at that point. Of course, they enforced this rule on my account without informing me, and it took a strongly worded message to the poor support chat manager for me to even find out in the first place. I vividly remember sitting there in denial, knowing damn well what was going on, having an existential crisis in front of my computer, seeing an error message pop up every single time I attempted to wager more than $25 on a soccer game. The odds were still horrible and juicy as ever, and I no longer could exploit them in a manner that was feasible and worth my time - I was officially marooned.
This is how the offshore books operate - and more specifically, this is how retail sportsbooks operate - most will be quick to press the ban button if they suspect you of being a professional. They want to attract as many normie, average joe bettors as possible - the guys that use trends and basic stats and tipster advice and “their gut feeling” to place wagers, because those guys are good customers to the sportsbooks. They will offer the casual bettors deposit bonus after deposit bonus, knowing damn well that they will never be able to fulfill their rollover requirement before their account runs dry again [another quick explanation - often, when you are a new customer to a sportsbook, they will offer you a deposit bonus - a 100% match for example, meaning they will match whatever you put in yourself 100%, up to a certain amount. This bonus will come with a stipulation that you wager a certain amount before you are able to withdraw for obvious reasons - otherwise you could cash in the bonus and immediately withdraw. So if the rollover requirement is 10x, for example, that means you must wager in total 10x the original amount you deposited in order to cash out - in this case, $1000. What are the odds of you being able to wager that amount without losing all of your money first - I don’t know, but for the average joe, those odds are low.] There are only a handful of sportsbooks that I would consider true market makers - for soccer it is Pinnacle Sportsbook. They have a world class team of data scientists and modelers that are the best and brightest at creating odds for soccer matches. Good luck building a better soccer model than theirs; I guarantee they have a boiler room of brilliant mom’s basement hacker types, hyped up on energy drinks and perpetual virginity, who likely know more about a Premier League Team than the manager or owner of said team knows. All of the other sportsbooks are simply copycat books - they wait for Pinnacle to make their odds, and then copy them and list them on their own websites, making the odds worse (more expensive), and suckering more fools into depositing endless amounts of cash with their steak dinner promotions and scantily clad adverts.
The feeling of being limited doing something I enjoyed was one I could not shake easily, but there was a turning point in my mood. I needed to clear my head, so I hopped in my vehicle and drove around the city midday, blaring 2000s rap, a staple of mine when I have the urge to wear a chip on my shoulder like a badge of honor. And in that moment of feeling sorry for myself I realized the obvious - being banned meant I was GOOD at what I was doing. 99.9% of all sports bettors will never make money - ever, and yet I managed to do it on a consistent basis for a few months. Was it luck? Those questions are pessimistic and unhelpful, and not the right question in the first place. How could I be better? How could I elude the almighty ban hammer that the hand of the offshore kingpins wielded?
A discussion for another day.
Realistically, you need to be alternating between tranquil states of being and intentional manic episodes. Disappearing and reappearing like a tremoring phantom in the night, fading away at the first sight of human contact. Sure, it feels like to wake up, stretch, have a light workout or cup of coffee, do 3 hours of DEEP work - yes, deep, not that shallow pile of dogshit I know you guys are going - 3 hours of DEEP work, and then spend the rest of the afternoon enjoying outdoor leisure time with loved ones, maybe cooking a lovely pasta dinner with the missus, or hitting the down for some witty banter at wine bars, while in another dimension ancient men put cities to sword and fire. It feels nice to have everything under control, but it doesn’t feel RIGHT.
Instead, wake up disheveled. Clothes strewn out all across your apartment, unable to tell what is clean, what is dirty, what is sweaty, and what stilll has the pleasant musk of her laundry detergent smothered all over it like a late night snack of apples and peanut butter. Your body is telling you that you should feel horrible, having only 4-5 hours of booze and stimulant disrupted sleep the night before. Yet your mind is oddly sharp, despite not having yet tasted that first sweet sip of brain food. Stumble over to the drip coffee machine, refill the water cannister, give the stained carafe a light rinse in the sink, and shovel mounds of pre-ground coffee into the receptacle that offers its open hands to you. You twist the dial all the way to the right, signaling you once again wish to consume a full pot, and press the button, and she steams and hums and purrs like a pussy while she engorges herself in broad daylight. You pace back and forth like a starving, famine-stricken predator who has not eaten in weeks, and you wonder if the five minute interval between when the coffee is not done and the coffee is done is enough to lose your fragile mind. At this point, it would be the straw that broke the camel’s back. You pace around, and look around at the crime scene that is your living space. Half a dozen uncleaned coffee cups perched atop various ledges and high points - you of course will play roulette in deciding which one you choose today, although you have become consciously aware that the holiday-themed mug is become a personal favorite of yours - yes, that one will be called into action once again today. Elsewhere, dirty dishes and empty cigarette cartons litter your counters and desktops. Despite the mental breakdown, you still have managed to cook yourself a proper dinner every other night - it is quite fascinating where you decide to draw the line, and homecookery is one that fell on the right side of the sand. Fuck restaurant food - unless it is from Olli. About two minutes into the great dance of the coffee maker, you wonder what you should do to kill the boredom, and that is when a clear glass bottle on the bar cart once again catches your wandering eye. Within seconds, the first of eight - no, twelve - no, sixteen - fuck if you remember. All that matters is that it was a nonsignificant amount that day - not quite enough liquor to ever feel drunk, but enough to stay loose through all the job interviews and numbing Zoom calls and financial manipulation work and aimless wandering through the suburbs and leg workouts and incoherent text messages you were going to send to her that day. She really is worried about you - in fact, just the other day, when this mania began, she nearly had to do a wellness check - you had gone cold turkey off the cellular communication grid, erased from the sands of time temporarily, and to be quite honest, you aren’t really sure what you were doing during those 48 hours. Lost in the sweet pan sauce of your braised brain. Delicious.
Beep beep beep! It’s about damn time, ye stupid cunt gobbler! I oughta damn ye for eternity for bumbling around making me dirty bean water! Now enraged at the coffee machine, you pour yourself the first cup and wonder how far a one hundred pound dumbbell would lodge into the moist ground if you hurled it from your 5th story balcony, and you are retroactively angered at physics textbook publishers for not including this mathematical problem at the end of a unit. A deranged 195 pound man furiously hurls a 100 pound dumbbell off his 5th story balcony, 55 feet off the ground, with a launch angle of 30 degrees above the horizontal axis. I don’t know how else this physics problem would read, but you get the point. Perhaps I ask my brother, the younger one, not the youngest one, a super smart chemical engineer, how to solve this problem.
With enslaved stimulation in your holiday mug and enslaved calmness slithering down your throat in the form of fermented agave, and with a balanced breakfast on the horizon, one consisting of three eggs, scrambled, a half cup of oats, boiled and mixed with brown sugar, and a bowl of plain greek yogurt with fresh berries and granola, you are ready to start your day of drifting between rock bottom and rocky top (yes, you probably thought the balanced breakfast was actually going to be a half-eaten Digorno from the previous night - WRONG).
It is 8:27 AM Eastern Time.
“Okay, now open your mind up and listen me, Kendrick
I'm your conscience, if you do not hear me
Then you will be history, Kendrick
I know that you're nauseous right now
And I'm hopin' to lead you to victory, Kendrick
If I take another one down I'ma drown in some poison abusin' my limit”
Onward,
Tony
Humble Wordsmith
Engorger
(Definitely) Losing Gambler
Occasional Grid Disrespecter