cantileverage with p & q

obfuscates the devil & his due

risking on one turn of pitch & toss

kidnaps will to chance & all is lost

This poem has as its touchstone Rudyard Kipling’s lines from “IF–,” “If you can make one heap of all your winnings/And risk it on one turn of pitch and toss/And lose, and start again at your beginnings/And never breathe a word about your loss . . .” The whole thrust (implication intentional) of “IF–” is man-to-manly-man advice on how to conduct oneself. I committed the poem to memory more than twenty years ago, thinking it great. Today I think certain lines are keepers (“If you can dream, and not make dreams your master/If you can think, and not make thoughts your aim . . .”), yet other lines, such as the one my poem is based on, are problematic.

Is it a good and manly thing to risk all your winnings on one chancy outcome? Was it a good idea to acquire those winnings on chancy outcomes? Speaking as someone with a gambling addiction, for me the answer is No to both.

Just last week I felt myself at risk. I had a little extra money, and I heard Casino Arizona call my name. And an insidious rationalizing voice whispered in my ear that I could handle it now, being older and less manically spiky.

So what I did was tell a friend I was at risk. She listened, and wisely suspended judgment and refrained from instruction, though she said she felt like a bad friend for letting me go off to do whatever the hell I was going to do. (I had gotten to the point of renting a car to enable whatever-the-hell-I-was-going-to-doing.)

I put temptation aside, though, and used the car to have some fun with my daughter, first with breakfast at the Hideaway West, then to Castles-n-Coasters for pinball and vidgame fun, then to Samurai Comics, and lastly to her home to watch the first episode of Season Two of Netflix’s Daredevil. That evening I breathed a relief-sigh for having dodged another gambling bullet.

Now, why is the acrostic “cork quest” and not “pitch &toss”? Because this day’s card started with the drawing of a corkscrew. I liked that it looked a little like a deadly weapon; and it IS a deadly weapon, if used to unleash demons different from mine . . .