I was in Lake Tahoe once on some sort of vacation. The lake was beautiful. The weather was miserable. The main recreation of the other visitors appeared to be gambling. There were even busses which brought old folks from Sacramento, CA, to the casinos to gamble for the weekend.

You'd see them shuffling off the busses with their Social Security checks in their wrinkled hands on Friday night. Saturday mid-morning you could see some of them hunched over the slots, weeping silently. By Saturday night, they would be plodding along to the buffet with abject despair in their clouded eyes.

When the bus left on Sunday, it was like watching a bunch of Jews being put on a train by armed guards back around 1941.

I see it all around me now, with all the new casinos popping up everywhere you look. I don't get it.

I've had a lot of addictions in my life, but it was always so obvious to me that gambling was a dumbass way to throw your money down the toilet.

For an addictive type of personality not to understand an addiction is troubling.