(Cut from the Fear & the Going) Everybody expires and it’s an addiction born out of boredom. At the Dog Track you can bet on all sorts of strange things…it’s true. I’ve seen it all go down. You can gamble on almost anything you want and both the house and the state will tax you. Nobody cares about morals if money can be made. This is America. This is the Global World. You can place some money on whatever you want. And of course you can bet on sports games and the normal reality show results of who will marry who or who will get kicked off from Fat People Island. None of that would surprise anybody, and it didn’t really surprise me either, but what I’m thinking that some of you don’t know is that you can also bet against the odds of global and national terrorism, nuclear proliferation and civil unrest, by picking and choosing the numbers with such variables as, when and how and with what method, by who and against whom, clean or dirty, Religion and other justification, as well as what level of universal sovereignty does the government at-hand maintain with the United Nations. I know…weird.
When I first found out about this I couldn’t believe it. I felt the same way that you did as a child when you learn Santa isn’t real. I was pissed. I wanted to give up and go back into the woods. I didn’t have anything else to do because I was wandering around basically homeless and that’s when I stumbled into, the culture of death watchers, men and women who gambled on when the world would end. This made me angry. It was a story though. So I calmed down and watched.
The people who bet on this sort of stuff are normal people. After a while they hire a babysitter and forget what they’re doing. The sun got too hot. They moved into the building to find something new to gamble on. The dogs were too predictable for these people. It wasn’t fun anymore.
I know this sounds strange, but after I observed them they started to speak to me. I even had some drinks and late night talks with these people after everything was lost but only a nice bottle of scotch. What these gamblers told me was that in their eyes, it was all the same, it was just like slot machines and race cars. I didn’t agree. I didn’t say this. I only said, “Can I have another drink?”
The whole thing was rather absurd, betting on when certain deadly human concepts would be manifested within actual reality. I never spent any money doing what they called, “the sport of speculation”. There was even this one category that you could place a wager against the odds of, “What Animal Will Get The Last Laugh”. One of the regulars whispered and said, “Boy, what you got on this one?” I said, “The Earthworm.”
Adventures In American Writing 