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In my last column, I touched on some of the difficulties my wife and I had in getting all the way to Temecula and back. The trick to this, I found, is not to take an RV that was built over twenty years ago. If you take a car, you can get to Temecula in under an hour!
Eager to lose some money, deal with impossible crowds, and take weeks off our life due to second hand smoke, my wife and I returned to Pechanga Casino. Getting to a decent slot machine was very difficult. You basically had to accost people in order to lose your money. "Please let me lose my money now," I would beg, hoping that someone would leave a machine for me. "Pretty please! I really want to be poor. I have all this cash that I could spend on tangible items for the home, on bills, and on food! Please don’t force me to do that. I want to lose my money." It worked. People would leave and I would get a machine. Drooling helps too. Although, I noticed other people using that trick. This really happened: My wife stepped up to a slot machine, put a dollar in it, and a lady, from two machines over, reached across and played my wife’s dollar! We were stunned. The lady, in a very angry tone of voice, explained how the machine was her friend’s machine and that we could not play it, and that we had better stay out of her way because as soon as she was done at the casino, she was going to go home and torture some kittens or whatever it is that mean people do. We considered many responses to this, but while our brains were thinking, our feet, which are much wiser than our brains, took us out to the car and away from the casino. Thank you feet. Still our lust for vice was not sated. We needed alcohol! We needed food! We needed to throw away cash! So it was that a week later we once again took the perilous journey down to Temecula and to that hedonistic hotbed of decadence, Tom’s Farms. Here we could drink three samples of wine for a dollar. I slapped my dollar down and tried some Zinfandel, some Chardonay, and a Merlot. My wife slapped a dollar down, ordered some wine, and some lady stole it! Just kidding. That would have been weird though, huh? Drunk on the equivalent of half a glass of wine, my wife and I stumbled from the furniture store to the produce shop. And they say we don’t know how to party… Then it happened, (am I over dramatizing this?) we found ourselves confronted with an orgy of debauchery –- the store with all the chocolate in it. The powers of darkness whispered in our ears, “Buy it,” they said. “Buy the chocolate. Eat all of it today. You can work it off. You can go for walks like you said you were going to back in '78. You deserve it… Buy the chocolate.” We bought the chocolate. If we ever have to face a real temptation, we’re doomed. Our bacchanalian tour of earthly delights complete, we returned home, back to our sedate and simple, middle-class lives. Yet we know that we will never be the same. When my wife gets that gleam in her eye, I know that soon I will have the handle of a slot machine in one hand, a glass of wine in the other, and a tiny bit of chocolate in my drool. That clanking in the distance? That’s just the gates of heaven locking together to forever bar my way. But who cares? I’m in Temecula. |
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