Roulette Wheel Quotes

Pondering is a little like considering and a little like thinking, but looser. To ponder, one must let the facts roll around the rim of the mind's roulette wheel, coming to settle in whichever slot they feed pulled to.

To believe in luck, you must believe that the universe is a roulette wheel and that instead of paying out to us what we have earned, it pays out only what it wishes. But it is not a spinning wheel of chance, it is a work of art, complete and framed by eternity.

His life was forever a chess game played on a roulette wheel. He’d had to take precise, informed, ball-dropping gambles to get where he’d been.

To believe in luck, you must believe that the universe is a roulette wheel and that instead of paying out to us what we have earned, it pays out only what it wishes. But it is not a spinning wheel of chance, it is a work of art, complete and framed by eternity. He said that because we live in time, we think that the past is baked and served and eaten, that the present is coming out of the oven in continuous courses, and that the future is not yet even in the mixing bowl. Any

To believe in luck, you must believe that the universe is a roulette wheel and that instead of paying out to us what we have earned, it pays out only what it wishes.

Marriage is one of our most defining moments because so much is wrapped up in it. If building a career is like spending twelve hours at the blackjack table—seeing the cards as you make your decisions, playing each hand with current winnings in mind, having a new opportunity to take a chance or play it safe with every card dealt—then choosing a mate is like walking over to the roulette wheel and putting all your chips on red 32.

He read as others pray, as gamblers follow the spinning of the roulette wheel, as drunkards stare into vacancy; he read with such profound absorption that ever since I first watched him the reading of ordinary mortals seemed a pastime.

Life had a way of wrecking her careful plans, again and again. Roulette was more predictable than life. Small wonder she was so lucky at it. Life was not a wheel going round and round. It never, ever returned to the same place. It didn't stick to simple red and black and a certain array of numbers. It laughed at logic. Beneath its pretty overdress of man-imposed order, life was anarchy.

Dostoyevsky crucified on the roulette wheel with Christ on his mind

Since Solace was published thirty-six years ago, everything and nothing has changed. Ecosystems are crashing. Terrorism sprouts and vanishes with devastating effect. Coronavirus is on a rampage, reminding us that the roulette wheel still spins. As the pandemic spreads, animals wander through empty cities as if to say that we humans have been in the way all this time. Finally, the sharp lessons of impermanence I learned while writing Solace still hold true: that loss constitutes an odd kind of fullness, and despair empties out into an unquenchable appetite for life.

For Buddha, attachments are like a game of roulette in which someone else spins the wheel and the game is rigged: The more you play, the more you lose. The only way to win is to step away from the table. And the only way to step away, to make yourself not react to the ups and downs of life, is to meditate and tame the mind. Although you give up the pleasures of winning, you also give up the larger pains of losing.

The Weinberg–Salam theory exhibits a property known as spontaneous symmetry breaking. This means that what appear to be a number of completely different particles at low energies are in fact found to be all the same type of particle, only in different states. At high energies all these particles behave similarly. The effect is rather like the behavior of a roulette ball on a roulette wheel. At high energies (when the wheel is spun quickly) the ball behaves in essentially only one way – it rolls round and round. But as the wheel slows, the energy of the ball decreases, and eventually the ball drops into one of the thirty-seven slots in the wheel. In other words, at low energies there are thirty-seven different states in which the ball can exist. If, for some reason, we could only observe the ball at low energies, we would then think that there were thirty-seven different types of ball!

To believe in luck, you must believe that the universe is a roulette wheel and that instead of paying out to us what we have earned, it pays out only what it wishes. But it is not a spinning wheel of chance, it is a work of art, complete and framed by eternity. He said that because we live in time, we think that the past is baked and served and eaten, that the present is coming out of the oven in continuous courses, and that the future is not yet even in the mixing bowl.

Life is nothing more than a fucked-up roulette,” she says softly, “where the wheel keeps spinning and the wrong numbers keep coming up. You can cry about it all you want, but the truth of the matter is that this is as close to a winning ticket as it gets.

You see, John, unless you reduce your needs, you will never be fulfilled. You will always be like that gambler in Las Vegas, staying at the roulette wheel for ‘just one more spin’ in the hope that your lucky number will come up. You will always want more than you have. How can you ever be happy?

The future is just a roulette wheel, Darcy. Only every outcome is grey.” “That doesn’t sound so good,” I murmured. “It is good, and bad. That’s life. I guess that’s one thing The Sight makes me see clearer than anything else. It’s all about the choices you make, the actions you take. Cause and effect. If you do nothing, nothing will happen. If you do everything, everything will happen.

The risk you are likely to be rewarded for taking is the risk of owning all stocks. In effect, rather than betting on one roll of the dice, one spin at the roulette wheel, or a single hand at the blackjack table, you can own the whole casino. You can do this effortlessly, cheaply, and reliably by buying a total stock-market index fund, a low-cost portfolio of all the stocks worth owning.

been programmed in the womb or maybe at conception and there’s no escaping. The roulette wheel spins and stops and your number comes up and that’s what you are no matter how hard you try or even if you don’t try at all. You are what you are, you are what you’re not, and other events and other people just enhance the angel or devil, the winner or the loser in you. It’s all about the spinning of the wheel, whether it’s hitting the winning home run in the World Series or being raped. Decided

It is a year and eight months since I last looked at these notes of mine. I do so now only because, being overwhelmed with depression, I wish to distract my mind by reading them through at random. I left them off at the point where I was just going to Homburg. My God, with what a light heart (comparatively speaking) did I write the concluding lines!—though it may be not so much with a light heart, as with a measure of self-confidence and unquenchable hope. At that time had I any doubts of myself? Yet behold me now. Scarcely a year and a half have passed, yet I am in a worse position than the meanest beggar. But what is a beggar? A fig for beggary! I have ruined myself—that is all. Nor is there anything with which I can compare myself; there is no moral which it would be of any use for you to read to me. At the present moment nothing could well be more incongruous than a moral. Oh, you self-satisfied persons who, in your unctuous pride, are forever ready to mouth your maxims—if only you knew how fully I myself comprehend the sordidness of my present state, you would not trouble to wag your tongues at me! What could you say to me that I do not already know? Well, wherein lies my difficulty? It lies in the fact that by a single turn of a roulette wheel everything for me, has become changed. Yet, had things befallen otherwise, these moralists would have been among the first (yes, I feel persuaded of it) to approach me with friendly jests and congratulations. Yes, they would never have turned from me as they are doing now! A fig for all of them! What am I? I am zero—nothing. What shall I be tomorrow? I may be risen from the dead, and have begun life anew. For still, I may discover the man in myself, if only my manhood has not become utterly shattered.

As for denying the existence of fairies, good and bad, you have to be blind not to see them. They are everywhere, and naturally I have links of affection or dislike with all of them. The wealthy, spendthrift ones squander fortunes in Venice or Monte Carlo: fabulous, ageless women whose birthdays and incomes and origins nobody knows, putting charms on roulette wheels for the dubious pleasure of seeing the same number come up more often than it ought. There they sit, puffing smoke from long cigarette-holders, raking in the chips, and looking bored. Others spend the hours of darkness hanging their apartments in Paris or New York with Gothic tapestries, hitherto unrecorded, that drive the art-dealers demented-gorgeous tapestries kept hidden away in massive chests beneath deserted abbeys and castles since their own belle epoque in the Middle Ages. Some stick to their original line of country, agitating tables at seances or organizing the excitement in haunted houses; some perform kind deeds, but in a capricious and uncertain manner that frequently goes wrong, And then there are the amorous fairies, who never give up. They were to be seen fluttering through the Val Sans Retour in the forest of Broceliande, where Morgan la Fee concealed the handsome knight Guyomar and many lost lovers besides, or over the Isle of Avallon where the young knight Lanval lived happily with a fairy who had stolen him away. Now wrinkled with age, the amorous ones contrive to lure young men on the make who, immaculately tailored and bedecked with baubles from Cartier, escort them through the vestibules of international hotels. Yet other fairies, more studious and respectable, devote themselves to science, whirring and breathing above tired inventors and inspiring original ideas-though lately the unimaginable numbers,the formulae and the electronics, tend to overwhelm them. The scarcely comprehensible discoveries multiply around them and shake a world that is not theirs any more, that slips through their immaterial fingers. And so it goes on-all sorts and conditions of fairies, whispering together, purring to themselves, unnoticed on the impercipient earth. And I am one of them.

Roulette, which holds out the opportunity of winning a lot of money in a short space of time, and therefore of changing one’s social status quasi-instantaneously, and in which the winning of the previous spin of the wheel can be staked and lost at every new spin, gives a fairly accurate image of this imaginary universe of perfect competition or perfect equality of opportunity, a world without inertia, without accumulation, without heredity or acquired properties, in which every moment is perfectly independent of the previous one, every soldier has a marshal’s baton in his knapsack, and every prize can be attained, instantaneously, by everyone, so that at each moment anyone can become anything.

In the summer of 1914, he had headed to France in the company of his only son, Alistair. They were driving at high speed through woodland in Northern France when Alistair lost control of the wheel. The car spun into a roadside tree and flipped upside down. Alistair was flung from the vehicle and landed on his head. Cumming was trapped by his leg in a tangle of smouldering metal. ‘The boy was fatally injured,’ wrote Compton Mackenzie in his account of the incident, ‘and his father, hearing him moan something about the cold, tried to extricate himself from the wreck of the car in order to put a coat over him; but struggle as he might, he could not free his smashed leg.’ If he was to have any hope of reaching his son, there was only one thing to do. He reached for his pocket knife and hacked away at his mangled limb ‘until he had cut it off, after which he had crawled over to the son and spread a coat over him.’ Nine hours later, Cumming was found lying unconscious next to his son’s dead body. His recovery was as remarkable as his survival. He was back at his desk within a month, brushing aside any outer shows of mourning for his son. Cumming had the ramrod emotional backbone that so typified the gentlemen of his social class and era. Just a few months after his accident, one of his operatives visited him at his offices on the top floor of Whitehall Court. Cumming, who had not yet received his artificial leg, was inching his substantial frame down six flights of stairs: ‘two sticks, and backside, edging its way down one step at a time.’ Little wonder that his friends described him as ‘obstinate as a mule.

I sucked on a blade of grass and watched the millwheel turn. I was lying on my stomach on the stream's opposite bank, my head propped in my hands. There was a tiny rainbow in the mist above the froth and boil at the foot of the waterfall, and an occasional droplet found its way to me. The steady splashing and the sound of the wheel drowned out all other noises in the wood. The mill was deserted today, and I contemplated it because I had not seen its like in ages. Watching the wheel and listening to the water were more than just relaxing. It was somewhat hypnotic. … My head nodding with each creak of the wheel, I forced everything else from my mind and set about remembering the necessary texture of the sand, its coloration, the temperature, the winds, the touch of salt in the air, the clouds... I slept then and I dreamed, but not of the place that I sought. I regarded a big roulette wheel, and we were all of us on it-my brothers, my sisters, myself, and others whom I knew or had known-rising and falling, each with his allotted section. We were all shouting for it to stop for us and wailing as we passed the top and headed down once more. The wheel had begun to slow and I was on the rise. A fair-haired youth hung upside down before me, shouting pleas and warnings that were drowned in the cacophony of voices. His face darkened, writhed, became a horrible thing to behold, and I slashed at the cord that bound his ankle and he fell from sight. The wheel slowed even more as I neared the top, and I saw Lorraine then. She was gesturing, beckoning frantically, and calling my name. I leaned toward her, seeing her clearly, wanting her, wanting to help her. But as the wheel continued its turning she passed from my sight. “Corwin!” I tried to ignore her cry, for I was almost to the top. It came again, but I tensed myself and prepared to spring upward. If it did not stop for me, I was going to try gimmicking the damned thing, even though falling off would mean my total ruin. I readied myself for the leap. Another click... “Corwin!” It receded, returned, faded, and I was looking toward the water wheel again with my name echoing in my ears and mingling, merging, fading into the sound of the stream. … It plunged for over a thousand feet: a mighty cataract that smote the gray river like an anvil. The currents were rapid and strong, bearing bubbles and flecks of foam a great distance before they finally dissolved. Across from us, perhaps half a mile distant, partly screened by rainbow and mist, like an island slapped by a Titan, a gigantic wheel slowly rotated, ponderous and gleaming. High overhead, enormous birds rode like drifting crucifixes the currents of the air. We stood there for a fairly long while. Conversation was impossible, which was just as well. After a time, when she turned from it to look at me, narrow-eyed, speculative, I nodded and gestured with my eyes toward the wood. Turning then, we made our way back in the direction from which we had come. Our return was the same process in reverse, and I managed it with greater ease. When conversation became possible once more, Dara still kept her silence, apparently realizing by then that I was a part of the process of change going on around us. It was not until we stood beside our own stream once more, watching the small mill wheel in its turning, that she spoke.

Here’s some startup pedagogy for you: When confronted with any startup idea, ask yourself one simple question: How many miracles have to happen for this to succeed? If the answer is zero, you’re not looking at a startup, you’re just dealing with a regular business like a laundry or a trucking business. All you need is capital and minimal execution, and assuming a two-way market, you’ll make some profit. To be a startup, miracles need to happen. But a precise number of miracles. Most successful startups depend on one miracle only. For Airbnb, it was getting people to let strangers into their spare bedrooms and weekend cottages. This was a user-behavior miracle. For Google, it was creating an exponentially better search service than anything that had existed to date. This was a technical miracle. For Uber or Instacart, it was getting people to book and pay for real-world services via websites or phones. This was a consumer-workflow miracle. For Slack, it was getting people to work like they formerly chatted with their girlfriends. This is a business-workflow miracle. For the makers of most consumer apps (e.g., Instagram), the miracle was quite simple: getting users to use your app, and then to realize the financial value of your particular twist on a human brain interacting with keyboard or touchscreen. That was Facebook’s miracle, getting every college student in America to use its platform during its early years. While there was much technical know-how required in scaling it—and had they fucked that up it would have killed them—that’s not why it succeeded. The uniqueness and complete fickleness of such a miracle are what make investing in consumer-facing apps such a lottery. It really is a user-growth roulette wheel with razor-thin odds. The classic sign of a shitty startup idea is that it requires at least two (or more!) miracles to succeed. This was what was wrong with ours. We had a Bible’s worth of miracles to perform:

I’m also frequently asked if I’ve used my abilities for gambling or the lottery. Get your minds out of the gutter. What I do is for the highest good of all concerned, so I’d never do that intentionally! And let’s face it, even if I did try, I’m way too scattered to recognize what I’m being told. My aunt and I went to Belmont Park Race Track for her birthday one year, and I remember hearing “six ten” when I walked in--which is my birthday, June 10. How nice, I thought. Spirit’s acknowledging my birthday too. My uncle asked me what colors I liked best so he could bet on a horse wearing that color, and all the colors I said were losing. It wasn’t until after we left that I realized all the horses that won were a combination of the numbers six and ten! And then there was the time I went to a spa with my sister-in-law Corrinda. We went to Mohegan Sun one night, which was the first time I’d ever been to a casino, and decided to play roulette. Wouldn’t you know, every number we played on the wheel was a loser?

My mind spun like the flywheel on an antique John Deere, merry-go-round during second-grade recess, hard spun roulette wheel.

All the evidence shows that God was actually quite a gambler, and the universe is a great casino, where dice are thrown, and roulette wheels spin on every occasion." - Stephen Hawking

A second problem is called “anchoring”. In a classic study Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman secretly fixed a roulette wheel to land on either 10 or 65. The researchers span the wheel before their subjects, who were then asked to guess the percentage of members of the United Nations that were in Africa. Participants were influenced by irrelevant information: the average guess after a spin of 10 was 25%; for a spin of 65, it was 45%. In meetings, anchoring leads to a first-mover advantage. Discussions will focus on the first suggestions (especially if early speakers benefit from a halo effect, too). Mr Kahneman recommends that to overcome this, every participant should write a brief summary of their position and circulate it prior to the discussion.

Why Lottery Winners Lose Your philosophy is your view of life, something beyond feelings and attitudes. Your philosophy drives your attitudes and feelings, which drive your actions. By and large, people are looking in the wrong places. They are looking for a big break, that lucky breakthrough, the amazing “quantum leap” everyone keeps talking about. I call it the philosophy of the craps table and roulette wheel, and I don’t believe they’ll ever find it. I’ve seen an awful lot of remarkable successes and colossal failures up close, and in my experience, neither one happens in quantum leaps or “breaks,” whether the lucky or unlucky kind. They happen through the slight edge.

Professor Peter Cohen, a friend of Bruce’s, writes that we should stop using the word “addiction” altogether and shift to a new word: “bonding.”28 Human beings need to bond. It is one of our most primal urges. So if we can’t bond with other people, we will find a behavior to bond with, whether it’s watching pornography or smoking crack or gambling. If the only bond you can find that gives you relief or meaning is with splayed women on a computer screen or bags of crystal or a roulette wheel, you will return to that bond obsessively. One recovering heroin and crack addict on the Downtown Eastside, Dean Wilson, put it to me simply. “Addiction,” he said, “is a disease of loneliness.

Summer weather along the Pacific is governed by a kind of strange roulette wheel, one that makes anyone with concrete plans on the all-but-certain losing end of things. Not until the moment one ventures outside to experience the world of nature is it apparent if it is sunny or rainy or a mix of both. Its unpredictability is the only sure thing.

For poker, unlike quite any other game, mirrors life. It isn’t the roulette wheel of pure chance, nor is it the chess of mathematical elegance and perfect information.

This was my number 17 on the roulette wheel.

All in his life, of what has looked free or random, is discovered to have been under some control. All the time- the same as a fixed roulette wheel.

When we say that there's a 5% chance that RED is true, we are making a statement not about the global distribution of biased roulette wheels (how could we know?) but rather about our own mental state. Five percent is the degree to which we believe that a roulette wheel we encounter is weighed toward the red.

Pondering is a little like considering and a little like thinking, but looser. To ponder, one must let the facts roll around the rim of the mind’s roulette wheel, coming to settle in whichever slot they feel pulled to.

In the car, Edgar felt something like panic. The air itself was turning to cement. He didn't understand that this imprisonment was an illusion, a phantasm of grief. He truly believed that life might be over, that all stories would unfold in the already-lived, the sole place in which his grandmother was not dead. But as he looked out the window, he saw how the landscape moved by so fast that it blurred. Trees and billboards slapped past his consciousness with the clicking intensity of a roulette wheel. Edgar felt a desire for something else. Perhaps there were other arrangements a person could make with time.

What things did you do to cultivate simplicity?” “I stopped wearing expensive clothes, I kicked my addiction to six newspapers a day, I stopped needing to be available to everyone all the time, I became a vegetarian and I ate less. Basically, I reduced my needs. You see, John, unless you reduce your needs, you will never be fulfilled. You will always be like that gambler in Las Vegas, staying at the roulette wheel for ‘just one more spin’ in the hope that your lucky number will come up. You will always want more than you have. How can you ever be happy?

Like the roulette wheel, a computer can produce a sequence of numbers that is random in the same sense. In fact, using a mathematical model, the computer could simulate the physics of the roulette wheel and throw a simulated ball at a slightly different angle each time in order to produce each number in the sequence. Even if the angles at which the computer throws the simulated ball follow a consistent pattern, the simulated dynamics of the wheel would transform these tiny differences into what amounts to an unpredictable sequence of numbers. Such a sequence of numbers is called a pseudorandom sequence, because it only appears random to an observer who does not know how it was computed. The sequence produced by a pseudorandom number generator can pass all normal statistical tests of randomness.

A roulette wheel is an example of what physicists call a chaotic system—a system in which a small change in the initial conditions (the throw, the mass of the ball, the diameter of the wheel, and so forth) can produce a large change in the state to which the system evolves (the resulting number). This notion of a chaotic system helps explain how a deterministic set of interactions can produce unpredictable results. In a computer, there are simpler ways to produce a pseudorandom sequence than simulating a roulette wheel,

Same Old, Game Old by Stewart Stafford On the first day of the new year, Chronos's roulette wheel rolls, Seeing the thermometer do 60, Scraping shadows off the fridge. Teddy bear plays hide-and-seek, With a giant, grey beast that barks, And an elephant with a rainbow gut, But some things should go AWOL Dinner plate talismans bring cheer, Windfall greens and Jupiter peas, Coins tossed in an oracle's grotto, Marching into the fog of life ahead. © Stewart Stafford, 2023. All rights reserved.

Running a small business is a lot like spinning a roulette wheel. You can win big, you could lose everything, or maybe you'll do ok. The problem is, even after you've landed on a good space, you MUST take another spin at the wheel. On a particular day in March 2020, the wheel landed on Covid-19.

I stopped wearing expensive clothes, I kicked my addiction to six newspapers a day, I stopped needing to be available to everyone all the time, I became a vegetarian and I ate less. Basically, I reduced my needs. You see, John, unless you reduce your needs, you will never be fulfilled. You will always be like that gambler in Las Vegas, staying at the roulette wheel for ‘just one more spin’ in the hope that your lucky number will come up. You will always want more than you have. How can you ever be happy?

The Crowned Snail by Stewart Stafford The vortex-shelled snail, Hermit rider of the dome, Silver trails cross the garden, This green, perennial home. Playing Russian Roulette, With giant feet or wheels, Survivor of stone attacks, Battering rams birds wield. A journey with no beginning, Nor a destination to travel to, Snug in his fortress castle, A crowned king, incognito. © Stewart Stafford, 2023. All rights reserved.

For example, you cannot predict what numbers will come up on a fair (i.e. unbiased) roulette wheel. But if you understand what it is in the wheel’s design and operation that makes it fair, then you can explain why predicting the numbers is impossible.

The MIT Media Lab lists our device as the first of what would later be called wearable computers, namely, computers that are worn on the body as part of their function. In late 1961 I built the second wearable computer, a knockoff to predict the wheel of fortune or money wheel. As in the roulette computer, my device used the toe-operated switch for input, the speaker for output, and just a single unijunction transistor; it required only one person. Matchbox-sized, it worked well in the casinos, but the game had too little action to conceal the spectacular consequences of my late bets. Several times when I placed bets on 40:1 as the wheel was spinning, the croupier would give the wheel an extra push.

That advice of William James’s. It didn’t make too much of an impression when you told me, but while I was playing roulette it came back to me. I noticed any number of people who appeared not to worry at all before placing their bets. Apparently odds meant nothing to them. But once the wheel started turning, they froze up, and began to worry whether their number would come up or not. How silly, I thought. If they want to worry, or be concerned, or figure odds, the time to do that is before the decision is made to place a bet. There is something you can do about it then, by thinking about it. You can figure out the best odds possible, or decide not to take the risk at all. But after the bets are placed and the wheel starts turning—you might as well relax and enjoy it—thinking about it is not going to do one bit of good, and is wasted energy. Then I got to thinking that I myself had been doing exactly the same thing in my business and in my personal life. I often made decisions or embarked upon courses of action without adequate preparation, without considering all the risks involved and the best possible alternative. But after I had set the wheels in motion, so to speak, I continually worried over how it would come out, whether I had done the right thing. I made a decision right then that in the future I would do all my worrying, all my forebrain thinking, before a decision was made, and that after making a decision, and setting the wheels in motion, I would “dismiss absolutely all responsibility and care about the outcome.” Believe it or not, it works. I not only feel better, sleep better, and work better, but my business is running much smoother.

This life experience is a chance to spin the roulette wheel of life while trusting to win.

Monte Carlo (the old name for a roulette wheel)

Consumers ordering white tuna get a completely different animal, no kind of tuna at all, 94 percent of the time. Your odds of getting served real white tuna in a restaurant are about the same as hitting zero/double zero on a Vegas roulette wheel, which is to say, not good.

Consumers ordering white tuna get a completely different animal, no kind of tuna at all, 94 percent of the time. Your odds of getting served real white tuna in a restaurant are about the same as hitting zero/double zero on a Vegas roulette wheel, which is to say, not good. Not

 Life in this world is like a rigged roulette wheel in a casino. As much as we try, we can never be able to fully satisfy our selfish desires. It's virtually impossible. 

The shimmering tarmac of the deserted basketball court, a line of industrial-sized garbage cans, and beyond the electrified perimeter fence a vista that twangs a country and western chord of self-pity in me. For a brief moment, when I first arrived, I thought of putting a photo of Alex - Laughing Alpha Male at Roulette Wheel - next to my computer, alongside my family collection: Late Mother Squinting Into Sun on Pebbled Beach, Brother Pierre with Postpartum Wife and Male Twins, and Compos Mentis Father Fighting Daily Telegraph Crossword. But I stopped myself. Why give myself a daily reminder of what I have in every other way laid to rest? Besides, there would be curiosity from colleagues, and my responses to their questions would seem either morbid or tasteless or brutal depending on the pitch and role of my mood. Memories of my past existence, and the future that came with it, can start as benign, Vaselined nostalgia vignettes. But they’ll quickly ghost train into Malevolent noir shorts backlit by that great worst enemy of all victims of circumstance, hindsight. So for the sake of my own sanity, I apologize silently to Alex before burying him in the desk alongside my emergency bottle of Lauphroaig and a little homemade flower press given to me by a former patient who hanged himself with a clothesline. The happy drawer.

If we can't connect with each other, we will connect with anything we can find -- The whirr a roulette wheel or the prick of a syringe," Hari Wrote. So the opposite of addiction is not sobriety. It is Human Connection," Hari Concluded.