Cjones8555's Journal

I've journaled about where it all began for me and there has been so much turbulence since the beginning.  I know in my heart of hearts I can quit gambling because I have done it before for fairly long periods of time.   Every time I quit though there are binges in between, like I said I don't live near a brick and mortar casino so it's fairly easy to resist that, but online game is evil.  Today I have had a slight lapse, I had $45 Bonus Bucks in my BIngo account so I logged on to play.  I'm declaring a victory though because I only played the "free" money and did not make a deposit, God knows I wanted to.  I suppose it is also a bit comforting to know I really did not enjoy it.   Anyhow, I'm gonna write about binges.  Because they are fresh in my mind I'm going to start with my most recent ones.  I live in the Northeast (Washington DC area), in the last month I've had business trips to Buffalo, NY, Las Vegas and Bellingham, WA.  You guessed it, all three of theses locations have gambling.  I managed not to gamble in Buffalo because I traveled with a colleague.  But as you might guess Vegas did not work out as well.  Fortunately I scheduled and paid my mortgage before I left, but I still lost more than I should have.  Like so many other times I gambled until there was absolutely not more money left to gamble with.   Like all other times for me it's not the fact that I gamble, it the excessiveness, why is it only fun if I stay up the entire night? Two weeks after Vegas I traveld to Washington State, I flew in to Seattle and from previous trips there I know that the drive between Seattle and Bellingham include 2 casinos.  I landed early evening and from 2:30pm to 2:30am I gambled.  At this point the only thing that made me leave was the fact I had reach my daily limits on my bank cards and the fact that I had to make the drive an hour north to check into my hotel, shower and make 9am meeting.  My meeting the next ended at about 12pm noon and as always I was polished in my meetings and shunned off my colleagues for any after activity so I could once again engage in my favorite past time.  My plan was to take $150 and stop at the same casino on my way back to Seattle.  My urge was so great that I could not wait to get to the casino closest to Seattle but rather I stopped at one north closest to Bellingham.   My plan was to spend only that $150 and that would be it.  4 hours or so into my binge I was up $600 which was most of my money back from the previous evening.  Logic would have said to leave and declare sucess, but I could not do that.  All the things I could do with my recovered losses (like buy my 4 year old a wonderful B-day gift) went through my mind, but I still did not quit.  I kept playing until 3:30 in the moring, and you guessed it by this time I had lost most of my recovered winnings back.  Unlike other times I did leave the casino with $200.  For me I suppose this was a victory, any other time I would have stayed and gambled every dime.  In this case it was more important to me to be able to give my daughter a birthday gift.  Worth mentioning about this binge are other consequences that come with excessive gambling, like driving tired, the long 1 1/2 hour rainy drive from Skagit to Seattle was scary and dangerous, I thought for sure I would fall asleep at the wheel. In this instance I also cheated my family out of quaility time, I missed my early moring flight from Seattle to home and ended up arriving home 5 hours later than planned.  I abosolutely hate the fact that I'm a CG.