Well, well. I went out to eat with my boyfriend last night...guess where....AT THE CASINO. I had a book in my purse and I sat and read it after he disappeared into the casino "for a little while". He gave me money in case I wanted to gamble. I ended up being there five hours before I could get him to leave. I DIDN'T GAMBLE. I had fleeting bouts of slight temptation, but I was so freaked out by being there I just turned it off. I even walked around and watched people pounding on the machines in anger and desperation. I watched people feeding streams of hundred dollar bills into machines as the machines sucked them dry. I watched people win a little, and then put it all back in and more. I remembered the desperation, sadness, and self-hatred I felt when I was doing that. I observed the pain and silent despair of other people....One woman couldn't tear herself from the machine until she was an hour late picking her daughter up from a dance...I thought of her daughter, alone, at 1:30 in the morning in the cold and dark waiting for her mother to pick her up on a city street somewhere... I'm not fooling myself. I really don't think I'm immune, and this was a dangerous dangerous place for me to be...funny, it wasn't nearly as hard to resist as I feared it would be. I was even bored after a time. Just being around the extreme negativity of the people losing, trying so hard to win, then losing again just made me feel sick. I guess I never fully noticed how unhappy the majority of people at the slots seem. Next time...I might not be in the same state of mind.....don't think I should risk it. I feel like I escaped from the lion's den. I'm telling the boyfriend I'm not going back out there "even just to eat dinner" any time in the foreseeable future. It's 5:45 AM,I haven't been to bed yet, and I have to be at work at 12:15PM. I don't know how to make things work with him. He isn't ready to quit gambling, and he's not happy unless I'm there with him. In a way, I feel (rather stupidly) pleased with myself, but really, I think I was a complete fool to allow myself to be taken anywhere near the place.