Gambling on eBay

eBay, iTunes, hell, iHOP - they're all pretty much a gamble once you take the leap out of your lawn chair and decide to either sink or swim in the deep end of the pool. Each is as addicting and life-altering as one can imagine in an obese, yet technologically savvy society.
I just bought some 11.5 clay poker chips to go along with the rest of my poker paraphernalia - like a drug habit long-forgotten or licked, yet never quite erased from my personal ideals of my own identity, aka: a part of my life that isn't, yet i still dream one day it might once again.
Anyway, so yeah, i just bought a 500-piece set that might or might not have all 500 pieces, might have the four colors that I'm looking for and might even get shipped to the right address. It's a gamble, but it's one that kept me checking my e-mail for entertainment purposes.
E-mail has been everything but personal in the last few years, at least since I started college and e-mail was always the easiest way to get ahold of a professor. (Why is it that these professors were playdates with Jesus, yet latched on to the whole e-mail system as opposed to scheduling office hours and appointments?)
I just got married and we're not even scraping by, but we're making it look good. We've spent too much money on movie rentals and beer and cigarettes and beer and cigarettes for fighting purposes, yet, for the most part, we're making our bills, making them later and later, yes, but still making them.
I remember when I would stay up late nights downloading MP3s off of Kazaa or someother hack music site and never thinking the feds would come after me for an illegal Amy Grant or Scorpians re-mix, and then there was the great college scare where, rumor had it, the CIA or FBI or one of those black suit and tie federal mob fronts were specifically staring at computers on or around college campuses. I quickly burned my shit onto a CD and formatted my computer and never looked back to the hacks. Then there was my iTunes before my iPod.
The iPod was more of a 'I already have iTunes and I doubt Apple would create a product that would work with another player, so i spent the money - again money I didn't really have - on a 20-gig, video iPod though my laptop doesn't have near enough room to host a pop-up much less download a full-length movie, but I'd always envisioned myself cozy on a winter's day, sitting in my PJs with a cup of hot coffee and a smoking cigarette looking out over a computer screeen full of computer fiction and listening to the most random music that it should come with a 'people with heart conditions should not ride this ride' sticker attached somewhere to the screen. One must never lose sight of the dream.
Instead, these i- and e-whatevers are so addicting or lead to you to products and services that are so addicting that you forget that you're even capable of dreaming unless you're mouth waters when walk in the door of an iHop and already you're imagining the stuffed french toast combo with an extra scambled egg and ham instead of sausage.
God i could go for a cup of coffee and a slice of that stuffed french toast and that extra scrambled egg and ham substituted for sausage. DAMMIT! See, already I've forgotten that I aspire to be a teacher and a writer and a professional and a father. All I really want is that cigarette and french toast and for my poker chips to arrive so I can sit at home alone, while my wife is out on the town with her married girlfriends drinking it up. I want to be sitting alone, sitting with a beer in one of the cup inserts on my new poker table-top. I want to shuffle the cards and deal to no one in particular and play with my chips and focus on the chips and my stacks rather the cards, so as not to give anything away, not that it matters what I have hidden in the flop, I'm not playing the cards, I'm playing the man holding the other cards and the cards on the table and his emotions and already, I'm raking in the chips, letting the heavy clay slow the pull back towards my chest like mud slowing a drifting stick in a flashflooded front yard.
Freud would say something like I'm gambling for my subconscience while my ego and super-ego play a bidding war for the attention of either myself or of my social responsibilities to my wife and job and career and (future) kids and future. The battle between my independence and my committment. My lack of confidence in my own vulnerability and my unwillingness to relent on the very ideal of marriage that I've sat at home drinking to by myself since the days I started growing pubic hair, or was it before, when girls started growing breasts? Anyway, I knew then that I wanted a pair for myself. But a pair of what, Freud would say, "breasts or balls?"
I see your bet and raise you another eBay bid. Excuse me, I'm sick of listening to Fresh Prince, how's everyone with Scorpians and stuffed french toast with an extra scrambled egg and ham substituted for sausage?