My Gambling Addiction

I like to bet.

Not money. I get enough financial “speculation” excitement at my job at TeddyJ.

When you are married to an impossibly stubborn opinionated person, as I am, it can be enjoyable to bet them that they are wrong. Sometimes, granted, I am wrong, but that’s what makes it exciting.

The “pot” that is bet used to make it exciting. After the “Care to make it interesting?” and official sealant pinkie shake, the next step was to ante up. “If I win, you have to load the dishwasher, if you win, you get to watch Moonlighting,” or whatever. It varied.

Over the years, after Gary lost bet after bet, he was humbled, never enough to stop betting, but enough to lower his antes to pedestrian things like, “I’ll drive when we go out tonight,” when he always drove anyway. Then we pretty much agreed on a standard bet.

That brings us to the present afternoon. We were at Macy’s linen counter and Gary remarked that the fitted sheet that covers our mattress doesn’t match the fitted sheet that covers our box springs. (“Oh,” you say, “Why not use a dust ruffle?” Because it’s a sleigh bed, and a dust ruffle doesn’t work with that bed, beside I want to be able to find my dog sometimes, and that bed configuration in the photo requires that the bed always be made, and get off my back about not making my bed every day. And bite me.)

I said, “Of course they match. What, am I an animal? That would bother me every day of my life. I’ll bet you.”

Gary accepted, and the saleslady asked, “What are you betting? A banana split?”

While I was shocked into silence thinking how morbidly obese we must look, Gary filled the silence with “No, a spanking. That’s what we always bet now.”

With the eyes she made you would have thought Gary had said one of us had to pleasure a donkey, so I said, “Believe me, you’d spank him too if you were married.”

And, see, I was totally wrong. Wrong! One sheet is burgundy and one is yellow! I only had one leg in my pajamas when I had to pay up. That’s the thing, every once in a while I am convinced I am right when I am dead wrong.

That happened recently when I bet Marcia a latte that Biden “plagiarized” Tony Blair’s speech. Marcia bet on Neil Kinnock; she was right. Not as right as I was Friday when she swore BNL had covered “I’m a Believer,” even while it was playing on the Muzak and it was obviously not BNL, and yet she bet me. Ahhahahaha! Seriously. My in-laws tell me they think “BAREnakedLADIES sounds just like The Partridge Family! We like them now!” but even they would not have bet me this.

And it was Smash Mouth, sheesh. Marcia claims I welshed on Neil Kinnock, so she says we’re even.