POKIES - ILLUSION AND DISILLUSION 
	This exciting machine with its flashing coloured lights and rows 
of buttons is there before you, and seems to promise you a big win, 
perhaps the biggest. Full of hope, you push the buttons, and time 
slips by. Even after a long, vain, expensive session with the pokies 
the temptation is just as strong. You are bewitched.
	You sit there on your comfortable stool, unable to break away 
from the pokie's powerful hold. It seems to be your friend, a lover 
almost, with its disarming face. It emits musical sounds together 
with the promise that your luck is on the change. It will happen at 
this instant, at this spin of the symbols. No? Ah well, on to the next 
spin. Your luck is bound to change because you haven't had any 
luck with the pokies for ages. Reason tells you that a long spell of 
bad luck never guarantees a future win, but then the pokies have 
their own logic, haven't they? How about that bloke who put his last 
twenty cents down the pokies and won twenty-five grand? 
	It is with hopes like these that millions of devotees sit for hours in 
thrall to their god, pouring their money into it, mindful only of the 
hope - no, the certainty - that they will win the big one soon. Many 
lifetimes have been spent in this state of stupefaction.
	People find great pleasure in gambling away their money. They 
enjoy not only the anticipation of winning, but the play itself. Let us 
face it - whoever invented the monster produced something 
disarming and seductive - as well as cunning, baffling and powerful. 
The machine presents itself as innocuous and even friendly, but it is 
greedy and will take your last cent. Sometimes you will hazard ten 
dollars and reap two hours of play, but another time you will lose 
ten times as much in as many minutes. And then look what you are 
missing. You aren't socialising with your fellow humans, whether 
carousing, gossiping, commiserating or just chattering. You aren't 
learning anything. While on the computer or phone, in the office or 
kitchen, even doing chores, something is being done, and maybe 
something new learned. Playing the pokies is experiencing dead 
time.
	How can dead time be pleasant, especially when you always lose? 
Lose financially, socially, timewise, morally? One bad aspect is that 
you knew beforehand that it would be a wasted experience, but while 
playing, that old black magic cast its spell; the same old come-on, 
the same old let-down. Now that it is over you regret the waste of it 
all, and the familiar sinking feeling of disillusion and emptiness is 
with you again.
	There is more to it than that - something more sinister, we might 
say more poisonous. The pangs of losing can be bitter-sweet; from 
within the remorse and the dull blows of loss after loss emerges a 
strange pleasure that itself becomes an addiction. Experiencing 
pleasure through pain is a form of masochism, and this masochistic 
thrill is one of the most powerful attractions that gambling has for its 
devotees. Certain lost souls who have set aside a certain sum for 
necessities will feel a compulsion - a combination of hope and thrill-
seeking - to gamble it all away, every time. 
	The future will hold no big wins, only the same feelings 
experienced over and over again down the years. The same self-
inflicted painful pleasure, the same damage to your finances, to your 
quality of life. The friendly pokie is a monster devouring time, 
money and willpower. Call it not friend, not even a machine; call it 
what it really is, a creature of evil housed in a temple of doom. Give 
up the pokies, and take control of your life.