Dear Mr. Brown,
First off, let me offer my congratulations on your recent success with wagering on the ponies. This is a brutally difficult undertaking we are all engaged in and a man who can earn a serious profit at it deserves more than a bit of unreserved praise.
I should probably keep my mouth shut, which I have pretty much doing for the better part of ten years \'round these parts, but being deep into my fourth bottle of Jaboulet\'s Parallele 45 Cotes de Rhone (which, as an aside, is in my humble opinion one of the greatest inexpensive bottles of red to ever have been offered in the American market) and having just had a brief consult with Dr. Grabow (boy, the stars are lovely in the middle of the night in upstate New York at this time of year), I gotta speak my piece.
Please don\'t get yourself into a fight, Mr. Brown. I say this as a fan and sometimes-user of your product. Please don\'t go get your face smashed into a million pieces. Yes, I am sure in your youth you handled yourself with honor and aplomb, as did I back in the day (another aside: from what I surmise from postings around here, you should picture me as someone who could pass as a slightly older brother of jimbo66) but times have changed, and the world has become a lot meaner in our middle-to-late-middle-age. Did you happen to notice a woman pepper-spraying her way to Christmas shopping glory at an LA Wal-Mart the other day? We\'ve spun off the axis at this point. Look at it like I do: there\'s nothing left to prove at this point, I delivered my emergency-room-inducing beatings more than twenty years ago, and nowadays it seems behind every corner lurks a bat-shit insane psycho who would gut someone just for the thrill of it. Do you really want to get involved in a bar-fight in these crazed times?
My own admittedly amateur advice would be to bag the LES (? - seems like where it\'s at for you these days, forgive me if I\'m wrong) bar scene and the betting world, take a little of that hard-earned profit, buy a plane ticket someplace warm and at least fifteen hundred miles from here and find a nice stool to sit on and get hammered like a gent you are underneath it all for a few days, with little-to-no threat of a dangerous altercation in the forecast.
Now, I admit I have not wagered at the levels you have, but hear me out anyway. I have played for some seriously high stakes. I have sat and watched as my thirty-eight year old wife, the mother of my three children, bled to death, and I have had to come home the following morning and tell those children, the youngest of whom was fourteen months old at the time, that their mother was dead. I\'ve played for the health insurance premium for those children; I\'ve played with no cards other than a last few bucks and your figures and I\'ve turned that weak-ass hand into months of their insurance premiums, of their rent, of their heat, of their breakfasts and lunches and dinners. I hit a Pick of my own on a $96 ticket back in the day, using at a minimum the theories I\'ve read here, and I nailed Noble\'s Promise what seems like two hundred, not two, year\'s ago. Yeah, you can scoff at my numbers but not at their depth; I\'ve played pretty serious, if I don\'t say so myself.
So take it from someone with a little hard-won wisdom: get the fuck outta Dodge, as soon as possible. Take some of that profit, and say goodbye to the potential bar-fights, say goodbye to playing these god-forsaken races. Go. Go somewhere and leave this shit behind for awhile. Get outta town, take a break. You\'ll be glad you did. Seriously.
