…so there I was, laying in bed recovering from the knee injury that had ended my career and more or less every single idea of the future that I’d ever had. The only thing that I had going for me was that I could still use my laptop (for about twenty minutes, until the pain and the medication made me pass out again).

When I was awake, I was usually looking up stuff on the Internet about football. You know, torturing myself. But when I overcame a little of my crippling self-pity, I decided to pass a little time by making a bet at one of those online sports books at an online casino USA.

I used to bet in a casual way, here and there, with some of my friends on the football team — but they were a little busy having sex with my former fiancée, the homecoming queen, while I depended on a wizened and apparently mute old Guatemalan woman to pry the impacted stool out of my rectum every twelve hours or so. But I’m not bitter…

…where was I? Oh yeah, sports betting. Every once in a while I’d go with my best pals to place a bet at the local bookie, a heavily-tattooed Russian man with three teeth and one eye. He was very friendly; when one of the guys was a little late with his payment, the Russian (known affectionately as Ivan the Scrotumgouger) put his illustrated arm around the quaking kid and reassured him, in the most comforting way possible, that many people had gone on to lead rich and full lives without all of their internal organs.

So yeah, online sports betting may lack some of the local character that you’d get with guys like Ivan, but it’s better in every other way. Like offering online slots, and not having to go to a physical, ‘land-based’ sportsbook — ideal for me, seeing as it was going to be a long time before I could actually go anywhere. You know, like, to the bathroom by myself, or to my high school to re-take my senior year of classes…