It’s Opening Day of Rivers Casino & Resort

I am not going to the Rivers Casino & Resort because casinos scare me and Schenectady scares me but casinos have been scaring me since I was a kid.

This picture captures why casinos scare me perfectly, just look at their faces they're all nervously obsessed.

My mother's parents were gamblers, they were also Polish so they never knew when they were ahead enough to leave the casino, my mom inherited the family past-time.

My childhood vacations always seemed to end up in Atlantic City somehow, I always remember standing at the edge of the casino floor watching senior citizens with their hands and eyes glued to a slot machine, sweaty men and women wondering around the floor, grandmothers in their housecoats hobbling around like zombies.

Sometimes when we went to the casino my dad, who swore he hated but gambled anyway would manage to pull himself away from the casino trance long enough to take us kids to the arcade or for a walk on the boardwalk, the arcades always felt cheap and awkward like electronic daycare centers with no one to supervise the kids and the boardwalk always felt like a ghost town but then again it was the late 80's and early 90's.

Long story short: I've been to every casino in New York, Connecticut and New Jersey, I like the breakfast buffet at the Mohegan Sun but no matter where I go, I always see those nervous, obsessed faces as the bodies they are attached to float around in some weird trance as the electronic sounds of the machines echo throughout the building.