A good friend sent me a column from the Diari de Tarragona. It is signed by a psychologist specialized in addictions with the title “The silenced hell of gambling.” She documents the growing gambling addiction of increasingly younger people. The same as with porn, the internet breaks down control filters. In the real world you have to show your card to access a casino, so it is almost an introductory test.
The night I turned eighteen I went with a friend to Club Helena, a bingo hall on Diagonal/Via Augusta. After checking my date of birth, the doorman looked at his watch. It was seven minutes past midnight. Those who were technically of legal age. We spent the little money we had in twenty minutes and left, bored. I would say that I have never set foot in a bingo again, not even the one that still survives in Horta's Eivissa Square.
Today it is enough to have a credit card number to be able to gamble with money sitting on the subway or lying in your bunkered room as a teenager. You don't have to be a genius. It is also not necessary to enter any casino website. All you have to do is play one of those screensaver games with rewards and micropayments to get yourself into the mud. When I finish reading the column, I wonder why he sent it to me. Maybe because in the ludocriminal novels that we publish with Oriol Comas we always claim the difference between playing for the sake of playing or playing for money, which in English verbalize gaming versus gambling.
Well, that's not why. He sent it to me because the psychologist specialized in addictions who signed it is called, oh, Núria Cónsola. Only a tilde separates it from a console. A new case of aptonymy, that is, a name that predestines a professional activity. I'm beginning to see that aptonymy is another addiction.
