Good morning, commoners.
I come to you today wearing a glorious Armani robe, drinking Cristal through a straw fashioned out of a rolled $100 bill. Or is it $1,000? Who cares, really? I’m just going to use it for kindling, anyway.
While you’re eating that egg-like substance and rushing to get ready for work, I’m nibbling caviar off a platinum plate and drinking coffee made of Juan Valdez himself. I’m waiting for a call from a darling real estate woman named Mimi who is scouring Malibu to find the perfect beachfront home for me. The perfect second home, that is. I want one with a pool that sits next to the ocean because that seems the height of pretension to me and that’s what it’s all about. My tool shed alone will be two times bigger than that shack you live in or Mimi will be fired at once.
Was that the phone? Never mind. I’ll let my servant boy get it.
I’ve got plans. Big plans. While I haven’t yet been properly notified that I’ve won last week’s Powerball, I’m absolutely certain I have. All I needed was to match six numbers, after all, and I bought two tickets. That’s 12 numbers! What are the odds that I DIDN’T win?
When you play the lottery with big numbers at stake, you don’t simply hope to win, you fully expect it. For a tantalizing stretch of days, hours or even minutes, the delusion is complete. This is your time, you can feel it. You DESERVE those half-a-billion bones after all the good deeds you’ve … all the good things that you meant …
Anyway, it’s more about the things you DIDN’T do, isn’t it? You didn’t cheat on your wife. You didn’t embezzle from your boss and you didn’t steal money from your kid’s college fund to finance another trip to Vegas. You’ve been a real good boy and what’s more, you’ve always had this silent, unformed feeling that you were MEANT to live the high life.
For days before the drawing, you’ll go around pontificating, out loud or on your Facebook wall, about all the good things you would do with that fat chunk of dough.
“If I win, I’m going to throw a big party and give money to those who need it most,” you will declare in that magnanimous way you have. Or, “I’m going to travel from city to city handing out fat wads of cash to the homeless! And pie! Pie for everyone!”
Nice try, Rockefeller. That’s mostly just you trying to tease a little advanced karma from the forces that control the universe. You say you’ll go all Mother Teresa but given that much money all at once, you’d be living more like Charlie Sheen by the end of the week. And we’re talking 2011 Charlie Sheen.
Of course, if you don’t bother to play, you never have to worry about any of these uncertainties. And there are plenty of people who flat-out refuse to waste money on long odds.
“I would rather throw my money in the lake,” said one such tightwad, who then went on to actually calculate the odds of winning the jackpot, which are indeed comparable to your odds of getting abducted by aliens and eaten by a shark on the same day. Although why aliens would want to abduct a person who is all chewed up is beyond me.
What the skeptics don’t seem to get is that, while the chances of winning are slim, the word “chance” is still there. For those two dollars — or four, or ten or three hundred — you buy yourself a bubble of time during which you believe you might win this thing. Two bucks and there you are, having long, lurid daydreams about quitting your job and never looking at an office cubicle again.
You ponder who you will tell right away. You fantasize about taking that winning slip of paper and easing it into a safe-deposit box bought just for this occasion. You think about that ride to the lottery office and beyond that, the first fat check with all those zeros on it. A heaven of wealth! And it could happen because, damn it, sometimes the universe is a very romantic place and who deserves it more than you?
You’re driving a 10-year-old car with four bald tires. You have about three gallons of heating oil in the tank at home and the cable company just sent the THIRD AND FINAL NOTICE. The credit-card vultures keep calling and your kid needs braces. For two bucks (or four, or three hundred) you get a gleaming sliver of hope that you’ll go to bed Wednesday night just eyebrows above the poverty line and wake up a prince. Like that, all your problems could be gone, and isn’t that faint hope worth the money you would have otherwise spent on something stupid, like bread or milk?
Of course, all good fantasies come with a cold-water splash of reality. When you behold the winning combination of numbers in the morning, you’ll see that you nailed only one. All those karmic negotiations and you don’t even come away with a free ticket for next week. You’ll tell everybody you’re not disappointed. I mean, geesh, do you know how long those odds really are? But inside, the letdown is as big as yesterday’s potential windfall. And now you have to read all those news stories about some yokel in Monkey Fang, Mont., who won the jackpot all by himself. A handyman at the local church, yada yada. Nine kids and a sickly wife at home, blah, blah, blah. Friends of the lucky bastard say nobody is more deserving than he, and you quietly disagree. The way you see it, NOBODY is more deserving than you; yet here you are, driving to work on those bald tires instead of shopping for a Winnebago.
And then you — or I or any of those other saps with losing tickets — put on our $300 jackets and jump in our $20,000 cars and go to work for eight hours in a warm office with baked goods next to the coffee machine. At the end of the day, we go home to our tablets, video games and huge-screen televisions and muse about how happy we could be if we could just get our hands on some big-time money.
Our forebears would be sickened, I’m pretty sure. There was a time not long ago when the idea of the World Wide Web and instant communication would have seemed like life in SuperDuperFunTopia and here we are taking it for granted. We live 50 times better than anyone in our grandparents’ era, but is that enough? Nossir, it is not. The way we see it, if you’re not living like a rock star, you’re really not living at all.
Well, not me, brothers and sisters of squalor. Starting now, I’m going to fully appreciate what I’ve already got. Who needs a lottery jackpot when we’re already rich? I’m grateful for what I have. I’m happy with my level of comfort and my place in this dazzling world.
Until next week when Powerball starts all over again and I can finally get out from under this miserable existence. This is my time, for sure. I can feel it.
Mark LaFlamme is a Sun Journal staff writer. Jackpot daydreamers can email him at mlaflamme@sunjournal.com.
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