Nurse the Hate: Hate the Lottery

The lottery is a tax on poor people and fools.  The odds of winning are so infinitesimally small, it is like crumpling your money up and throwing it into the street.  Yet people project their hopes onto holding a paper ticket and watching everything change in an instant.  All of their previous errors in judgment, lack of planning and failures are wiped away as they become buried in wealth beyond their comprehension.  Everything that was bad will become good.  All dreams are attainable.  The lottery ticket is the very definition of Fool’s Gold.  You have to be a goddamn idiot to throw your money away on lottery tickets. 

This is exactly what crossed my mind as I stood in a small line at a bleak convenience store when I bought two lottery tickets for the $700 million Powerball drawing.  I know I have no chance of winning.  History has proven time and time again that the only people that win the lottery are hillbillies.  Somewhere deep in the lottery offices is a chart which shows the exact line where the intersection of “likelihood to win” and “likelihood of buying gold jet skis” that pinpoints potential winners.  Each tooth missing in a ticket holder’s mouth increases their chances of winning by 18%.  It’s true.  Look it up. 

Despite this overwhelming evidence, I decided to “toss my hat into the ring” as it were.  Let’s face it.  $700 million is a tremendous sum of money.  I overheard some rube talking to his friend saying “If I win that lottery, I am going to buy a red Dodge Charger just like my uncle’s.  That’s the first thing I will do, I will tell you that RIGHT NOW.”  A Dodge Charger?  With $700 million dollars.  What are you?  A goddamn idiot?  It infuriates me when I hear someone think so small.  With $700 million dollars, you can buy a Dodge Charger every single day and just abandon it and the Guatemalan whore sitting in the front seat when they bore you.  Though the Dodge Charger hillbilly thinking is ideal in that it can produce a winner, it’s not thinking big enough.

$700 million buys you freedom and influence.  There is nothing more valuable than real freedom.  That is the real prize.  That’s why the first thing I do is buy surface to air missiles to protect my airspace.  Woe be to the neighborhood kid that flies a drone above my house as the unmistakable sound of a SA-20-B Gargoyle missile roars out of what had previously appeared to be a storage shed in my back yard.  This is the peace of mind others can only dream about.  A man must keep his castle safe.

The next thing I do is buy businesses that have wronged me in some way and shut them down completely.  For example, if I still harbor a beef at an old employer, I will simply purchase the company and then shut it down.  Maybe I am still harboring a grudge from a radio station job I had in the 1990s.  No problem.  I will just buy the station.  While it might be a shock to the current employees to see their current place of employment bulldozed over, I would give them the opportunity to work at the new Mr. Chicken franchise I would randomly place in the vacant lot that I now own.  This inspires a healthy fear within the community that was enjoyed by people like Stalin and Idi Amin.  Toss into the mix a series of statues of myself that I could commission, and my stature in the community grows swiftly.  I might even create my own military uniform to wear as I drive around in my red Dodge Charger exacting fiscal vengeance.

I would have to temper this desire with that of purchasing a small island somewhere tropical and creating my own regime.  I could see myself swirling into complete madness in that scenario as I walk around my palatial grounds looking without emotion at the decapitated heads on sticks of my perceived enemies.  I would definitely have a situation where I would have “armed henchmen” as that is something I think I would enjoy.  A loyal team of goons is just not something most people have nowadays.  They would all laugh too loudly at the bad jokes I would frequently tell.  I would be like a violent Elvis, and they my armed Memphis Mafia.  Their biggest fear would be me catching them glancing with lust in their eyes at one of my many clearly drugged teenage brides that lounge near me while continuously scrolling through their phones.  Every few weeks I would roar into a paranoid rage and have the group turn on one of these hangers on.  My power would be based on unpredictability and sick Machiavellian experiments I would carry out for my own amusement.  Ah, that would be the life…

I think in the end I would probably not have the ambition to pull the trigger on those scenarios though.  Being a despot requires so much effort.  The thing I want doesn't require money.  I'm just a guy that wants to be in an igloo listening to scratchy records.  Why did I waste those four dollars on those lottery tickets?  The answer is self evident.  I must be a fool...  Or perhaps a hillbilly.