Karl Klockars

For the next few hours of my life, I’m a rich man.  In my head, at least.  Why?  Because I spent one of my hard-earned dollars on a Mega Millions Lottery ticket last night as I was purchasing alcoholic beverages from the kindly old Indian man at the corner store who always smiles when you put a $4.29 six-pack on a debit card.  I gotta start carrying more cash.

It allows me to play a game I used to kill time with back in my factory working days.  If you had 207 Million Dollars, what the hell would you do with all of it?  Aside from give about half back in taxes, that is.  You can probably gauge your progress as a human being if you were to stand your desires up against what the old you wanted.

For example, when I was rocking a ponytail and multiple piercings as a mattress-building shop worker with a penchant for cheap beer, cigarettes and stupid women, I probably would have first spent a million bucks on a month-long debauchery-filled shindig for my friends and I.  Now that I hide inside and only talk to a handful of people I barely like, I don’t have to worry about that any more.  See?  Progress?

Nowadays I’d want to be a real estate czar.  It’s a buyers market right now, and you’d be a dummy to piss away millions upon millions of dollars on fancy antiques and crazy swords and goofy cars like every other multi-millionare dipwad you see on those “don’t win the lottery” specials and documentaries.

Well, okay, I suppose the first thing I’d do is change my name.  Get that big check with your old name on it, walk out the front door and head right to the courthouse.  “I’d like to be Nobody J. Nobody for the next couple years, if you don’t mind.”

“Why, you dummy?  That’s a stupid name.”

“I just won a metric shitload of cash in the Megamillions, Judge.  I don’t want you to know who I am, let alone the rest of those animals out there.”

“The judge finds for the Plaintiff, Mr. Nobody J. Nobody.  That’ll be a million bucks.”

Done!  Now!  Off to Scotland to hide for a few months!  Then I begin my plan of world domination.

Okay, and the bulldog puppy for the wife, and the preparation for spawn, and a tremendous amount of benevolent giving and monetary outreach to a whole bunch of Chicago joints.  Like, we’ll buy everyone a slide rule.  That’ll change the world.

The irony that I once made mattresses and would probably descend into madness and stuff my own mattress with cash is not lost on me.  But I would know tons about the mattress into which I was stuffing that cash.

So, payday.  You’re just minutes away.  I’ll be out reveling in my last night of poverty-induced freedom with cheap beer, rock and roll and general good times.  As soon as this lottery ticket clears, I’m counting on abject misery, cash-flow worries, total wealth-induced paranoia and a general feeling of luck-guilt and pointlessness that will lead to a tremendous amount of overindulgence and self-induced misery.

C’mon, big money.  Daddy needs a new pair of shoes.