Your hopes and dreams

As dead as you are inside, which is quite dead, you still have hopes and dreams. You still somehow, against all odds and evidence, think you're going to be rich, famous, or just moderately happy one day. You still pretend like your life is headed down a general path toward these hopes and dreams, and that one day you'll be the success that you've been telling everyone you're going to be (but that everyone has stopped believing you about for some time now).

But at some point, you need to start rethinking these dreams. You need to refocus your aim. That day should be today. Or tomorrow, if you're really hungover today. But then definitely tomorrow. And you've really got to pick a new hopes-and-dreams basket into which you can pour all of your rotten eggs.

And that dream should be the lottery.

You should start playing the lottery compulsively. You should know which days the Mega Millions is drawn, and you should have a set of numbers you play every time, in addition to spending ten extra dollars on computer-generated quickpicks. Your regular set of numbers should have extremely thought-out significance to you and should border on psychotic numerology.

You should also have recurring nightmares that involve your forgetting to buy a lottery ticket, and then your regular set of numbers turning out to win. In these dreams, your depression should be so deep and palpable that you walk around the entire next day looking like you just got diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

You should begin to talk to all of your friends about how you're going to win the lottery. But then, you should start to become horribly reclusive and never mention the lottery to anyone, since you're sure that once you win, they will all be begging you for money, and you'll eventually have to hire a bodyguard and change your name and your appearance just to get away from your former, awful friends.

It's important to remember that your belief in your eventually winning the lottery should be so intense that you have already basically spent all the money. Also, every time someone wins who isn't you, you should feel exactly the same as if that person had come into your home in the middle of the night and robbed you of everything you own, leaving nothing but a urine stain where they decided to pee all over your living room carpet.