Your lottery winnings

Sometimes, when all the reliable news sources (Yahoo!) tell you about how enormous the lottery jackpot has become, you should start feeling like you'd be pretty stupid not to spend the money you were saving for your "lean" Christmas on a lottery ticket instead.* After all, God owes you for that crippling depression He gave you, right? He'll probably pay you back in some sort of spiritual legal settlement with this particular lottery. At least, that's what you should tell yourself as you stare at the lukewarm oatmeal in your coffee cup that's congealed like some half-digested brain because you never really learned how to make oatmeal properly.

Anyway, it's time to take a trip to 7-Eleven and buy yourself $500 million dollars!

As you walk down the street to 7-Eleven, you should seriously consider how you'll spend those millions. First off, you guess you've got to shovel a bunch over to your family, which should hopefully fulfill your familial obligations for life and act as a money-rich salve for all those weddings and funerals you failed to attend and feelings you failed to emote. Then you think about how you can reward the four people in your life who let you call them friends by paying off their house loans, student debts and car payments, even though you haven't talked to most of them in months and even though everyone involved would probably feel incredibly awkward about the situation: them because you're trying to reward their friendship with money when they'd probably just prefer to know you're not actively ignoring them and you because you feel like they feel like you're not giving them enough money.

Once that's over, you have to figure out what to do with the rest of that $200 million or so after taxes. You should probably give it some charity or something, but then you think maybe it'd be better to give it to individual dying people or something, since then you'll be able to see the results of your fantastic generosity, and as far as the reliable news sources (Yahoo!) have told you, every charity ever is a gigantic fraud. But how do you find those dying people, and isn't it sort of gauche to go up to grieving people to try to throw money at them? Also, the more you think about it, the more you realize money doesn't buy off death or even, really, illness, and that winning the lottery will probably cause you to contract (more) cancer in some horrible cosmic irony.

As you find yourself standing in the 7-Eleven, looking more lost than the homeless guy looking lost by the hot dog spinner, you should come to the realization that the only reason you want to win the lottery is to buy off guilt as some cheap (well, spiritually cheap) way of making yourself a happier person. Then you should go ahead and buy a Slurpee instead, and find that that sort of works too.


*Actually, if you've been living a fraudulent life, you should have been buying them all along anyway.

Your vacation

Running away is always your goal, so one great thing to have on the horizon at all times is a vacation. You should make sure you plan enough of your vacation beforehand so that you have transportation to the destination and back home, but everything else about your trip should just be sort of hopes and fears. You should make sure to tell people that you'll definitely go to whatever museum thing they recommend you do while you're there, just so you'll have the opportunity to feel bad about the fact that you never even tried to do that.

Going out of the country is always preferable, because for a few moments during your trip, or for several days, you'll concoct schemes to stay in that country that involve all kinds of fraud and shit. You should briefly consider just becoming a weird outlaw living off the land, or a panhandler with a knapsack on a stick, and then realize that you'd die so fast in that situation that you'd be better off selling your body for money. You should start to wonder what it takes to get into the prostitution biz. Do you need a pimp, or is that more of a suggestion? Maybe some good, sturdy hooking shoes? Since you're new to this, you're going to have the novelty thing going for you, and you'll probably get a ton of business in the beginning. You'll probably also make friends with a scrappy hooker who seems like she has a heart of gold but ends up backstabbing you at some point, probably with a knife. This will give you street cred, though. Which is like regular credit except easier to get with a bad FICO score. Maybe you'd eventually meet a generous John who comes around pretty frequently and never makes you have sex, but instead asks you to talk about your life, but really you're sort of doing this because of the sex, which is something you'll awkwardly realize one moonless night on the corner and then never think about again. But you'll need the money, so you'll do this "talk" thing.

And why will you need the money? To run away, obviously. But this time it's running away from your life of danger and hooking, and that's what you really want. You want a reason to run away that makes sense and isn't just that your life is meaningless and comfortable and suffocating you with its lack of apocalypse. Also, you really want a reason to finally wear those hooker shoes. 

Your impending professional demise

At the end of each work day, you are one work day closer to being fired. So this is sort of bittersweet, because on the one hand, you've made it one more day! You pulled that wool over the world's eyes one more time like a real master wool puller, you. But on the other hand, you're probably going to be alive tomorrow. So, there's that.

If you're doing it right, every work day should be filled with the dread that you're going to massively fuck something up, or that something you've done in the past that was massively fucked up will be discovered. It doesn't really matter if you know you've done something wrong or not. In fact, in most cases, you'll be pretty certain that you've done everything exactly right. You filed that report thing right on time. You touched base with all the right people. You've made sure everyone was tracking. You've even circled back and synergized and looped in and performed other acrobatic wonders. But that's not what matters here. Oh no. What matters is that living fraudulently is like walking across a tightrope that's held on both sides by people that don't really know/like you.

So, since you're bound to be fired sooner or later (sooner), it's best to begin planning (worrying) about how you will survive (become homeless) in your new unemployed situation. You can live without cable by stealing from the Internet, so that's an easy one. You can probably sell a lot of your old stuff, like your video games or jewelry or semen. You can even get by without food for a while. And then there's always food stamps, which you'd never get out of some completely undeserved sense of pride, but just knowing that you could get them is almost as satisfying as a sandwich. The very last thing to cut out of your budget should be your Internet. Why? You'll need it to look for a new job or whatever. But more importantly, what's the point of being unemployed if you can't spend time writing blogs or stalking Facebook or online dating? You might as well just continue having a stupid job so you can use the Internet.

And then it becomes clear why if you ever lose your job, you'll lose your life. It's just the Internet. There isn't anything left of you that isn't tied into the Internet. So, better get back to work and make some $$$ for your Internet connection (entire existence).

Your search for meaning

Well, here you are, almost four years later and still alive, somehow. Annoying. With your youthful certainty that you'd be dead by [17, 25, 30] now a part of your golden past, you've come to realize that you need to find some stupid meaning in your life, or at least a thing you do that you can pretend is some sort of "purpose." The work you do obviously has nothing to do with that purpose, so what else is there? Smoking e-cigarettes? Playing board games? Driving aimlessly? Watching TV shows you hate? Considering (but not realistically) becoming a doctor or lawyer? It's probably none of those things. Which is too bad, because you don't do anything else, except sometimes write some shitty shit or play a shitty thing or two on the guitar.

So what are the things you should do to find this missing meaning? Your first thought will probably be to volunteer and help some people who live less fraudulently than you. Maybe you'll join the Red Cross. Or even the Peace Corps. Maybe they'll even send you to some distant place that will end up changing your entire perspective on life and make you one of those intolerable people who talk about being sent to another country and having life-changing experiences. Briefly excited, you should begin to fill out forms for one of these programs before you realize two things: 1) You'll probably be sent to an aidsy-type country where you won't be doing anything except showing people who weigh 25 pounds that you objectively have one of the greatest lives on earth and don't appreciate any of it, and 2) You'll need to get a tetanus booster, and that's just probably not going to happen because you're lazy.

That's okay, there are many other fraudulent ways to look for meaning. One is continuing education. Remember how you liked learning things at some point in your life? Yeah! Well, that will cease to be a possibility once you remember it requires asking old professors for recommendations and filling out applications.

As the more realistic possibilities, including the army, close before you, you should begin to grope around for any old thing, like god. Truthfully, you're envious of people who believe in god, because god is a great replacement for having any actual meaning. Plus, He's a great excuse for doing a lot of things that would otherwise look crazy, like talking to thin air or genocide. You should fully plan on going to church or mosque or temple or whatever. But, man, they sure meet early on weekends.

When god has failed you, you should just give up and fall back on old faithful: waiting for the apocalypse and being secretly jealous of people caught in the frankenstorm.