Wow, now this is interesting:
A single ticket sold in Arkansas won the second largest U.S. lottery jackpot in history, a $1.817 billion Christmas Eve bonanza in the Powerball game.
Ho ho ho, indeed.
Talk about a life-changer — and I didn’t buy a ticket, because reasons.
“What reasons, Kim?”
Here’s the thing. The cash option on that beast was about $500 million, making the lucky winner a semi-billionaire. And that life-changing thing is what stopped me from buying a ticket.
Don’t get me wrong: it’s not that I wouldn’t be able to spend the money — I have plenty of relatives and friends, all of whom I could make extremely happy/wealthy. But honestly, I don’t want to change my own life that much.
Believe me: change it would. With 500 big ones to your name, you become a target for all sorts of undesirable people: kidnappers, scam artists, robbers, whatever. You might think that you could disappear from public life and become anonymous, but you can’t; that sum of money is just too big. So you’d have to hire lawyers, accountants, financial planners and personal bodyguards… and that all adds up to a massive lifestyle change.
And speaking quite honestly, I’m too old for all that shit. Not only that, but what would I want to buy? A new house? Two new houses? An expensive vintage car? Three expensive vintage cars?
Don’t even get me started on guns. That hurts, because as much as I’d like to own some pretty shotguns and rifles, the truth is that the time in which I could shoot them is becoming increasingly shorter. I’m in my seventies, FFS, and even though I’m in good health, my meeting with that old bastard Death is not a remote possibility, is it? So a safe or three full of Purdeys or whatever is just not appealing, anymore. Ten or twenty years ago? Now that’s a different story; but I am where I am and that’s all there is to it.
Bloody hell, I couldn’t even buy a ton of books either, because of the time it would take me to read them.
Here’s a bad one. I don’t want to travel that much,because I’m pretty sure that most of my old haunts have turned to shit in my absence over these past few years. London? Paris? Vienna? Judging by what I’ve recently been reading about them, they’ve all turned into dangerous shitholes #Muslims #Africans #Gypsies #etc. And cruises have never held much fascination for me, because at the end of the day, you’re in thrall to other people’s choices or itineraries and that is not the way I want to travel. (Never mind the oceangoing part of it, because it just wastes time — that I don’t have, see above — and I don’t do sunbathing anyway.)
Frankly, the only thing that holds any attraction to me is a large-ish ranch somewhere in Texas where I could set up a few ranges of the clay pigeon, rifle, pistol and rimfire type, and blaze away to my heart’s content.
And I wouldn’t need half a billion dollars to afford that.
Anyway, I see that the Powerball jackpot has now returned to sane levels — just over $9 million for the cash option as I write this — and that would do me just fine.
Sure, my family and friends wouldn’t see much (or any) of that, once I’ve handed over the several pounds of flesh to the IRS and bought that ranch etc., but them’s the breaks. Nobody has ever stopped them from buying their own lottery ticket, after all. Call me selfish if you want, but there it is.
And our lucky winner in Arkansas? You’re going to need even more good luck to survive your windfall, buddy. I hope it comes your way.