The Lottery Just drives me NUTS!!!

Have you ever gone into a convenience store on your way to work, to pay for the gasoline that you’ve already pumped, only to be standing behind Wilfred Brimley’s retarded brother who is buying a fist full of lottery tickets. You’re in a hurry and this fool is spending his fortune from the sale of black market food stamps to invest in the capitalist system. And, once he buys them, he doesn’t move aside to scratch them off, but instead stands right there and scratches them one-at-a-never-ending time, never quite hitting the jackpot, but invariably winning another ticket or two so he can stand there even longer.

What makes matters worse is that he smells like my friend Willie did when he got stuffed into a trash can behind the Do-Drop-In in DeSoto, Kansas back in the 70s after his hippy butt decided it would be interesting to drop into the biker bar and have a beer with the boys. Instead, he found himself floating in a stew of stale beer, moldy French fries and half smoked cigarette butts which all things considered was better than having become the wife of one of the bikers, which he came closer to than getting the desired beer he sought.

So, you call the boss and tell‘em you’re going to need a couple days off because you’ve run into a jam and it’s got nothing to do with Grape Nuts. Now, I’m always hesitant to stop someone from going over to the dark side as there may be very personal and religious reasons for them doing so. I remember once stopping a guy in a truck stop from buying a $20 lottery ticket. I told him that his chances of winning were slimmer than being struck by lightening and that the whole scam was a ruse on the part of the state to tax stupid people who were supported through an array of handouts and welfare programs to placate them, that it was a way for the state to get that money back, and he would only see his family suffer his obvious loss of the $20. He thanked me and stood aside talking.

As we stood there, an obviously successful business type who had driven up in a Mercedes and looked for all the world to have more money than God, approached the counter and plunked down his $20 for the ticket that would have been the poor soul’s who I had just saved. BINGO! Just like that the business man hit a $40,000,000 instant winner and walked away joyously. I’ll never forget the look on my new, now ex-friend’s face.

He has to this day probably never considered the stress that all those winnings would have placed on him and is ignorant of how happy I probably made him. Of course, it could have been worse. I could have found myself in Willie’s trash can or worse yet, become his new sister-in-law.