I don’t feel like I should go out and drop another $20 on a monumental long shot, all because of the hopes and dreams of an exorbitant, life-changing payout. Not to mention that I kind of already had it lucky, because of my $100 payout from the first ticket, I was kind of playing with house money; but I had it in my mind that if nobody kept winning, and the jackpot kept growing, it wasn’t going to be the end of the world if I dropped another $20 each week.
So in the end, I spent $60 on three drawing cycles, but because I won $100 by virtue of matching four numbers, I came out ahead $40. Now imagine how much shittier I’d have felt by spending $60 without any sort of payback? That would’ve sucked. $60 is like, new-release date video game, dinner for two with the mythical girlfriend, or dinner for one at a Brazilian steakhouse.
Silly as it might’ve been, I actually had hope, that I might be the lucky draw out of the odds of 292 million, that I could win this. I mean, I can’t imagine that if there wasn’t even the most tiniest sliver of hope, anyone would play at all, but it still seems like a silly notion to have hopes like winning the lottery.
Even sillier, justification for having hopes, came from the fact that while I was driving home Monday morning last week, in the early dark AM sky, I saw a flash shoot through the sky. Honestly, I thought it was a missile or something, the way it visually erupted in the sky, shooting rapidly downward before dissipating as fast as it had shown. I actually held my breath and waited to see if there was an explosion or something waiting to occur, and only seconds later, did my mind scramble to think that maybe it was a shooting star, and that I needed to quickly make a wish to win the lottery.
I guess those seconds were seconds too long, and that someone else out there beat me to that wish.
The funniest thing is that I never talked about the flash in the sky, because of the superstition that you don’t disclose your wishes to stuff like shooting stars or birthday candles, because then they will undoubtedly fail.
Clearly, the thought was on my mind a lot over the last two weeks, discussing it with the mythical girlfriend, my friends and family, etc. As seemingly impossible as it might seem, it doesn’t hurt to daydream a little bit, and hope for some life-alleviating financial injection to (hopefully) make things easier.
Aside from the hypothetical what-I’d-do’s and stuff like that, I thought about what would happen to daily life, my brog, and the things I’d do with my money. Thought about writing cryptic messages, or try my best to put up a facade of normalcy if I were to win it, while trying to contain my excitement. If the litany of things that could happen to lottery winners were to happen to me, like violence, or family coming out of the woodwork seeking handouts.
Whatever though, the wild goose chase is over, and I’m not sad I didn’t win, because it would be stupid to be sad on something of a 1-292,000,000 chance, but it’s disappointing nonetheless. With three winners of a $1.5B pot that means each winner is entitled to somewhere around $500M, and then considering taxes and all that stuff, they’ll each probably lump sum out like “just” $175M. Funny, because that’s what the individual lump sum would have equated to, last week. Incredible how this Powerball craze got.
When it was initially announced a winner from California, I kind of hoped that it was some existing millionaire, like Matt Kemp (pictured), who decided to play because he was greedy, and a guy playing under a $160M baseball contract, goes out and wins one and a half billion, because he had the means to get a million number combinations. But with three winners announced now, it’s not nearly as tragic, but whatever, it’s over now.
Back to “ordinary” prize pools, and my daily job that somehow has managed to make me more miserably unhappy as of late. 🙁
