Thursday, 3-4-2004: I’ve decided to start playing the lottery. I’ve always made fun of people that play it, saying that it’s a game for people who suck at math. I’ve played it about once a month for the past 6 months and I’ve won exactly nothing. $6.00 down the drain. Up until 6 months ago, I’d never bought a lottery ticket in my life. (This doesn’t include lottery tickets that I stole while working at various convenience stores nearly a decade ago.) I think I’m going to buy 1 ticket per day, every single day for the rest of the year. There’s about 300 days left of 2004, so that’ll be $300 I’m wasting. If I don’t win at least $300 by December 31st, I’ll quit playing forever.

If I beat the odds and end up winning $100 million or something, I’ll give almost all of the money away. Nobody needs to have $100 million sitting in a bank. I think I’d spend a lot of money to help restore old, historic buildings and houses around Alton. I’d make that my full-time job, just blowing money on that. Then I could just go around knocking on doors of crappy-looking houses and offer to give them free paint jobs, landscaping, roofs, etc. I’d probably open up a place in town for kids to hang out, such as a skating rink. Alton used to have 2 of those but 1 closed down and then the other burned down. The nearest rink was about 20 miles away in Glen Carbon up until about a year ago. Lowes took care of that - they bought that skating rink and tore it down so they could build a new Lowes in Glen Carbon. So I’d put a million or so into a skating rink/arcade/cyber cafe. Maybe a movie theater too.

I think I’d also contact Weird Al Yankovic and his band and I’d offer to finance a few dozen videos for them. Because each album that Al puts out, he only can afford to make videos for the 2 best songs. So I would work with them and get them to make videos for most of the songs from all his past albums. We’d start with videos for The Biggest Ball of Twine in Minnesota, Hardware Store, Jerry Springer, Mellow When I’m Dead. Then I’d allow Al and his band to pick some videos they want to do. We could just blow $500,000 per video. I bet that’d be enough money to do something cool with. That’d be a great way to blow money! I’d sure beat spending it all on the homeless or starving children or whales.

As far as myself goes…I’d pay off my mortgage. I definitely wouldn’t move into a mansion because I like where I live now. I’d pay off my credit cards and buy a nice van. I’d probably give certain family members a bunch of money. I’m sure I’d do crazy stuff with phonelosers.org. Like have a contest for “What can RBCP do for PLA now that he’s got $1,000,000?” I could open up a retail store that sells PLA shirts and stickers. And that’s it. It’d be a sorry looking store! I’d definitely spend all of my winnings, though. Maybe I’d set $1,000,000 aside in a savings account. But that’s it, nobody needs more money than that. Bill Gates pisses me off, hoarding that $50 billion dollars for himself instead of giving it all away for something meaningful. Like financing Weird Al videos. So anyway, everyone wish me luck on the lottery this year! I’ll be buying my first daily ticket in about an hour.

Speaking of money - my daughter brought home this paper from school a few days ago, detailing what she would do with $100. Apparently she knows how to stretch $100 a lot further than I do.