To Do List: Lotto Winnings

            Recently, the Mega Millions went off for $132 million, which, when calculating the total cash value minus federal taxes (no state taxes on winnings in California), comes out to be somewhere in the neighborhood of $81 million.

            After doing the math I promptly a) bought a ticket and b) began brainstorming ways I would go about spending, sharing, saving, and plowing through this impossibly large pile of cash. Money, after all, is for spending. Enclosed is a partial list that captures the style and spirit in which I will celebrate my windfall:

1)     Upon first bloom, helicopter my sportiest associates to my small private island in the Lesser Antilles where we could bow hunt the homeless and criminally insane who’d been fattened over the winter.

2)     Acquire a merry band of midgets—Dwarves need not apply!!!!! Construct a cadre of perfectly symmetrical miniatures with midget dimensions and midget mind frames, midget hopes and midget dreams, midget tastes and midget pleasures. Train them in hand-to-hand combat and weaponry (each having a specialty: arms and armory, explosives and munitions, land, sea, and air vehicles; electronics); indigenous and dead languages (Sanskrit, Latin, Navajo, and other Meso-American dialects); and sustainable farming. Turn them loose to do my bidding.

3)     Host a real murder mystery. Send out gilded, wax-sealed invitations to an extravagant dinner party. Guests travel by horse-drawn carriage to a palatial estate with a drawbridge and moat where they would be outfitted in fine silken outfits and dine on rare, exquisite gourmet foods and wines. Once they have settled in comfortably, close the drawbridge and enjoy the thrill of killing off your closest friends one by one in the most creative ways. 3a) Re-enact the Donner Party adventures. Once the food runs out, let the games begin.

4)     A masterstroke celebration of the ephemeral! Benevolent nihilism in its truest form: Build the most extravagant amusement park in the history of childhood entertainment. Out-Disney Disneyland. More magic than Magic Mountain. Greater than Great America. Open it for a day. Burn it to the ground.  4a) Build a library, petting zoo, or play ground, a school for the deaf, dumb, or blind. A retirement home. Repeat. Add water to the smoldering ashen remains.

5)     Hire 20 hookers to play tackle football and do cocaine with. Only 20, not 22, because you’re “all-time” quarterback for both sides. After the game, line them up against the shower wall from ugliest to cutest and fuck your way from one side to the next. Smile at your good fortune. None of this really matters anyway, thank God.

6)     Sponsor a grassroots initiative to reappropriate the meaning of the word “pussy,” recasting it in a deservedly positive light while arguing for the celebration of female sexuality as well as the reclamation of the suppressed, if not discarded, sacred feminine largely missing from our society (as exemplified by the pejorative usage of the word).

7)     Tithe

8)     Open a sniper school. Train students in marksmanship and reconnaissance, including stealth, camouflage, infiltration, and observation. Graduation includes a fieldtrip to the inauguration of a current favorite politico, the studio of a talking head, or coffee shop of favorite celebrity.

9)     Fill a with farmhouse stable stall with bundles of $100 bills; each friend gets one pitchfork  full; close friends and loved ones can use a snow shovel.

10)  Open a private school for girls hidden deep inside a forest primeval whose mission statement is (like all educational facilities) to deflower the young of their unseemly innocence through liberating, maturing practices. Partial list of reading materials: Lolita, Tropic of Cancer, Are you there, God, it's me Margaret. Others?