My Plans For Tomorrow

Despite the fact that I KNOW the lottery is a tax on being bad at math, I like to daydream about what I'd do if I happened to win.  No, I don't really play, even when the jackpot is high.  If the opportunity presents itself, I'll throw a fiver in the pot.  But since the Powerball jackpot (not even sold in my state) is around a half-billion dollars, I thought I'd write down my spending plan for that size jackpot, which comes to about $225 million, after lump sum penalty and federal / state taxes, assuming my wife goes along.

• Houses for my family and all of our close friends and relatives, budgeted at $500,000 each - $10 million.
• College education for anyone on the same list as above who wants it - some kind of money-earning fund with a starting budget of $5 million.
• Pay off all debts of same list - wild guess, budget at $5 million to make sure there is a huge margin for error.
• Cash gift to each individual on the above list, $50,000 each - enough to have fun, not enough to kill yourself with drugs unless you straight-up OD - budget $5 million, to include future children of each member of the group, bestowed at graduation of High School or age 18, whichever comes first.
• Discretionary giftable money, $5 million each for me and my wife, to give to anyone or any cause we see fit.
• Investments - $100 million.

This comes to $135 million.  We have $90 million left.  My dilemma is this : I have two pet projects.  Do I spend the entire enormous budget on one, or split the budget in half and execute two merely huge projects instead?  Here are the options:

• Survivalist compound deep in the forest - With even the smaller budget, I could build an excellent underground bunker, fully provisioned and armed, ready for the inevitable scenario out of The Day After Tomorrow.  Or, if you insist, zombie apocalypse.  With the larger budget, the same, just bigger, deeper, and more secure.
• Cat sanctuary - Huge fenced area, like the size of a Six Flags amusement park, expressly designed and landscaped as a full-service cat sanctuary.  Full veterinary services, accepts all unwanted felines.  Most cats get free roam of about 75% of the land, the rest in designated areas for contagious disease carriers, medical cases, behavior issues, whatever.  Fully staffed, daily full park inspections for safety (and cat / human interaction).

Actually, as I've been writing this, the correct answer has become clear.  Do the most good possible now, and have fun now, don't prepare for "What if?"  I'll go $5 million on the compound, $85 million on the cats.  

Urban Safari

"Oh my god, Cheech, there's another cat in the house!"

It was a weird day yersterday - warm, but cold, and very windy.  The blinds in the bedroom always shake around like crazy when the wind is up, because we keep the windows cracked a few inches.  So it was not unusual at all for a lot of noise to be coming from the area.  Maybe 15 minutes later, there was a commotion in the hallway.  Our three cats were acting strange and restless, and fighting amongst each other.  This was a little more unusual.  They fight, but only in pairs - I couldn't remember a Wrestlemania like this between all three at once ever happening.  Still, it was just our cats fighting in the hall, no biggie.  My wife broke it up, and we went on with our lives.  Then, she had to use the bathroom, and when she came out, glanced into the bedroom.

"Oh my god, Cheech, there's another cat in the house!"  So I speedily (Ha!) hefted my ass off the couch and investigated.  I wish I had gotten a picture, but what I saw was very much like this, except with far more dirty drawers on the bed.  A beautiful, big, fully black male cat just totally chillin' on the bed.  "Hey, big guy, how ya doin'?!"  Very friendly-like, I slowly reached out, he let me scratch his head, and I knew he was fairly tame.  I told my wife to go knock on the neighbors' doors and ask if anyone lost a cat, while I stayed with him.  As she was opening the door, there was a dude walking down the hall with his son.  Our new upstairs neighbors, the ones with the bowling alley, or possibly piano moving business, operating out of their 500-square-foot apartment above our heads.  Kitty got out onto the fire escape and found a nice warm bed one floor down, it seems.

I'm considering some demotions among our feline security force, however.

Trojan Horse

I recently got into an internet argument (that is, an utterly pointless pissing contest) with another poster on a message board I frequent.  The person asked if there were any truth to the rumor (which I had never heard before) that babies can't breathe through their mouths, and would die if you hold their noses.  Since I'm not a complete knuckle-dragging fool, I replied "Seriously?  Don't you think that if babies could be suffocated by just holding their noses shut, it would be a BIG, WELL KNOWN DANGER!!! and not a rumor?"  Not surprisingly, he defended his position - anyone would, even if they were wrong.  But to my horror, other posters came to his defense!  "Well, babies don't LIKE to breathe through their mouths!"  "Babies only breathe through their mouths when in distress!"  Blah blah blah.

Look, I don't give a tiny little rat's ass about the physiology of infant humans.  But when I get a ration of shit for pointing out that yes, babies can breathe through their mouths, I get a little upset for the world.  Do I really have to accept ANY outlandish thing someone says as a sacrosanct belief, unassailable and reasonable?  It's bad enough that I have to accept everyone's kooky religion (yes, they're all kooky, even if god does exist).  Is every single utterance something that needs to be defended to the death?  And people wonder why I like to stay inside all day and avoid society?!

My problem is that I so very much want to avoid confrontation in my life.  That's what's going to send my heart into seizure, the rage that's stored up because, in real life, I don't release it in measured doses.  For example, I know a lot about old coins.  I'm not an expert, but quite knowledgeable.  At work once, a coworker mentioned how he thought he had found an error coin - a coin that was damaged while minting, but accidentally released anyway.  These can be very valuable.  He showed me his coin, and, unfortunately, it had what is called Post-Mint Damage - that is, it was damaged AFTER being released, and thus worth its face value only.  Despite the fact that my coworker KNEW I knew coins, and specifically asked me my opinion BECAUSE HE TRUSTED IT, he didn't believe me, got all pissy, and bragged to other coworkers how he was going to make hundreds or thousands of dollars.  Instead of arguing with him (which, honestly, would have been fruitless anyway), I just smiled and said, "OK, good luck!"

Then I beat up a puppy on the way home.  Well, not really.  I just bottled the anger up, to be released later in reaction to a commercial for vibrators or something.  It's really the only reasonable solution.

Talking Box

I have writer's block.  I guess that's what they call it.  I think I should call it "not being an asshole."  I have a strong case of not being an asshole.  I used to write.  When I was a child.  Now, as an adult, I know that I have nothing to say that hasn't been said better and more eloquently by someone a hundred years dead.  What balls I must have had to think that there would be anyone in this world that wants to read what I have to say!

If Andy Rooney had never been born, I'd have a sterling career ahead of me!  My head is full up to here with his style of pointless outrage.  I can't get myself really worked up about Benghazi, or whatever the fuck the newscasters are on about, but by God, if I see that cartoon bear with dingleberries again, I'm going to lose it!

I have a filthy mind.  If Larry Flint could look in there, he'd exclaim, "My goodness, Chi, that's disgusting!  By the way, would it be too much if I actually showed her cervix in the centerfold of next month's Barely Legal?"  But when I'm watching TV, I'm shockingly prudish.  Actually, "Prudish" is imprecise.  I just want decency in my TV commercials.  For example, I know exactly what diapers are for.  I know that they are sometimes leaky, and that can be gross. But I don't need to see a commercial for Luvs in which the concept is that there are babies on stage for a pageant, and the winner of the pageant is the baby who shits the most into their diaper!  I mean, seriously, they're about to shower the crowd in feces!  And don't get me started on tampon commercials.  We're all adults here, and I am fully aware of how the human reproductive cycle works, but dammit, I know for a fact that my wife doesn't want to "celebrate" her period.  Sometimes I think she'd pay me to kick her in the head to take her mind off the cramps.  Sometimes I want to pay her for the same service.  But no talking box is going to make anyone around here celebrate.

Hmmm.  Maybe I'll send a resume to 60 Minutes...

Staring Into the Eye of Darkness

I have cats.  There, I said it.  I like dogs just fine, but I am a cat person.  I daresay that, given the resources and space, I'd be a crazy cat man.  One thing I've always had in my head as something to do when I hit the Ultra Bucks, or whatever lotto jackpot, is to open a cat sanctuary.  Open to all unwanted cats, with acres of land, veterinarians, etc.  A giant no-kill shelter, but more like a farm for cats.  I'd have the run of the place, zipping around in a little golf cart, visiting the cats and hittin' a fatty.  I'd do some work around the place, but as a multimillionaire, I have employees who do the real work.

Cats looooove being scratched.  Given their physical limitations, cats can't really lick or scratch much of their spine, from their head down to the tail, and they seem to love that.  In particular, Lisa (on the left) loves it when I scratch her back right at the base of the tail.  It's kinda gross and creepy, because she starts to bite the air and get a weird spacey look in her eyes when I do it.  I've always assumed that, nasty as it was, she must be getting some kind of sexual thrill out of it..

Well, today was the last straw.  I was on the couch, looking out the staring window, just watching cars blow through the stop sign on the corner, when Lisa came up to me and started making her weird little bird-peeping calls that mean she wants attention.  So I let her up on to the arm of the couch and start scratching her head and back.  When I got to the base of her tail and scratched her back there, I happened to glance up, and her whole anus was puckered out like she was about to blow me a kiss. It was utterly fucking repulsive, all white and red, like a beached jellyfish.  I made a kind of gargling sound, and as I stopped scratching, it deflated to normal starfish-size.

Not ever again, Cheech.

Is This Thing On?

I kind of feel like King Douchebag sitting here typing things from my feeelings, but I think that it's time to start writing again.

I used to write a couple of zines.  They were like blogs, but on paper.  I had to write or type on an actual typewriter, cut the paragraphs out of the pages, and lay them out in an aesthetically pleasing format.  Then I literally pasted in humorous or illustrative pictures onto the paper itself.  When I had an entire magazine-length amount of material, I had to use some kind of Devil's Math to figure out how to lay out the pages so that the finished product looked like a real thing, and not a slow monkey's BM diary.  If you look at any magazine or catalog that's held together with staples, you'll see that the pages are actually as large as two pages, and have four page surfaces per piece of paper.  Page one, on the left half, is also the last page, page 2 is also the inside back cover, etc.  Well you can see the problem already.  I'm good at math, and somewhat intelligent in general, and I felt like an infant trying to paste-up the zine.  And the resulting feeling of pride when it all came together was wonderful.  I haven't felt that kind of real creative satisfaction in a very long time, and I think I should.

Anyway, that's what I had to do to get people to hear me back in the 1990s.  Now, my last fried egg fart has a blog, with 40 readers.  It's crazy how widespread everyone's opinions can reach these days.  Might as well add to the deluge.