Who will win Powerball and shame a nation?
When I win Powerball, which is now at, what, $2 billion Canadian, life for all of us will beautifully unfold. This is my dream.
Actually it will unroll — there’ll be none of that proletarian folding — like a red carpet, a yellow brick road, a smooth beautiful tarmac very like the one I’ve been asking the city for years to provide because I live on a bus route and every morning the bed shudders and the lamps rattle and it’s another day in Heather’s Not Very Much Money When You Think Of It World.
I don’t actually want to win. For I would spend the money wisely, which would make Powerball look upmarket, and what civilized person wants that?
What I seek is pure comedy. What if Kim Davis wins Powerball, what then, people?
That Kentucky marriage-certificate blocking lady with evangelical pseudo-Christianitis? Imagine that. People would abandon their hair, foul their own marriage licences, shop at her newly opened chain of cardigan dealerships, anything to win her shaggy favour. Wipe that malevolent expression off your face, Kim, you’re rich. I want Ammon Bundy to win, the beardy guy in that silly Zoolander-level men’s hat standoff in Oregon. Because that guy would be out of that disputed federal grasslands so fast his camo legwarmers would fall off. He and his man friends would drop their neck scarves, their gun holsters strapped just-so on the thigh, their symphony-in-beige vest armour and scram. (Seriously, who buys a beige gun?) Big city, bright lights.
I don’t want Mike Huckabee to win because he really would blow it all on the wet rub/dry rub barbecue ribs debate. He would strip millions of cattle of their undercarriage, treat the meat and force it on people door-to-door. Americans don’t want that. Do Americans want that? Discuss. What I want is someone who could be plausibly rendered by Will Ferrell in a 2017 comedy to rival the great Step Brothers or You’re Welcome America, his 2009 George W. Bush tribute, his homage to Leni Riefenstahl, Triumph of the Stupid.
Actually, I want Ferrell’s elf Buddy to win. But he’d get fleeced. Buddy is a true believer.
And that’s what Powerball is, a cat toy for American naifs. The clerks at corner stores are seeing a parade of sad people in caps buying wads of tickets they can’t afford. When they’re interviewed about their customers, their tone is gentle.
I want Affluenza Mom to win. Tonya Couch and her husband are fantastically terrible parents, their son Ethan is a drunk-driver and a creep and the woman’s out on bail. She’s tanned, rested and shameless, I can’t imagine the greatness this woman could produce with . . . it’s just gone up to $2.1 billion.
Like all of us, I hate lottery winners, grinning creatures who aren’t us, who don’t know their marriage is going to end in smoking rubble with the cash sucked away by a caravan of no-hoper family members come a-beggin’. At the end they’ll be glad they still have OHIP, we’ve all seen it.
When I win Powerball, I will pay Canadian taxes and build a National Portrait Gallery for my country. It will have more portraits of faces than you’ve seen actual faces, it will be the Guggenheim of “Canadians Looking Right at You.”
I will rescue the Canadian newspaper industry. Not Postmedia, obv, Conrad Black’s mean dream was over before it began. My politically left-centrist newsrooms will have fainting couches and coffee wagons, a team of interview transcribers, simply acres of reporters and a crack legal team.
My Twitter followers, all 6,100 of them, will prosper and rightly so. My pool of friends will expand but not in a crass money-grubbing way. When they ask me for loans, I will say, “It’s a gift, my friend.”
I could dribble on like this forever. But I don’t have a Powerball ticket, mainly because I’m Canadian and it would shame me. Also I read the rules about importing lottery tickets into the U.S. and it appears that if I drove to Buffalo, bought a ticket and headed home, I would not be able to re-enter the U.S. to claim my . . . it is now $2.2 billion.
I am not squandering my remaining years in Buffalo, billionaire or not. So.
I want a shameless habitual U.S. criminal to win Powerball. Or a 6-year-old. If there’s a must-be-18 rule, make it three 6-year-olds. If it’s the debacle I’m hoping for, Americans will end Powerball because it makes normal people feel all sick inside.
I want a 3,700-pound walrus at SeaWorld named Chad or an Asian small-clawed otter named Rob Delaney to win Powerball, anything that can’t articulate a need for luxury. This is my dream.