If I Were a Rich Man

What would you do with one million dollars? If I had a million bucks I’d phone the pay number to get the last fucking clues to today’s NY Times crossword puzzle. I need a four letter word for lost and it begins with an ‘A,’ and what was the name of the skipper on Gilligan’s Island? If you want my opinion I think pop culture references in the Times crossword puzzle suck. The phone call is only $1.20 but I would never call unless I had a million dollars. What sort of pathetic loser would call a crossword puzzle help line? That’s sort of cheating, isn’t it? Only a millionaire would be a big enough loser to pay for clues to a crossword puzzle. Rich people are all cheaters anyway.

So what I’m saying is that I would feel too stupid to call the crossword puzzle help line even if I had a million dollars. So tell me what good is a million bucks? It’s not worth the paper it’s printed on if I can’t finish this puzzle today.

I guess that I could go see movies at night instead of being a cheapskate and only hitting the matinees. But there are too many loud, punk kids in the theater at night so a wheelbarrow full of cash wouldn’t help me there, either. And don’t tell me that if I was loaded I could buy the large popcorn. I don’t do popcorn at movies. It’s not that I’m grossed out by the “butter” that tastes like salted crank-case oil. I just hate it that you can only get the crank-case oil on the top handful of popcorn and the rest of it is bone dry. Tell me how you work that problem out, rich boy?

If I were a rich man I could always buy that fancy albacore canned tuna instead of the ghetto, lower grade stuff, but I don’t really like tuna much. I only buy it because it keeps forever just in case a hurricane hits Seattle or I come home drunk and hungry and there is absolutely nothing else to eat besides a can of tuna. If I come home drunk and hungry and there is absolutely nothing else to eat besides canned tuna I probably won’t give a shit if it is fancy albacore tuna or the low-grade crap. Being rich is turning out to be a lot less interesting than I thought.

I was waiting until I hit it big before I fixed my car radio but I broke down and took care of that. I didn’t want to miss any of the thrilling games of the dead-last Seattle Mariners. I guess with a million dollars I could get my car painted but what is the use? It will just get dinged-up being parked on the street. Even if I had a million dollars I wouldn’t piss it all away on a paint job for a car that is just going to get bumped repeatedly by soccer moms going to see the Space Needle.

I could finally pay the $11 and go to the top of the Space Needle after over five years of literally living in its shadow. Now it has sort of reached the point where I just want to be able to say that I’ve never been up to the top of the Space Needle. I think that I’ll save that experience for the end of my life. I’ll wait until the very end of my stay here on earth and then I’ll pay the $11 for the elevator ride, or whatever the price will be when adjusted for inflation. I’ll ride up, step out of the elevator, I’ll say, “Man, what a view,” and then I’ll croak. I think that I’ll be able to manage that without being a millionaire.