GREED RULES!!

You know what I want? Yes, okay, you’re right; there really isn’t enough room in this paper for THAT list so I’ll narrow it down to what I really, really, really want.

Are you ready? Then let’s play the old greed card right off the get-go…yup…money…I want lots of it…and I don’t want to earn it either. I want to win it, inherit it, find it, not steal it, but one way or another I want it. There’s no question about it, I want money.

How much money, you ask? Lots…like pro-sports-athlete lots; like movie-star-work-ten-weeks-a-year-and-get-twenty-million-dollars-per-flick lots, filthy, stinking Bill Gates/Oprah Winfrey kind of lots. That’s what I’m talkin’ about.

What would I do with it? To be perfectly honest, I’d probably have to pay for some rehab or something somewhere down the line, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves here.

            Now, here’s the thing folks, while I’m being perfectly honest, I wrote everything up to the beginning of this sentence last week sometime and I can’t really remember what prompted my lust for cash or where I was going with this whole “lots of money” thing, but if I had to guess, and that’s exactly what I’m doing here, I would guess that it was a combination of several consecutive things that flicked my greed switch on.

            First off, as I have mentioned many times to you, summer ended, and that’s a real bummer to me, so maybe I’d like to be able to jump in a plane and chase summer around for a little while. Well, more than a little while I guess…like…‘til next May!

            Then, you know, I was just trying to catch up on a little bit of sports action by flipping through the sports channels on TV and all I keep seeing and hearing about is how these billionaire owners are fighting with millionaire hockey players trying to decide how they’re going to divide up the old NHL profit pool and all I can think about is how people are so stupid to keep going to these arenas and paying a hundred bucks for a ticket in the nose-bleed bleacher seats to ONE hockey game and eat six-dollar terrible-mostly-warm hot-dogs and drink eight-dollar-mostly-cold beer wearing a hundred-dollar replica team jersey and then they whine and snivel because their teams won’t be playing this year because somebody said, “it’s my puck and I’m going to take it home ‘til you play nice” and, once again, they completely ignore the real people who have put all of that money into their profit pool and if I was filthy-rich enough maybe I’d start a whole new affordable hockey league and then all the greedy NHL owners and players could just go…away.

            And then, I was putting a sky-window into our roof and I was up and down the ladder like twenty-seven times in five hours and my body was just aching, but I don’t really mind the work, per se, but I was thinking that it would be nice if I had a body that actually worked again and if I had enough money maybe I could afford to pay someone to fix me or replace some of my worn-out parts like the Bionic Man or even Frankenstein, but with my own brain and not the hideous appearance or the villagers coming to kill me part, and, yes, with oodles of cash, I might be able to arrange something like that. I know, I know, if I had oodles of cash I could pay someone to do the work for me but that takes the fun out of it, too, and you’re missing the point.

            And that leads us right back to reality, now, doesn’t it? The chances of me coming into bagfuls of money are as slim as having my body parts replaced or taking the greed out of professional sports but thinking that it could happen was kind of fun there for a little while, wasn’t it?

 

“Anyway, no drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power.” -P. J. O’Rourke (1947-).