I was thinking about winning the lottery and wondering why, short of my not buying a ticket, I hadn’t done so. That seems a trifle unfair, doesn’t it?
If you’re following the Saga of Me, I apologize for this brief recap: my new book is on the hands of my editor wife, who is studying for a test before she touches it. The test is in mid-June. And so I must wait…
While waiting for a certain someone – at this point, a certain ANYONE, to read my book – I’ve been thinking about things. You know, quests and what-am-I-doing-with-my-life kind of stuff.
This is what I do before I decide to chuck it all and go become a cowboy in Montana (although now that I no longer agree with Montana politics, I begin to wonder to where a liberal runs when they want to get away from it all and choose to be a cowboy. In truth, at my age, riding a horse doesn’t seem all that pleasant, either. Rats. This isn’t going well.)
Anyway, you’re a writer, right? You know how it goes. Whatever you do in your day job, writing about stuff is always right there, living large in your thoughts. You’re a writer. You have a purpose and a mission. A quest.
Maybe that’s why you don’t play the lotteries, or bet on horses, or wager on sports. You’ve already got your plan.
Someday, you’re going to get your stuff published, sink that day-job of yours like a two-foot putt, and live the life you always dreamed of. Except that we don’t end our sentences in prepositions, so you will live the life of which you’ve always dreamed.
That’s your lotto, your triple crown. Every piece you put out there could be the golden ticket that wins your version of the lottery.
What that means for us, we writers and artists and dreamers, is that the only way out of the dreary black forest of daily toil is to go through it.
No, we keep paying our dues, doing the dirty, as they say, because we can’t run away from our humdrum existence with some get-rich-quick scheme.
That Win the Lottery shortcut? Not for you, mate.
In truth, I DID run away to go be a cowboy. It was a very easy, very stupid decision to make, and even though my soul knew it to be the wrongest thing I could do, I ran away from my art, and made it all the way to Northen California before the money ran out.
It took decades to get back here. Long, disastrous, anguished decades to undo the betrayal I’d done to myself.
Now I’m almost whole again. And waiting, waiting, waiting.
But like you, instead of betting on horses, I’m buying lottery tickets with my words.
And waiting, waiting, waiting.