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January 13, 2003
mark thomas Sometimes I wonder what would happen if I became instantly famous around the world. Famous not for any achievement but for something inane, like winning the Powerball lottery. I wonder who from my past would burst out of the woodwork when they saw my face on the cover of every newspaper in the world, on the nightly news and in magazines? And how deep would the press go to find dirt on me? They would need some shocking footnote about my life to make real news out of the generally uninteresting story that is a Powerball winner. I'd be worried enough that I might even try to remain anonymous. People would see my face on the cover of the New York Post and say "Hey, that's the guy who" [insert description of ludicrous act which I performed somewhere in my life]. Or "That guy would say the weirdest things. One time he said" [fill in your own account of something bizarre or bewildering I said to you at some point when I felt comfortable enough to let it go.] Trouble is, I don't much remember a lot of the crazy and ludicrous things I've done or said. When I do recall these crazinesses it is because someone else reminded me of them. The lottery has never held much interest for me. I've bought tickets here and there in New York and in Florida, but never connected with the excitement manufactured by state lottery authorities. I wouldn't know what to do with millions of dollars anyway. I'd be one of the ones who pisses it all away into hard alcohol, earning the sad recognition of all those people who dug up the dirt and turned me in in the first place. They would say, with no information to back them up, that money is the answer to human happiness, and how could anyone who won the lottery be anything but ecstatic 24 hours a day, and how could they use all that money as nothing more than material for some pathetic public statement about the emptiness of it all? Speaking of West Virginia, I now know a lot more about the Blue Lake in Chester, West Virginia, than I knew a few weeks ago. Someone from Chester found my pages about the blue lake and sent a link to the page to several other people who had some connection to that area in the West Virginia panhandle, and next thing I knew I had more e-mail with facts and theories about the blue lake than I had time to sort through. Check it out. I had such good luck with the Chester page, maybe I should post questions about other mysteries of the universe which are not explained anywhere on the Internet. For instance, when there is a long line at the grocery store the usual custom is for another cashier to open another register and announce "Next in line." Why is it, then, that whoever was next in line in the first line almost always chooses to stay put, and the people who are last in line in the first line always bolt to the head of the new line? I've been in that position, where I waited in the long line for 10 minutes already, so I might as well finish the work I've done so far and wait it out another minute or 2, even if it means letting all these assholes who were way behind me in line get out of the store before me. There must be a sociological examination of this irritating phenomenon somewhere in the libraries of high thought. « Scratches and Pops • sorabji.com • Is This a Gas Station? »
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