I’d like to win the lottery, really; today I’m buying a ticket for MegaMillions, which stands at $35 million for Friday’s drawing.
$35 million lump-summed and taxed would leave me with roughly $9 million in cash, maybe not quite enough to retire and live life as a fat cat foreverâthe dotcom upstarts of the late 1990s always said that would take $10 million or more, because at that level, one could stick it in a trust and live off the $1 million in annual interest and investment gainsâbut plenty for me, undoubtedly, to take a long vacation and buy a bigger apartment for me and my lady, and exit the Web world for a while, and buy a lot of CDs, and write for a living, or at least pretend to write for a living, knowing full well that the chances of me making a six-figure annual income off words are slim, but that’d be okay, because I’d be sitting on the $9 million that made it into my pocket on even slimmer odds, and I could eat at the bar at Union Square Cafe once a week, if I felt like it, instead of once a year, when I decide I really deserve that $23 veal and pasta appetizer.
Barring that, I’ll get a cheeseburger for lunch on Saturday.