A Favorite Fantasy

I was washing dishes this morning and found my mind in a favorite fantasy.

See, things have been pretty much shutdown here in my neck of the KY woods because of snow and ice. Main roads are well-cared for, but side roads (like ours) can be dangerous long after main roads are clear and dry. (The fact that my neighbors tend our county? city? road themselves so that it actually gets done, plowing it with their side-by-side and bringing in truck beds full of gravel to fill the holes is another story.)

Tyler, walking our road this week.

I was thinking about friends who own businesses, and local businesses that just opened this winter, and all those small stores, shops, and restaurants that are going to be financially impacted by 3 or 4 days opening late, closing early, or staying closed altogether because of the weather (not to mention the employees hurting from cut paychecks). I was running through my budget to figure what I'd be able to do/buy/order from some of these businesses next week once I can get my car down off this hill. And I had my familiar fantasy of having big money... not for my own bank account, but rather the fantasy is always to anonymously give away a million dollars a month.

In this fantasy, if I'm buying things, I then think of where to donate the purchased goods, or if I'm hiring services, who could receive the services. So, to give a million to our beloved Read Spotted Newt bookstore in Hazard, we could do 500K toward a new storefront, and then order 250K worth of books to distribute to prison libraries, and then allocate 250K to cover 5 years of author visit honorariums and free community writing workshops and bookclub books. (I have no experience to know if these numbers are realistic.)

I stole the profile pic from their Facebook. Check them out here: https://www.facebook.com/readspottednewt

This fantasy entertains me while washing dishes, or stuck in traffic, or having trouble falling asleep. What cause, business, organization, person, school, group would I love to support with big money?

A million dollars to the American Cancer Society isn't gonna do much besides buy a month's worth of toner ink, maybe. But a million dollars to a small independent bookstore? A million dollars to an arts organization that offers free lessons for the community? A million dollars to an animal rescue center?

It is so much fun, though bittersweet, to dream this dream. I always end up stunned by the fact that billionaires exist. How can you sit on that much wealth and not itch to share it? I'm sure we've all seen that online demonstration of how much bigger a billion is than a million. A million seconds is like 11 days and a billion seconds is like 31 years. A dollar a second for 31 years makes a billion dollars? It's impossible to really envision.

How can they not just walk the street giving wads of $100 bills to regular people? To the kind of people like most of us, living paycheck to paycheck and if we had an unexpected $3,000 car repair, we'd be up shit creek.

I guess they probably can't understand our lives any more than we can understand theirs.

In this capitalist hellscape of the US, when you don't have money you know that actually, many of your problems (and your friend's problems, and your community's problems) can be solved or greatly improved by having more money. True, it can't bring us happiness, but it can alleviate many stressors and agitations, open up new opportunities, and improve the quality of our lives enough to make room in our hearts, minds, and hours for us to work on finding and fostering happiness.

I know I'm preaching to the choir. Ain't no multi-billionaire reading this. :)

Until I unexpectedly am put in charge of distributing some eccentric, dying uber-rich person's fortune, one 7-figure chunk at a time, rest assured if you're doing cool things in the world, you're totally on my fantasy list of recipients.