Come on sevens. Mama needs a hot tub…

I dreamed of owning a hot tub. The hot tub of my dreams wasn’t a blowup model from Waldo Mart. I wanted the real deal with jets that relaxed every muscle in your body except the muscle in the hand holding a margarita. I had my money saved, but then the city forced me to pay for sewer upgrades. With only a hundred dollars left, I watched my hot tub vanish down the toilet.

So when a friend, with a free room at a casino, invited me to go gambling, visions of hot tub bliss clouded rational thinking. I said, “Sure, I’ll go.” With what was left of my money in hand, I ignored the stories I’d heard about people going into a casino by light of day only to emerge in the dead of night days later. I saw gambling as my chance for a hot tub.

We arrived early in the afternoon. Twenty minutes later, with plenty of daylight left and plenty of room in my pockets, I roamed the hotel lobby looking for reading material. Leafing through a magazine, I realized I could’ve joined an organization to eradicate zombies. Forty dollars would’ve taught me how to prepare for doomsday. With the balance of a hundred, I could’ve stockpiled a few cases of beans, band-aids, aspirin, and Jack Daniels. I’d never be prepared for the apocalypse because now I was broke.

Gambling, what were the odds of winning? From my singular experience, zero to never. It’s called odds for a reason as in it’s odd that people leave a casino with money. Casinos were homeless shelters in reverse. Casinos put you up for a night, take your money, then put you out on the street.

In doomsday prepper fashion, I could’ve invested in twenty boxes of Girl Scout cookies or ten tins of Boy Scout popcorn if I was watching my waistline or was it waste line? Instead, I watched a 12×12 piece of my hot tub disappear with the push of a button. This had me thinking of all the ways I’ve wasted my hard earned money.

The gym membership started out as a good idea so I could keep myself healthy enough to eat cookies and live long enough to enjoy a retirement hot tub. However, walking, raking leaves, and shoveling snow were free. If you slacked off, you weren’t paying a membership fee.

Buying clothing had become a gamble. Clothing now had a shelf life. Garments made overseas fell apart before they went out of fashion.

For the outrageous price of watching sports on cable TV, I could play 102 rounds of golf, get exercise, and keep land from becoming another Waldo Mart that sold inferior clothing and hot tubs.

Items like alcoholic beverages didn’t count as wasteful spending. You eventually pissed liquor out, but while intoxicated who worried about zombies taking over the world or your waistline?

By far, paying taxes is wasteful spending on the same scale as gambling, but without the complementary room. My taxes went for twenty-one days of vacation at a cost of 21.6 million dollars for a political leader who didn’t have to rely on a free room voucher and BYOB for an overnight vacation.

My taxes, instead of going towards education, energy, environment, and transportation, were slated to be wasted on military junk. More nuclear missiles wouldn’t save us. If used, bombs would destroy the world. Taxes were wasted on an air surveillance balloon that didn’t work (2.7 billion). What about the $8,000 the Army paid for helicopter gears worth $500? And I thought I got ripped off when I lost $100 at the slots!

Having the government in charge of my tax money is about as smart as if I brought the money for my sewer project and let it ride on the spin of a roulette wheel. Paying taxes was like flushing your money down a sewer system that you paid for out of pocket because your tax money went for bombs.

Gambling and paying taxes raise my blood pressure. Hydro therapy, ahem, hot tub, was known to improve health. Without a reliable national healthcare system, I wish I had a hot tub.