Apr 27, 2011
I don’t just want to be rich, I want to be crazy rich. Really crazy rich.
And I’m not just talking African-babies wear-my-sunglasses-indoors crazy, I’m talking Howard Hughes, Charlie Sheen, Tom-Cruise-beating-up-Oprah crazy. I’m talking throwing babies out of windows, face tattoos, hiring midgets as house furniture crazy rich.
This is what I’d do with my money.
I’d build a huge mansion in the middle of an average American suburb. I’d bulldoze all of their stupid houses and put mine right in the middle.
Once I moved in, I’d board up all windows from the outside except for one, and each night I’d stand in front of that window, never moving, never coming out, just watching, smoking a pipe.
This would go on for months. The neighbors would talk.
The only sign of life they’d see would be once per week, when the trash gets picked up, I’d have crazy stuff set out on the corner: a pelt of an extinct animal, fingerless dishwashing gloves, a garbage bag stuffed with empty Mr. Pibb cans and a giant Mr. Pibb can stuffed with empty garbage bags, newspapers from years that haven’t happened yet, undiet coke bottles, a Zune…you know, weird stuff.
The neighbors would talk.
More odd things would happen. My house would change colors in the rain. My chimney would loop back into the house. Instead of dogs going missing, people would suddenly find an identical dog in their yard, identical in every way to the one they already own, except it would stare at you. Constantly.
The neighbors would be on edge.
Local teenagers would leave a burning bag of poo on my doorstep as a prank. Not only would I not come out to extinguish it, but the bag of poo would never go out.
Things would get creepier.
One night, everyone’s garden gnomes would get gagged and blindfolded. On a certain day, everyone would get a false mustache made of real human hair in the mail. And one evening at dusk, paramedics would rush into my home…and never come out. And somehow the ambulance in my driveway would rust and fall apart by morning.
The tension in the neighborhood would be mounting to an all-time high. They would want to sell their homes and move, but no one wants to buy a home next to “freaky weirdo mansion.” (not a neighborhood nickname, that’s literally what I would call it; it would be written on a wax sculpture mailbox of a real mailbox sitting outside where my real mailbox would be if I had a real mailbox)
So there I would stay, standing in front of that window every night, smoking my pipe, with no proof that I had anything to do with these strange events. Until one night, after many, many months, I wouldn’t be in front of that window. I would be absent.
Then, the strangest thing of all would happen.
The next morning, my mansion would be gone, completely burned to the ground. In the middle of the rubble would be a pile of hundreds of unscathed marionettes, each one in the likeness of the people in the neighborhood; not a single neighbor left out. And just above them? A dark, deformed marionette, blindfolded, hung from a charred beam by his own puppet strings.
And it would be smoking a pipe.
Now THAT, my friends, is how you spend money.
