Rick and I were driving to a dive bar in Pittsburgh and he said, “I see why the people that run the world are so evil, why they fuck children and murder people and use them to fertilize Hillary Clinton's garden. I mean, if you have billions, what else are you going to do? What would you do: buy a bigger yacht, fuck a prettier girl? What is there left if you have all the money you need to satisfy any desire? Most people have a price—I mean every person I ever knew other than you, they have a price. Won't suck a dick for ten million, well how about a hundred billion? What would you do if you were a billionaire?”

-Rick Wayne

…

This is what I told Rick.

“I'd give some money to the people that have housed me since I've been homeless. Twenty years ago I would have wasted it on charity and good-looking women and have been miserable. What would I do now, nothing appealing?”

I had time to think about this.

I have never wanted to travel, never had a single tourist impulse. After I decided not to commit suicide when I was 20—that having been my plan since age 11—all I wanted was a home with a library. Then I got hurt, lost the home, and had to throw the library away and gift it off in stages, some 700 books going into a dumpster. So, I suppose, If I became rich, women would be out—at least relationships would be. I'd be done with them for good because the ones I met would just scheme for my money.

What would I do with a billion?

Buy a stretch of timber between 7,000 and 9,000 feet in the Rockies, that had a fresh water spring.

Have a 16-by-16 foot cabin build for me to sleep, bathe and relax in, heated by a small wood stove.

Have this cabin connected by a covered walk to a great hall based on Heorot in Beowulf, which would be the dining room.

Stock the hall with large print, over-sized books—of everything written from Gilgamesh to Moby Dick, nothing modern.

Over the spring build a barn for bringing in supplies that would be attached to a brewery, a distillery, a cook house and water bottling facility so that the property would be economically sustainable.

Have cabins built for the cook, den mother, librarian/reader [some one to read books to my blind ass] distiller, brewer, visitors, huntsman and property manager—some cowboy with trucks, tools and a brain with a family. I guess he would need a house and a machine shop and carpentry shed and would manage the woodshed as well.

Leave the property to these folks when I die.

Oh, yeah, $50-K a week on dancing girls and/or musicians, selected by the den mother, not the brewer or the distiller, for the great hall who will have their own bunkhouse.

That is about it.