For I know the plans I have for you," declares the Lord, "plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. Jeremiah 29:11
Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man. Friedrich Nietzsche
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“Hope is the last refuge for the hapless. It’s wishful thinking. It’s rubbing Aladdin’s lamp expecting magic to pour out; believing that today’s generic horoscope was personally divinated just for you. Hope—ha!—the lying promise of better things to come has been the driving force for religions and grifters down the pike—sure, you bet!—driving needful suckers from their money,” Jasper Riggs ranted and raved to his wife from the rotting porch of their rotting cabin on the banks of the Ohio River. Then he sighed and said in defeat, “let’s face it, hun. . . . we’re like the last two watermelons left in the produce stand—we’ve taken a lot of thumpin’, suffered a lot of bruising, but are still here for more. Shoot, we ain’t nothing more than a sweet spot for the flies and parasites of the world. Life is hopeless.”
Delores was sorry she brought the word up after scrounging up a couple bucks worth of charge for the evening’s lottery drawing, and then making the mistake of showing her glowering husband the ticket with a singular row printed on it, saying nonchalantly, to the air, mostly, and half in jest, that she hoped she had all six winning numbers. She was sorry she had triggered him.
She began to despise her spouse of 34 years more and more because he was such a constant grump any more; even worse since he left the workforce disabled, and was now home around the clock. By now, she was almost sorry she had promised him, “I do” all those years ago, but back then she was young, naive, and had hope—hope, sure, you bet! Maybe Jasper was right in his bloviating crabass attitude. The Riggs’ watched some tube and went to bed before the lottery balls dropped, assuming tomorrow's boring drudgery would match today’s boring drudgery. The Riggs’ assumed wrong.
The local morning deejay, Farmer Funny, was spewing his bright and peppy chatter more than usual from their bedside radio, like he had taken five hits of nitrous oxide instead of his usual four, telling his not so bright and peppy listeners that last night’s lone $500,000,000 jackpot winner had been sold at P & D’s Groceries in Hazelton.
Aroused for the first time in ages, Delores stumbled around the dump in the morning haze in her own morning haze, wondering where she put the ticket she bought at P & D's the day before. “I hope I can find that sucker, and I hope I’m the latest multi-millionaire,” she chirped, hopeful, like a bluebird waking up to another sunlit morning. On this lucky sunlit morning, Delores Riggs’ twin hopes were answered—her uneaten winning lottery ticket had blown off the kitchen counter and into hound Rollie’s food bowl; and a week later, they were off to the state capital to collect the check that was nearly as large as the living room they would never be returning to.
“I hope we don’t run into traffic. I hope the old bomber gets us there. I hope the state doesn’t go bankrupt before we get our money,” she hoped. These three hopes were also answered. They bought a mountaintop mansion in Negril and hoped that life’s thumpings and bruisings were at their merciful end.
Jamaica might seem like a wistful destination for retired couples, but the panoramic views of the Caribbean Sea from on high only seemed to provoke Jasper’s bloviating crabassiness. “It’s too bad the reefs will be bleached out and dead in a decade or two because of climate change, with islands of sargassum and plastics thicker than river mud. Stupid humans have to ruin everything. Did you know, Del, that the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico caused by chemical runoffs in American rivers, is larger than the entire state of Massachusetts?”
One perfect sunset, just seven months since the fortuitous ball-drop, three as expatriots, Jasper Riggs was rambling to his wife from their fourth-story patio hot tub about Colonialism’s destructiveness on the hopeless native islanders down below, a nearly daily diatribe.
Delores hoped that just once, especially in should-be-meditative moments like this, just once, he could just shut his bloviating crabass piehole for just five lousy seconds. When she returned with a second bottle of Moet Chandon to the Jacuzzi, Jasper had suffered a stroke and drowned in the effervescent waters, his bloviating crabass piehole silenced forever.
Four months later, the lonely widow hoping to find a “younger stud more my type”, she sniffed—a bon vivant, a dashing man-of-the world—she met and married one: a scheming Brit under an assumed name who promptly sent her back to Hazelton, pre-lottery days.
Thirteen months after winning 312 million take-home buckaroos, a destitute Delores Riggs lies dying of lung cancer, hoping to go quickly and without pain. Suckered penniless and back in the shack, her hope is to join her husband in a non-Jamaican Paradise somewhere. She hopes he has lost his bloviating crabass attitude by now, wherever his cantankerous old soul might be.
Hopefully for the whole of the human race, Del’s final hopeful rub of Aladdin’s lamp will not be granted as she fights for oxygen and gasps in gulps of poor phrasing for the the rest of us on the planet: “I hope (deep breath) this old suffering (deep breath) world of misery (deep breath) ends soon.”
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