Imagine Camping

We’ve all played the game of “what would you do if you won the lottery?”  Where you and your friends take turns imagining where you’d live, how many cars you’d buy, and what kind of petty acts of revenge you’d commit if all of a sudden you had a few hundred million dollars at your disposal. 

My list of things used to always start with new socks, but then I moved to a climate where socks are optional for the most part, so it’s not as much of a priority for me anymore. One of the unexpected perks of living in Long Beach is that I get to jump right to the meat-and-potatoes of the Imaginary Lottery Game, without worrying about footwear. 

There is a pattern that everyone seems to follow when playing the game. First, you buy new homes and cars for your friends. You pay off your mama’s house. You do some incredibly petty things to the people who have wronged you in recent memory. Then you get down to the business of where you will travel for the next year, and what kind of home you would buy. 

I always get stuck on the house thing though. My brain goes blank when it comes to imagining homes I can never imagine. Like trying to come up with a new color, how do you describe a thing that you’ve never seen? What is even in those really expensive houses? Really nice stuff I guess, but what is really nice to me? Like a huge refrigerator? Ok, but I really only buy food for today. A massive kitchen with all the nice cooking things? I dunno, it doesn’t take much to heat up tacos and leftover Thai food. A king size bed? Ok yeah. I want that for sure. I’m sick of my feet hanging off the end of the bed.

I can say definitively however, that I’d want a big window with a view of nature. I’m not really picky about whether it’s the ocean or forest or a swamp. I just want a big opening to the outside world, preferably one that I can push aside so I can feel like I’m living in part of it. A big sliding window-wall. And I’d put a bed out on the patio, so I could feel like I was camping every single night.

The irony there is, that you don’t even need the big house to stand inside of, to look out of. You can kind of just go do it, and most of the time it’s free. It’s what poor people have been finding comfort in ever since people have had the opportunity to to be poor.

This makes me wonder if the folks who already own these big mansions on the hillsides surrounding me, do they dream about being in nature too? Do they fantasize about having that big sliding door open and just watching a lizard poke their head in? Of camping every night? Or do they look at marble countertops and a massive 6-burner gas range and think “yeah this is what I want to see every day”?

It probably has something to do with the nature vs. nurture debate. I bet if I grew up in a way that didn’t rely so heavily on sticks and rocks and lizards for entertainment, I’d have a completely different view of concepts like luxury and comfort, and I wonder if those concepts would be at odds with my love of outside. If I was raised in a big house with a king-sized bed, would I have played outdoors so much? Would I miss out on the smell of sandstone? The fibrous feel of wet aspen trees? The hollow sound of footsteps on blankets of earth covering shallow tree roots? Or would I be the same me, just with socks on, and the ability to imagine the 7-bedroom homes that my brain can’t comprehend right now?

I guess it doesn’t really matter in the end. The odds of winning the lottery are almost zero, and the odds of me being born into a big luxury home are even less than that, since I passed on the opportunity over 40 years ago. But the things I would do if I won the lottery - I’m going to do some of those this week. In fact there is a 100% chance that I’m going to go swim in the ocean after I hit send on this little bit of writing, and a 99% chance I’m going to stare at some pine trees in the mountains next week. Makes the lottery seem a little silly in a way, since I’m going to do the same things anyway, but damn I want that king sized bed, and there’s no harm in buying a few Mega Millions tickets on the way up to Big Bear, right?

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