And Slightly a Murderer

I wrote this two weeks ago. I'm just testing out my new blogger space. Enjoy.

If I gave you a million dollars and told you it was yours, you could probably deal with that. But what if I told you that out of that million bucks I gave you, every 1000th dollar you spent would kill someone the very second you spent it. It wouldn't necessarily be someone you knew - it could be any one person in the world. All you would know is that the second that every thousandth dollar left your hand, someone else was leaving earth. And you'd never know who, where, or how painful it was. Could you handle it?

I bet you could at first. And then you'd slowly start to go nuts. You'd try to figure out who it was: "Who were these people I've killed?" And then you'd try to justify it by doing something dumb like trying to pay off your victims' families - but you'd probably never find them. So then you'd try to tell yourself, "He didn't really have the power to kill those people. This isn't really happening. But why would he give me that money for no reason? He must be killing them like he said he would if I spent this money. I'm eventually going to be responsible for the death of 1000 people! I'm crazy! I'm crazy! I'm crazy!"

You see. That's why I was never allowed the power to give out money with stipulations (such as murder.)

Now, as if it couldn't get any worse. Imagine if I presented you with the same million dollars/1000 dead scenario. But I narrowed the scope of my killings to the town you live in. For example, if you lived here in Wilmington with our population of about 100,000 - you'd know that once you spent that million I gave you, you would have killed off one percent of the entire population. And no doubt, you probably would have killed off a handful of people you knew and even a few you liked. Every time you spent another thousand dollars at Target, you'd crouch and grind your teeth as the money left your hand in the hopes that you didn't see someone in the store fall over dead of a heart attack right in front of you. And you'd never get a good night's sleep because you'd always be waiting for the newspaper to hit the doorstep so you could check the obituaries to see who you had done in. And every time the phone rang you'd answer it on the first ring to make sure your friend wasn't calling to tell you that another friend was dead. And every time a co-worker was late for work, you'd have to call to make sure they were still coming in. And every time your roommate was in the bed at a strange afternoon hour being too quiet, you'd have to rush in and check her pulse. And every time you were driving on the local highway, you'd be afraid that one of your online transactions was posting and that the driver of the car coming towards you would fall dead on the wheel and drive into you. And every time you heard an ambulance drive by, you'd be sure it was your work again. And sometimes you'd sneak over to the morgue to see the faces of your victims. And eventually you'd start paying for every funeral in town (just in case) until you were actually going broke trying to buy your way back into heaven.

I warned you not to take the money. Wait, no I didn't. And this isn't real. But if it was, I'd have made you waaaay crazy. And slightly a murderer.