I'm thirty years old, I'm dying, and I finally understand lottery tickets.

I learned about lottery tickets when I was nine and I thought I understood them then. You give a man a dollar, and one time in two million he gives you a million dollars; the rest of the time you get nothing. In other words, you pay a dollar and get half a dollar back. Selling lottery tickets might be smart, but buying them is dumb. Case closed. I should have noticed that that left something unexplained: why do people keep buying them? Could be true that millions of people are just worse at math than I was when I was nine? When I was nine that's what I thought, but as an adult I think that reasoning is a little suspicious.

So why?

Another thing about me is that I'm always unhappy.

I think it's just a matter of talent. Some people are naturally great at being happy, and then there are others who fail at it. You see the same thing in athletic ability: you have Michael Jordan, and you have a guy who sat on his own balls and crushed them. In terms of happiness, I'm ball-crushing guy.

My circumstances have nothing to do with it. My parents are good ones - terrible things happened to some of my friends, but not to me. My brothers and sisters turned out fine. I wasn't bullied in school - in fact, I make friends wherever I go whether I want to or not. And my family had plenty of money. I don't think we were spoiled, but if we needed something we could always get it.

If you found ball-crushing guy and gave him new balls - let's say you're a doctor who mastered ball-reconstruction surgery - it wouldn't help him. What happened wasn't a freak accident, he caused it with his own (lack of) ability. There's no miracle cure. If you gave him his balls back, sooner or later he'd sit on them again. It was the same for me. None of the many good things in my life ever reached me at all.

But we were talking about lottery tickets.

I can think about a million dollars in an abstract way. That money is just a number on a screen. A bigger number than I'd usually see, but basically the same kind of thing. It doesn't mean "getting your father the kidney transplant that his insurance won't pay for". It doesn't mean "buying a new house where your kids can go to a safe school". It doesn't mean "going to college and getting a good job, instead of working in a warehouse until they close it". My parents brought me into a world where those things don't happen. But, not everyone lives there. To those people, a lottery ticket is the hope for a world like mine. It's cheaper than beer, and even more effective, if you believe in it.

But I never thought of that, because until I was twenty-six, there was nothing in the whole world that I wanted that badly.

Of course, I thought of suicide. If you don't care what happens, and just don't want to feel pain, then death is perfect. But that doesn't quite describe me. I don't feel happiness, but other people do, and I wanted to protect that happiness. I probably cared too much about it, but I didn't care about most other things so it was hard to have a sense of perspective.

Maybe I thought that if I spread enough happiness, some would be reflected back, and I could feel it too. Of course that never happened. But it was my life's goal, and I worked at it diligently. And as I said, I made friends everywhere I went.

So, suicide was impossible. All of those people would be hurt if died, and they'd be hurt worse if I killed myself. It's normal to wonder if you could have changed things after a disaster, and everyone I knew would think there might be a way. Maybe they should have said something. Maybe there was a signal they missed. Of course I never left any signals, never gave any clues that anyone could detect. But even so, they'd think like that.

So although I wanted to kill myself, I never did it.

One night I had a dream. I was in a doctor's office, and the doctor told me I had brain cancer. They'd discovered it too late. I was going to die, and there wasn't anything anyone could do. Even in the dream I hid my true feelings, of course. I said I wanted to leave. I didn't worry about whether I was acting strangely - when your doctor tells you you have brain cancer, then acting strangely is really acting normal, right? But inside I was a glowing wire, connecting Mother Earth to God. I felt like I could float, that I knew every secret of the universe.

I had perfect happiness, for a few minutes after I woke up. Then I remembered that it wasn't real.

It turns out you can't give yourself brain cancer. The causes are completely unknown. For me that made it perfect, because no one would ever think that I'd caused it deliberately. But the facts that made it perfect, also made it unattainable. It was a just a dream.

Three years later I got sick. I was tired all the time, I had headaches, and I'd throw up sometimes without knowing why. Brain cancer can cause that, so of course that's what I hoped it was even though I knew it wasn't. Almost nobody gets brain cancer, and people with the flu have headaches and throw up. The doctors said that too, when I asked.

But it was nice to think about. Every time I'd get a headache, I'd feel a little spike of hope, and it was even better than I thought it would be. I'd throw up, and I'd think, is this how normal people feel when they eat their favorite foods? Or maybe it's more like the feeling of watching the sun rise with someone you love. I guess you can't compare happiness like that, but I still enjoyed it. Those headaches were a lottery ticket I didn't even have to pay for.

I didn't really notice how time was passing, but my friends did, and after two months they made me go back to the doctor. The doctor decided to get a brain scan, just in case. And then I learned that I'd been lucky once again.

It wasn't quite like my dream.

They wanted to start with brain surgery, and then when that didn't work they switched to chemotherapy. Of course I went along with everything; giving up without a fight would be just like killing myself, as far as my audience was concerned. I told my family I'd definitely beat the cancer, and my voice was so calm and relaxed that they believed me.

A person's fighting spirit will determine whether they defeat cancer or succumb to it. Or at least, when you have cancer, a lot of people will tell you that. And I guess it could be true, because I didn't get better.

So now everyone is sad, and no one is blaming themselves. I can't say my plan worked because I didn't have a plan; things happened and I took advantage of them, that's all. But I'm still a little proud of myself: I'm getting what I want, and nobody's hurt too badly. They say that lottery winners just waste everything they win, but I'd say I exploited my opportunity perfectly.