The Real Johnny

So, I was thinking the other day about entering a giveaway and I realized that participating in something like that is not really about the prizes, it’s about the entire experience and the waiting and the anticipation and the way your brain starts to invent all these scenarios about what could possibly happen and you start to calculate probabilities even though none of it makes sense and you begin to question your life choices in a way that is both terrifying and exhilarating and at some point you wonder if maybe the entire universe is just conspiring to make you obsess over free stuff and maybe that’s okay because free stuff is technically good and also kind of meaningless at the same time which is a combination that is somehow deeply satisfying and then I think about the act of entering the giveaway itself and how it’s like signing up for a very slow, very polite lottery where the rules are intentionally vague and someone somewhere is probably laughing at the fact that you are spending actual brainpower deciding which checkbox to click or which username to use and meanwhile you are imagining all the potential outcomes, some absurd, some tragic, some heroic, and you realize that you are investing so much emotional energy into something that may or may not happen that it’s almost like a meditation exercise but with higher stakes because the stakes involve coins or skins or whatever it is that people give away these days and then your thoughts wander to the logistics of winning and what it would mean to actually possess these prizes and how it might change your virtual life or your self-esteem or even your reputation among strangers on the internet and then you start to consider whether the act of thinking this hard about something so trivial is itself a form of achievement and whether the anticipation is maybe the prize and then you pause for a moment and think, okay maybe I should stop overthinking this but also I can’t because the thought of winning is too tantalizing and the mere possibility keeps you hooked and now your mind is spinning with ideas and strategies and what-ifs and..............