With apologies to T.S. Eliot

UNIVERSAL CITY, TX –

Do I dare to eat these gummy peach rings? What about this Code Red Mountain Dew, these powdered donuts, this Big League Chew? Here are cakes and teas and ices, beef jerky and candy bars and Dos Equis. I stalk their stock, ruffle their wares, leave not a rack behind. Shaq smiles mirthfully from the pastel can of a new line of cream sodas by the Brooklyn-based Arizona Beverages Company. It feels vaguely oppressive. What kind of vittles are these?

I settle for a “deliquorish” candy called “Kazoozles” from the Wonka brand. Behind the counter are dip and cigarettes, and I realize that nearly everything you can buy from a gas station at 12:30 a.m. will only hurt you. It will kill your brain cells or raise your blood pressure or leave you pinned and wriggling with the rot of tobacco. If one must really spend a dollar or two, your best option might just be a benign lottery ticket.

“I’ll take a dollar scratch-off too. Thanks.”

In playing the lotto there is a sense of giving yourself up to the unknowable machinations of the world. I become an agitated fatalist when I have a card in my back pocket. Yes, my odds of winning anything significant are virtually nonexistent – yes, I’m more likely to be crushed beneath an errant jet engine – but yes the winners are out there. That instant grand or quarter million dollars could be destined for David alone. This is my license to dream, my flickering greatness.

Some folks will grab a penny from the clerk’s courtesy tray and force the moment to its crisis at once. I prefer to savor my fix, to bring the card home and make a ceremony of its sober scratching. Each game of “Fantastic 5’s” or “Find the 9’s” could be a threshold to radical change—so tread softly and unfold delicately. Is it merely a minor abrasion that could open the door to outrageous fortune? Is it only a thin layer of latex that separates you from a new life? These questions soon dissolve into air, into thin air; your ticket is a dud or pays a lousy couple bucks that you’ll sink right back into more tickets. But at least your money is going to Texas Public Schools!

The lottery is not unique to Texas, of course. In fact, it was Massachusetts that first came to sell instant tickets back in 1974. Cantabrigians and the rest of the Commonwealth responded so well to this outlet for instant gratification that scratch-offs soon became a staple along with chewing gum and coffee. My experience in the Bay State reflects something different; there is little opportunity to play the numbers in Harvard Square. Maybe that’s more of an MIT thing.

My preferred campus haunt is instead the CVS, that retail giant borne circa 1963 in Lowell, MA.  Sharing a place of origin with Kerouac and Milton Bradley, this Consumer Value Store speaks to us students’ own manner of free association and youthful games. In other words: the insulting juxtaposition of red solo cups and ping-pong balls; the aggressive Red Bull displays; the upstairs pharmacy that is too often closed when it really ought to be open. Meanwhile the students come and go, talking of Michel Foucault.

During freshman fall my roommate and I liked to go through those well-deserted streets at night and scour the store’s supply of a certain Hostess snack. Over time they seemed to increase in inventory according to our reliable patronage. Microeconomics in action. We do dare disturb the local universe. Weeknights melted from one food run and study break over a TV show to the next. Introductory classes and the desperate effort to justify our presence here: it’s disorienting.

Hostess is under new management since bankruptcy. Twinkies are back but they’re smaller and less calorific, or as Yeats would have it: “changed, changed utterly.” We are no longer those wandering freshman and certainly not the bright-eyed high schoolers who came in April 2010. The stakes were low and our world was more oyster than shell; it was acceptable to delay that quarrel with tomorrow’s p-set iin the endless hours of an all-nighter. We were faced, newly, with opportunity so boundless that it was nearly paralyzing. Our lotteries were of birth, college admission, and Eliot House. What becomes of fantasy and terrific luck when it’s finally in your lap?

Sometimes that somnolescent eternity watching reruns of “The Twilight Zone” is as distant from the inevitable dawn as the gap between your lotto numbers and the winning digits. We measured out our lives in Sno-balls™ and Cherry Coke. But how delicious it is, on an ether of marshmallow and coconut, sprawled on a cheap futon, to drift away in self-deception. To sleep, perchance to dream. Like another restless youth before the unanswered possibilities of a lottery ticket.

—Columnist David Grieder can be reached at Davidgrieder@college.harvard.edu.