Life is a Zero-Sum Game

I will not attempt to torture the reader or myself with the full explanation of what a zero-sum game is. This was a particularly painful epoch in my past during my Economics major training. My professor was an in-the-closet homosexual, and also a sadist, who took out his frustrations of not being able to live freely and happily as a gay man on the students who paid him to teach them. It was not teaching, it was sadistic torture. So in layman's terms, a zero-sum game is that in which gains are offset exactly by losses, and nothing is created or destroyed. As I crossed from the west side of LaSalle Street to the east side at Adams, where my building is located, I was accosted as I am most mornings by a local vagrant. I don't know his name, but I think I know his game. He is white, has a long ponytail (which I suspect is a George Carlin-like "skullet") flowing from beneath a military beret. He usually wears combat fatigues. His face looks like someone put a brush fire out on it with a pitchfork. And also, his legs are both amputated at the knee. He tries to play the wounded Vietnam veteran who has fallen on hard times angle. I don't personally buy it, but if he can get away with it, then kudos to him. I speculate his amputations are more likely the result of shooting smack into his toes one too many times, then ignoring the stench of gangrene in his lower extremities as he chased the dragon through Honolee. But if he wants to tell people he lost the legs 50 clicks up the Danang, I'm not going to stop him. Some sample greetings (and these are real) that I have received from him are as follows:
"Good morning, have a great day sir"
"Hummnnnnaaa farfffallffffelll mmmiiinnnnggggeeeennie"
(and my personal favorite) "You're all a bunch of fucking CUNTS!"
So you never know what you are going to get. As I pass him most days I think, "I am glad I'm not that dude". Today I decided that line of thinking is erroneous. I have a warm home, a wife, a dog, regular meals. But I also have payments to make, schedules to keep. Oh, and I walk into a building each morning to sit at an ugly desk and whore myself out for 8 hours of soul-crushing white collar labor for people who don't care if I fuck off and die on my way home tonight. Meanwhile Ron Kovic out there in the wheelchair doesn't have steady meals, unlikely has a warm home or a wife. But you know what? He doesn't have to pay shit. No one squeezes his soul through a cheese cloth each day so that someone he's never met can make more money than 1,000,000 people together would not have need for. He's out there doing whatever the fuck he wants all day, and all he has to do is figure out how to get high every 12 hours or so. So I guess you could tell him that I have a comfortable condo and a car and a designer mutt. But he might, very fairly, fire back "At what cost?". Touche Ron Kovic, touche. And now I know, it all evens out. For my seeming glut of comfort in domesticity, he has an equal but opposite overabundance of freedom. And this is why life is a zero-sum game.