No Bucket List

Empty, darling,

Here’s the thing. All or nothing. I can either link everything, which is a month’s work for one paragraph, or link every term of memory, which will take months.

The Bucket List is all the things you wanted to do and never did, are now wishing you’d done, because if you’d done them way back when or even now they’d make your life complete.

Don’t have one. A Bucket List. 

Most BLs are about sex. Old guys dreaming about doing the stuff that makes women want you, even though your stuff is mostly quiet now.

Starting at the top or bottom, depending on where you reside in your own bucket, I don’t have unfulfilled sexual desires. I’ve actually lived all my fantasies, which [censored by woke wife..]

Everything else is showoff time, people and places seen or met, glamor moments, and collisions with beauty, stark fear, spectacular landscapes and room service, instances of confronting the essence of human experience face to face, and fantasy make-believes of heroism and good makeup with you on camera.

Done that. All of it.

I can’t even punctuate the Victor Hugo-long sentence of everything I’ve ever done because it includes way way way way too much stuff. Glorious sights witnessed, cars and other exotic vehicles driven or ridden in, works of ineffable art and artistry, concerts to die for, movie stars coming and going a few feet from me, tales of great risk in great places, extraordinary voyages that nearly ended prematurely on planes, automobiles, boats, trains, and other transportation objets d’art. (Just had a big fight with AutoCorrect about that term, they wanted ‘objects d’art’. An algorithm that ain’t knows no French, wut?)

Where were we? (Not at FB now. How can we be sure? At FB, ‘were’ would be automatically corrected to ‘we’re’. Think I’m kidding? Try it. The Blogger version of AutoCorrect — yes, every app has its own fucked algorithm to deprave your spelling — would let the French slide by, unless you want to mention ‘Xavier’s Hollander,’ er, Xaviera, when they think you really mean Audrey the pornstar.) I know you’re struggling to keep up. Sorry about that Chief.

Where were we? Again. Life is not a bucket. As I get old, and I am old now, I find that most people are faking it, the wisdom, the experience, the knowledge based on decades of clever decisions, the goodness that shines through hardship, the World View that bestows authority. Crap. 

If you have a ‘Bucket List,’ you are a failure in life. It’s that simple. There is no one thing, or set of things, that can make up for not leaving your mark otherwise. Unless your Bucket List is just one more way of doing what you’ve always been doing, killing time. Which is okay. Do it. Try to kill time. Can’t be done of course.

What you realize, as I have realized, is that time is not anything they say it is. It is not relative, for example. Right now, it is staring down at you from a great distance and enjoying the perfection of arrangements you don’t yet see and never saw, that culminated in the ‘you’ you think you know from your perch of wise old wisdom. 

What does time do that nothing else can? It defeats cause and effect completely. Maybe I’m just kidding myself in a different way than most of the rest of you, but I can see multiple causes in my life that came to be after the effects I experienced. My life turns out to be a canvas, all of it simultaneous, including this very moment. In my case the story, the meaning, the purpose, was always about learning this lesson about time. And the glories of that much misunderstood word ‘love.’

Extremes of love. Extremes of everything, which are always, ultimately, about love. I love my wife, always have, from the very first moment I laid eyes on her, even though we spent 33 years apart before accepting our destiny to live and die together. I love the Rolling Stones, eternally, a kind of constant every life must have. I love the music of Philip Glass, even though I spent years ignorantly hating him. He is me in some weird way, all that insistence, discipline, and controlled fury.

Well, I could go on. But I won’t. I’ve already left the record of my life all over the Internet, where it will thrive or perish, from a perspective I’m still not old enough or dead enough to see clearly. There are words, images (videos even), numbers enough to make your head swim, and the voices of dozens, maybe hundreds, of characters I have lived and loved along the way.

Thing is, I don’t have a Bucket List because I still have work to do. One more major project that I must spend the rest of my days doing in the full knowledge that it must make sense whenever I am terminated from adding to it. I have that architecture. I can be de-engineered, if that’s a critic’s term you recognize.

Only one thing I can’t delegate to those who come after. Not finding but telling her, my sister, that I always loved her, even during the many years when we just hated each other. Why this Facebook post was never posted to anyone but me. If you know her, or how to contact her, let me know here or by FB Messenger…

She always liked the Beatles. How I’ll close.

It was Strunk who said, “Omit needless words.” Done and dusted.