Tags
Bogota, Bucket List, Buenos Aires, Fitzcarraldo, giant squid, humour, Jambalaya, love, Manaus, mid-life crisis, Shimla, Taj Mahal, Titicaca, Valparaiso
If something’s worth doing well, it’s probably not worth the effort.
Not for me the ‘bucket list’ of quirky activities and adventures, absurd ambitions, those trivialities that the bourgeois life needs for a sense of fake fulfillment.
It’s the curse of being a deconstructive nihilist. The very term, bucket list, contains the essence of its own pointlessness. Things to do before one kicks that proverbial container, that is to say, before one passes to a state where all memory, all appreciation, all self which might have appreciated, is gone for good; or, if there is a life to come (there isn’t), a state where all such activities will be at best irrelevant.
A first world, premature mid-life crisis? For those of us hopefully well past the mid point, it’s even more ridiculous. What’s the point of doing all that stuff, if it’s not that long until you’re staring blankly at a load of instagrams and wondering what the hell they’re of?
Dafter still, it’s a list which is depressingly similar for most people, so much so that many of them choose them from a fucking menu! Antisocial media memes invite participants to select/deselect items from a catalogue of popular choices, from bare-arsed bungee bouncing in Bangalore to white-water wanking in Wichita.
So I’m drawing up a Fuck-it List, things I now accept I will never get round to doing and which I have no doubt would be disappointing if I did. Maybe some few of them would have been more enjoyable had I found time and company in which to carry them out while my body still possessed what little stamina and strength it ever did. Probably not, though. Even my ambition of dying in a ditch in Wales seems to be too much trouble, when I can just do the show right here.
So, with no explanations or embellishments, doubtless with some omissions, and in no particular order of non-doing (as if such a thing would make sense), here we go …
- seeing the Taj Mahal, Red Fort, Udaipur Lake Palace, & especially Shimla
- learning to drive
- seeing giant squid from a deep-sea submersible
- learning to play the piano
- doing a Diarios de Motocicleta trip, Buenos Aires — Valparaiso — Titicaca — Manaus
- learning to ride a motorbike
- swimming with sticklebacks
- learning to swim
- getting remotely fit
- forming an avant-gard, post-punk, post-rock band
- learning to skate
- doing a Fitzcarraldo trip, Manaus — Bogota
- learning to play the saxophone
- seeing a sperm whale breaching
- learning to ski
- writing a symphony
- learning to dance (any dance that can be done with two uncoordinated left feet)
- owning an Amazon paddle steamer
- learning to sing
- eating Jambalaya and Po’ Boys in NOLA
- sleepin’ in the bayou in an ol’ rotten cot
- learning to play blues harp
- learning to read music
- learning to shut the fuck up
- learning to play the kazoo
- being loved