The Bucket List

               I’ve noticed that a popular entry on any particular blog is the inclusion of a “bucket list”, as it’s called. So, I’m going to do one as well. This is me being a sheep. Bah. These are things I hope to accomplish in my lifetime. Some of them are a little odd. Since my life is so utterly mundane all the time I want to do grand things. Anyways, let’s get one with it, shall we? In no particular order…


1. Get Dreadlocks – Yes, I’ve already accomplished this one. It was on my list a few years ago, so I went and got dreadlocks. I’m including it on this particular list just as an ego boost, to say that I’ve accomplished at least one thing. The main reason I wanted dreads is that my hair naturally dreaded if I left it alone. But I never liked the look of natural dreads, so I went to a hairstylist and got them done. I still enjoy them immensely, though I don’t take care of them the way I used to.

2. Record an Album – I write music. Quite a bit of it, as it were, but I never quite get past creating demos. I write in a lot of different styles, which makes it a bit difficult to assemble any sort of album together. Another big problem is that I’m not in a band. Worse yet, I don’t know that many musicians and I rarely meet new people, so I’m kinda left doing a whole solo thing for some music that requires multiple people. An additional problem to that is that I don’t feel comfortable playing my music for others, but this is something I am trying to overcome. I write a lot of instrumental music, but nobody cares about instrumental music, so for others I feel it necessary to include words. I’ll always write instrumental music though, even if it is just for my own personal consumption. However, my thoughts are that I if get around to recording an album I should make it a sparse, simplistic, minimalist folk album. That way it would require little more than myself and a guitar.

3. Have a Giant Anteater as a Pet – The possibility of keeping an anteater as a pet hadn’t even occurred to me until I recently came across a picture of Salvador Dalí walking his pet giant anteater out of a subway. I was immediately enthralled. What an awesome animal for a pet, I thought. So I started looking into it. It turns out that anteaters are great pets. They are playful and absolutely love attention. However, there are many hurdles to overcome in order to properly take care of one. Obviously, they eat ants. Which, as I understand it, are kind of hard to get a hold of as a constant food source. I’m sure they eat other things, but I haven’t found out what yet. Besides that, they are a threatened species and they live in warm, humid rainforests. So my current location of Toronto, Canada would hardly be suitable for a pet like that. I imagine one wouldn’t survive the winter. But still, I think a giant anteater would be a fantastic pet.

4. Write, Encode and Bury an Epic Tale – This is a weird one. This potential accomplishment is inspired by the Voynich Manuscript; an old, old story from the early 1400’s that is written in a so-far undecipherable script in an unknown language and continues to baffle cryptographers, code breakers and literary historians to this day. I want to do something similar. The idea is that I will write an epic story, in the vein of Beowulf, Journey to the West or The Mahabharata; an ancient Indian tale. I want it comparable to The Mahabharata in the sense that The Mahabharata contains 1.8 million words. It is massive. And I want my story to be as well. A huge, epic adventure story with a lot of philosophical ideals interwoven to the multiple plots. No doubt a massive undertaking. After this is completed I will then encode the entire story. It will remain in our modern Roman alphabet, but it will be written in a specific code so as to make it undecipherable to the average reader. After this is accomplished, I will produce 10 copies of the story, numbered and titled in regular unencoded English. Then I will proceed to travel the world and in 10 random, sparse and remote places I will bury a copy of the story in a metal box as deep into the ground as possible. Once all 10 are buried, my job is done. I simply sit back and hope no one finds them before I die. Because the goal of this is to have people in the future discover them and spend a lot of time trying to figure them out. It’s my own weird version of a legacy.

5. Start an Internet Meme – I want to start an Internet meme, like Sad Keanu or the Y U NO guy. I don’t even want credit for it, I just want to start something and see it go viral. The problem here arises in the fact that I have no current ideas on what the meme would be or how I would distribute it. I’ll have to figure all that out at some point.

6. Own a Contrabass Balalaika – The Balalaika is a Russian string instrument. It is fantastic looking and sounds really cool. Those are about the only reasons why I want one. It’s all aesthetics on this one.

7. Travel – You’ll notice that there is no particular destination listed. That’s because I don’t much care as to where I go, I just want to leave the province. That’s right; I’ve never travelled outside of my own province. The furthest I’ve been away from home is a four hour car ride. This is something that really bothers me so I just want to go anywhere. Once I get a car I might go for a cross country trip. Once I get my passport, I’ll aim a bit further than that. If I had to choose specific destinations, in Canada, Vancouver would be high on my list. I don’t even know why really. I don’t know much about Vancouver. Outside of Canada, I think I’d like to visit Great Britain, Australia, Cuba, the Galapagos and Germany the most. Various reasons for each.

8. Own a Respectable CD Collection – As of this writing, my CD collection consists of 445 albums. It’s a good amount, but I’d like more. I always want more music. I would consider 1000 CDs to be a respectable collection so that’s what I’ll be aiming for. And not just a mass of any CD I can find, I want this to be 1000 CDs that I enjoy and listen to. And perhaps one day I’ll even have a collection like this.

9. Tell the Girl I Love How I Feel – I know this one seems out of place on this list. Truth be told, this should be something that could be done easily. But, I’m shy, apathetic and I have a problem dealing with success in any form, including being loved. But still, this is something I’d really like to accomplish …but that’s about enough of that.

10. Publish a Book – I would like to publish at least one book. The most obvious choice would be to publish a poetry anthology. I enjoy writing poetry and I have compiled quite a bit. But I would also like to publish a collection of short stories. I’m not much of a novelist though. Every time I’ve tried to write a long story it’s always turned into a good short story. I tend not to waste any time in my telling of a story so the plot tends to resolve itself rather quickly. The strength of my writing is in the metaphysical realm, describing what’s happening emotionally or psychologically in interesting and vivid terms. I tend not to dwell on the details of what’s going on in the physical world at the time. Besides poetry and short stories, I would also like to publish at least one children’s story. I’m currently working on a story, and I’ve got another story brewing in my mind. My motivation for writing a children’s book is that a few months ago my mother bought a book for my niece and I was appalled at the simplicity and utter disregard for intellect involved. Just because the story is for a child does not mean the story should be dumb and simple. On the contrary, it should be deep and memorable, but written in an engaging way for a young reader. My favourite story as a child was The Nightingale by Hans Christian Andersen. It was a beautiful little story, great for children, but even to this day I enjoy it. It has great meaning to it, and I want to write stories like that as well.

11. Fake a Bigfoot Sighting – I am completely intrigued by cryptozoology, but not because I believe in it. On the contrary, I find it all very amusing. I love watching video evidence of Bigfoot, ghosts, Mothman, aliens, El Chupacabra, etc., etc., and just laughing at it all. Not specifically at the belief in Bigfoot or some other stuff, but the fact that people find these videos persuasive in any way. It boggles the mind that a 4 second blurry clip of a shadow is enough to convince anyone of anything. But I’ve always wanted to fake a Bigfoot sighting and get it covered at least on a local news channel. If it gets bigger than local news then that’s just icing on the cake. A friend and I used to have a plan to pull this off, but this is no longer a viable option. I’m sure I’ll think of a new way though.

12. Learn to Paint – I’ve no illusions about become an actual painter, or even a good one. But I’d like to learn how to paint landscapes at least, if only half-decently. It seems like it would be a good, calming skill/hobby to have. The most artistic I get nowadays is sketching little doodles in my notebooks. Nothing good, mostly abstract shapes and whatnot. I’m horrendous at drawing people and faces though.

13. Compile a List of My 100 Favourite Songs – This one is nearing completion. For the last few weeks I’ve been trudging through my music collection to try to whittle it down to the top 100. Of course, it doesn’t help that my hard drive crashed partway through this process. Anyways, I’ve cut it down to 141 songs and am in the process of setting these songs in order. I will simply cut off the bottom 41 songs and review the order and then be done. I do plan to post the list as multiple blog entries. 10 of them, counting down in 10 song increments from 100 to 1, each song accompanied with a little blurb about why I like that particular piece.

14. Perform a Protest Song at a Place of Political Importance – This is inspired by Rage Against the Machine’s music video for their song Sleep Now in the Fire. They set up their instruments in front of the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street and started rocking out, causing trouble, and delight, for people nearby. I’d love to just set up on the White House lawn and play a song like Killing in the Name. Although I assume it’d be easier to pull something like that off without the whole rock band setup. One guy with an acoustic guitar would be easier to maneuver. So I’ll play a folk song of some kind.

15. Change Somebody’s Mind – I want to meet somebody I disagree with on a difficult topic. I want to have a discussion with them on that particular topic. I want to make such a sound, rational argument that they walk away from the discussion with a new point of view. Accomplishing this is rather difficult. People have the tendency to not want to listen to or think about alternative ideas. And if ever you can change somebody’s mind about something it usually takes a long, long time. I want to see if I can do it in one conversation.