Archives for July 2015

It came to me just like that.

My mother-in-law, in her cups or under some other spell, suggested that we plan a family vacation to Branson, Missouri.

In this social emergency, I stammered that Branson is on, like, the opposite of my bucket list. Branson, I babbled, is on my "fuck-it list"—places I've never seen and things I've never done that, if I have any choice in the matter, I never will.

I've been an outrageously lucky fellow. I've been to Australia, China, England, Scotland, Ireland, Italy, Spain, Greece, Germany, Switzerland, Denmark, France, Belgium, Canada and Mexico. I've ridden 20,000 miles on a motorcycle and skydived from 10,000 feet. I've driven an old truck nonstop–because it didn't have working brakes–from Albuquerque to Chicago. I've climbed a jungle mountain, I've hiked across a Texas desert, I've sailed across the North Atlantic, I've run from the West Side to the South Side of Chicago. There's a lot I've done, and not much I wouldn't do.

However: Bungee jumping. That's on my fuck-it list, because it looks so dumb. Wearing culottes makes your legs look dorky and riding a Segway scooter makes you look like a circumcised penis on the move. And the only thing that makes you look worse than bungee jumping would be doing so while strapped to a Segway while wearing culottes.

I'm sure I'm wrong to say this, but India is on my fuck-it list. It's not the heat, because I very much want to go to Africa. Maybe it's the skinny cows and the corpses in the holy Ganges River and whatnot. And all that fucking curry. The place just looks yucky to me. But I've been talked out of fuck-it list items before. (See skydiving, above.)

What else should I put on my fuck-it list? Before I die, I don't need to see the Mall of America, I don't need to call in to the Rush Limbaugh show, I don't need to read any books by Tony Robbins.

And I sure don't need to make a banal and miserly "bucket list" as a coward's phony justification to do what I want to do in my life.

Writing Boots regular Randall Damon calls the Friday Happy Hour Video "Phone It In Friday." So I know what I'll get for posting a video on Wednesday. But … apropos of yesterday's yak on the strategy of "strategy." Hat tip to another Writing Bootista, Amy Gooen, for finding this. So Randall can take it up with her.