It is impossible to write and not think about death. It’s the library as a graveyard. And then there’s the idea that immortality is a far more shuddering possibility than death anyway. Why we write the things we do, as a means of leaving a stain, a remainder of ourselves, is a question I’d best leave unanswered. That hurl of desire, but of what. What are we actually doing with ourselves? And, moreover, how do these things matter?
One of the things I can point to, to be an explicit desire:
1 Take a trip to Europe.
After this, things become slightly more detailed. Europe is a big place and that desire is really quite easily quenched. Some of these others, I tell myself, are gotten just as easily but they seem harder than putting a thousand on the credit card.
2 Make a solid effort to get rid of the stuff.
3 Get a bookshelf that doesn’t end.
or else,
4 Make up my mind that there are an infinite number of things that I do not like and to just be content with not liking them.
or, moreover,
5 Find a way to be happy, really happy, and not the actor-happy I present as fact to the world at large. The kind of happy where I walk down the street singing, but not like in a musical, because I’m not acting, but in real life.
There are other things linked to more base desires, as so many desires end up being, and I’d rather keep them short and sweet.
6 I’d like to fuck someone like they didn’t know what a noun was.
7 I’d like to be treated by somebody as a verb, but gently.
Then there are things that would require a more profound change in the way I live my life currently.
8 Live in a hotel for a year.
9 Take a cab instead of the subway, for as long as I could afford it.
10 Ride a horse, and call it a day.
There are then the dreaming things, the ones you know you’ll have your work cut out for you to attain.
11 Believe in God.
12 Get somewhere beyond ethics.
13 Have an “out of body” experience.
14 Build a camel on the back of a monkey and call it “Mom”.
Then, there are all the things that I’d like to learn, properly.
15 French.
16 How to tie a bowtie.
17 How to play a guitar without open tuning.
18 How to hunt without hurting.
There are things I’d like to do that have specific recourse to my work as a writer. For most aspects, these are vague projects that do not have any set design or reason.
19 Write a children’s book.
20 Write something that will break your heart, but in a way that makes you laugh.
21 Write a play about gays that never uses the word “the”.
Others depend on things I might be asked to do.
22 Write a report that describes, in detail, every donation made in the past 70 years and how each dollar is spent.
23 Write a children’s book.
24 Write a song for Lady Gaga.
25 Write comments on my sister’s wall.
And then there’s one thing I’d like to do but I don’t know how I’d ever manage really finish it, fully.
26 Plant a seed, watch it grow.
There are other things, promoted to change, that I’d like to change.
27 The entire idea of political parties.
28 The ridiculousness of poetic parties.
29 Painting, the kind that’s on walls.
Additionally, I find that the following should be completely attained, if not at least attempted.
30 Have a clean asshole.
31 Sit in a Strip Mall parking lot for over an hour drinking iced tea and eating a bag of potato chips.
Finally, this is the thing that I would like to do most of all.
32 Drink for a long time with He. In a nice bar, in the quiet, except between us.
There are plenty more.
But I’ll glady stop at 32.
