REVERSE BUCKET LIST

The kid in the back seat was still crying. Not that I blamed him you understand. I’d be crying too if I had an iPhone jammed halfway into my mouth. I had tried to get it out, but pulling on it only made him cry more, so I figured to leave well enough alone. The crying was bad enough, but the damn phone was playing some kids game at full volume, and I couldn’t get to the volume button because it was somewhere around his tonsils. God, I hate modern technology.

I was starting to regret this whole reverse bucket list thing at this point.

The idea had been relatively simple. Bucket lists were supposedly made up of things that you had always wanted to do but never had the chance and now that time was running out you had the opportunity to do them. I’d had a wonderful life and done just about everything I’d ever set out to do. So, I had decided, after probably one too many rum and cokes, to try and do all of the things in my life that I had avoided doing. To do and experience all the things I had vociferously said I would never do once or ever again.

 It seemed like a good idea at the time.

Take for instance my present situation. “ Number 2 on my list was ” Get to know a kid”. I have never liked children. I truly don’t understand the concept. We’ve got plenty of people, kids are expensive, they defecate on the furniture and they have an attention span that’s even shorter than mine. What’s to like? I had gotten spade when I was 21 and always thought it was the best decision I had ever made in my life. And here I was with a bawling little human, of indeterminate age, who besides crying had loud space saber noises coming out of his oral orafice.

This was turning out to be as bad as number 6, “Go to the opera”.  The only thing that had made that even tolerable was that I had taken out my hearing aids somewhere shortly after the musical introduction. Good God, if humans were supposed to make those horrible noises, we would all be singing arias instead of chatting on the phone. The only decent thing about the opera was that I figured after I had suffered through it, I didn’t have to do numbers 12, 14 and 15: going to a play, watching a modern dance performance and sitting through The Sound of Music, in that order.

Some things on the list turned out to be relatively painless if not gastronomically satisfying. Eating oysters, number 11, eating a Mexican dinner, number 9 and coming in at number 17, eating a dill pickle, were each as bad as I had expected, whereas eating sushi, number 7, was surprisingly bland. And to round out the reverse Bucket List Cullinary Hall of Fame let us not forget number 8, eating a fresh tomato, which lived up to my every summer camp memory, with their singular ability to make me hurl. There’s a reason that stop signs are red and that Hoosiers have a great proclivity for beige food.

But you’re probably wondering about the kid in the back seat. First of all, put away your potty brains. I had long ago done everything sexual that I had wanted to do, and it had been a long time since I was able to do anything about it anyway. What I had been doing was taking a long road trip, number 3 to nowhere, number 4. Let me explain. I have always hated to drive and was a great proponent of the “Beam me up Scotty” mode of transportation. I also had firmly believed throughout my lifetime that the concept of “the journey is everything” and the destination is secondary to be absolute bullshit. The journey is just filling time until you get to your destination.

So, that’s how I found myself out in the middle of the Texas, just being there was number 10, headed towards the next gas station restroom. And let me tell you I wasn’t happy about it. Every fiber of my being screamed to be in a flying titanium tube headed to Paris. But instead, here I was, in a rental Nova, headed to God knows where, on a dusty road that looked like it had been plucked from a Larry McMurtry novel. So, you can only imagine my glee when I came upon the still smoldering wreckage of a Land Rover SUV in a ditch off to the side of the road. Five-year-olds have been less excited upon seeing the Spires of Disneyland from an Anaheim parking lot.

After pulling over and ascertaining that emergency services had already been on the scene, amidst the smoldering remnants of flares in the road and multiple tire tracks around the SUV I did a little jig of happiness. This had nothing to do with my list but rather the fact that I detested Range Rover drivers almost as much as Tesla drivers. Realizing that I had missed all the action, I decided to make some of my own, and headed off into the scrub filled field to take a leak. That’s where I found the boy. At this point he was still wasn’t making much noise and a good 20 feet from the car, so that’s why the emergency crews had missed him.

It’s here when I got to check number 1 off my list. I used my phone for something other than making a telephone call. Which was a good thing because there wasn’t a telephone booth anywhere in sight and I got nada from 911. But did you know if you press enough buttons on these newfangled phones that a map will come up on the screen? And it will tell you where you are?! And tell you where the nearest hospital is?!

I still hate modern technology, but we made it to the hospital in one piece, I got to drive over 100 miles an hour, number 16, the kid’s parents were OK and they even got the phone out of his mouth with no permanent damage. That still leaves me with number 13. There must be a roller coaster somewhere in this God forsaken state.