Is the inverse bucket-list a thing?

The ultimate motivation behind seeking profound new experiences is the creation of lasting memories, and the ones I already have will have to suffice

The first band I ever saw perform live was Sweet Leaf. If you’ve never heard of this act, it’s probably because the band broke up in the late 1970s and was unknown outside of New Hampshire. My dad played lead guitar (he still has a cherry-red Gibson SG) and Sweet Leaf performed the hard rock classics of the day at venues like proms, dance halls with wooden floors, and booze-cruises on Lake Winnipesaukee. I would have been about four the first time I was taken to one of my dad’s shows. Evidence of these shows exists in both 8-track and standard cassette-tape format.

This show, wherever in Merrimack County it took place, was a couple of years after the first musical performance I remember seeing on television. Before I saw the clip below for the first time, sometime in 1973, I had never associated the sound of music with any of the tools used to make it; it was just cool noise that came out of speakers in living rooms and cars.

As a very young youngster, I watched Sesame Street, a show slightly older than I am, three times a day for a few years on end. I was about the same age as the youngest kids in the audience. I get funny looks when I claim to have some distinct impressions from toddlerhood, but I don’t think this is as rare as people make it out to be.

(I had no idea that Stevland Judkins, better known as Stevie Wonder, was blind, even though I sat through many episodes of Sesame Street myself wearing an eye patch over my good eye in an ultimately failed effort to correct the bad one's vision and physical orientation. “Superstition” is an incredible song, and now I understand why E flat minor is an especially advantageous key for a blind musician. Wonder, by the way, played the drums and bass as well as the clavinet on the studio version, the greatness of which Rick Beato analyzes here.)

The first “real” concert I saw, not counting watching my dad's band, was as a teenager and was either the Steve Miller Band or Sting. Both times I should have stayed home and watched Sesame Street instead, because neither performance was inspired (Miller was cooked by then and mailing it in anyway; at last notice, he was still touring). And I think the last “real” concert I went to was in the 1990s; that seems impossible, and I may be leaving something out, but I don't think so.

I almost went to see Roger Waters in Denver recently but passed. I’m glad I did, because the experience probably would have left me angry and depressed. I wasn’t really interested in seeing Waters; I just wanted to listen to Pink Floyd songs live while ignoring the political theater. And in taking a pass, I acknowledged that I have probably seen my last rock concert. It’s not so much that I expect to die tomorrow as a burgeoning unwillingness to be around groups of people that borders on absolute, at least when I’m not wearing earplugs. And it’s not the viruses these people might be carrying, it’s the bullshit in their heads they’re convinced is information.

Then again, maybe I just don’t like being around other upright monkeys very much. It happens. Either way, no matter how long I choose to linger here, certain experiences that once appealed to me, or at least seemed like a necessary part of a complete or healthy life, now seem somewhere between pointless and just below the threshold of worth doing.

In the fall of 2019, almost a year before I migrated to Substack, I announced on the Blogspot version of this site that at 50, I was finally planning to see the world:

I am planning to go to Europe, probably London, next spring. I have never really traveled except within the U.S., and often like to joke that the only foreign countries I've visited are Canada, where I used to spend a great deal of time, and Mississippi, which is not on my vacation list at the moment.

Covid of course put paid to this idea. And I’m glad I never bothered and wound up pissing away the money I saved on a steady grind of Chex Mix and Sour Patch Kids instead. Various developments around the world since early 2020 have convinced me that people are pretty much the same everywhere—pliable, deeply confused bovines who embrace bullshit while confidently touting “The Science.” Forgivable, but unsavory and lame and nothing a hater needs to see.

I’m sure most countries in Europe were better places to live even c. 2019 than the United States is, but not to such a degree that any of it would have been, or ever will be, worth seeing up close. People all over the world all have pits and crannies that stink, and I don’t need to play Magellan to confirm this,

In addition to no more concerts and no world travel, here are some other items on my inverse bucket-list, i.e., things I have done in the past as a means of ostensibly living a more complete life—either episodically or routinely—that I now expect or at least hope to avoid completely:

• The healthcare system. My most common reaction to stories about the current state of medical care in the United States is to hope that I never find myself face to face with a working doctor, nurse, nurse practitioner, or physician’s assistant again. (Routine dental visits don’t count, but with about forty-five crowns that should all last another three to five years, I don’t need those anymore either.)
  
  In a serious bind, I would consider consulting practitioners over forty with surnames suggestive of the Indian subcontinent, Nigeria, or Israel, but not recent graduates of any U.S.-based programs, especially those at Stanford or the Ivy Leagues.
  
  Part of this is having seen more than enough hospital rooms by the time I was forty to last several baleful lifetimes, and just having an aversion to seeking medical services at all. But a lot of it is the blows struck to the system in recent years by the independent banes of Wokism and the “pandemic”-exposed incompetence federal and local health agencies.

  It can't be much fun to be a physician with noble health-related motivations these days. If patients willingly seeking health evaluations don't want to know their weight or hear anything about the possible or already present consequences of carrying too much of it, doctors can't even mention this. And the pandemic, or whatever it's been, has forced thousands of doctors to lie to their patients in some way about all manner of things. And now the craziest, most obviously contrived "benefits" of radical surgery on youth is being backed by journals like JAMA.

• Vehicle ownership. As soon as this car dies, or I decide to prematurely euthanize it, I don’t want another one. I don’t know why I would really need a car; I could shitcan the one I have, as I never actually need to be anywhere other than where I already am.

• Air travel. I don’t expect to be anything besides enraged by anything greater than homeopathic exposure to airports, airplanes, or flight personnel. Even without the hassles imposed by covid, the flying experience has been degraded over the past twenty or so years at least as much as my attitude toward life has.

• Marathons. I have almost certainly run my last official competitive event, but something tells me I will be out there in the next year with a number on my chest finding more reasons to become furious at myself for even trying at anything. Failing that, I will resort to solo or small-group time trials.
  
  But even if I decide to race, the distance I primarily trained for in my “prime” is almost surely off the table. I wouldn’t want to race a marathon without being properly trained, and I don’t know if I can handle the minimum amount of training that would meet that standard. And I have no desire to run that far just to again prove that it’s possible.

• Restaurant dining. I have never been a fan of eating out because I have never been a fan of eating. It’s an obligation, one I wish I could avoid and never think about. Eating in public around others places the focus squarely on food. That focus reminds me that eating is at root a commitment to surviving, and I just don’t like being reminded of regularly submitting to this commitment. If I could rig up an IV system or otherwise create a hack that would allow me to move around normally without ever shoving goop into my craw to swallow, I wouldn’t hesitate.
  
  This has nothing to do with body dysmorphia. It’s far worse than that. I dislike having any reliance on organic matter for my own existence because this introduces an economic angle to quotidian life, which in turn compels interpersonal angles, and I’m as done with those as anyone can be.

You may be getting the impression that I’ve given up on life apart from the essentials. This is a fact. I would be “content” to spend what remains of my life learning new songs to play and reading books I haven’t gotten to yet and not talking to anyone who can talk back. But I expect certain things that look like they belong on the above list to perhaps happen anyway.

For example, despite how dubious it is to form meaningful bonds to people in a world I increasingly obsess over “prematurely” departing, I’ll probably make a few more new friends, because despite being a shut-in who loves the outdoors provided he’s in motion, my yammering seems to put me in contact with interesting people I would not have met otherwise. And even though the idea of a road trip is deeply unappealing to me right now, history suggests that if I am still doing this in a year, I will have written about one more experience someplace else.

But writing itself is another thing that no longer matters very much. It’s not enjoyable, I have no real idea why I persist, and I have little to say that I haven’t already expressed. Or maybe that’s a convenient stance to take because many things are happening to contribute to all of these “convictions” that are beyond my control, and the fact that these will also negatively affect everyone I know offers not consolation but its opposite.