That’s the thing with bucket lists. They end. If you’d asked me ten years ago whether I had one, I’d have said I thought they were stupid. I’d have called them products of an increasingly enshitified media-internet convergence, self-help waffle, and that one bad movie. The bucket list concept has always seemed like life-coach hype. But I did have one. I didn’t write it down or post it or engrave it on a thin sheet of marble to hang over my desk, but it was there, implicit, a coil of smoke always turning in my field of vision, a divination only I could read. And it said one thing: hurry up.
So I did. I wanted to publish a book of stories. I published two with a third complete manuscript still out there, tumbling through the maybe-someday abyss. I wanted to learn martial arts. I studied multiple styles. I wanted to teach university writing and wound up teaching it for over two decades, travel the world and live abroad for substantial periods (at least 13 countries to date), and get a PhD (2010, English). For these things, I feel only gratitude—mostly to myself for having had the courage to attempt them, but none of it was accomplished in a vacuum. What did the millennials say twenty years ago? Something, something, the friends we made along the way? I made a few.
But I’m Generation X, where the “X” evokes the old cartoon “wingding eyes,” which are supposed to indicate being “dead or asleep without dreaming. Comical depictions of corpses or ghosts will have their tongues sticking out as well as this. Sometimes, both eyes will combine into a single, longways X. May also be a feature in depictions of clowns.” Sounds about right for Gen-X. Dead. Asleep without dreaming. Corpses, ghosts, clowns. I’m all that, depending on which day of the week you encounter me. Come over on a Sunday afternoon and you get a trifecta. But one of them always has to be “clown.” And the friends I made along the way turned out just the same. Now they’re mostly ghosts.
In classical antiquity, sorcerers would burn sacrifices to gods and spirits of the dead, then practice capnomancy with the smoke, reading it like divine script. Καπνός (kapnos) means “smoke” and μαντεία (manteia) means “seeing,” as in divination or second sight. The bucket list I had was capnomantic in that sense. I was my own burning sacrifice, my own smoke, my own divine message from myself to myself. And the smoke always said time was short. So I needed to do what I needed to do. And it worked out, more or less. It wasn’t much of a list, unless I thought about it for a while and scared myself. But the bucket part ran deep.
And now? Now I peer into my bucket like a child afraid to dive in. Because it seems like I’ve come around, made a perfect circle to where I began. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche wrote, “I overcame myself, the sufferer; I carried my own ashes to the mountains; I invented a brighter flame for myself.” A brighter flame for more powerful μαντεία, of course, but in the end it’s all the same. The smoke blows away. After mountains, more mountains. And if you don’t die a hero, you live to carry other people’s ashes, too. So many. A million metric tons of ashes, the remains of the dead that are now your responsibility, their memories, their ghosts. Quite a burden to carry up a mountain trail.
The rim of the bucket makes a perfect circle. Wobbling on the edge, I try to grip with my toes. The mountains are watching. Smoke twists above my head like a thin snake. You ask me what the gods and spirits said in its coils. And I tell you to be patient. Just wait a little longer. I’m still burning.