What's In That Bucket?
Ah yes, the question of a bucket list. Sometimes we wait until we are older and ready to embark on fulfilling that wish list and discover that, wait, we don't really have a bucket list. Certainly we all talk of things we "want" to do someday, those party-talk fantasies of writing a book or learning a new language, that sort of thing. But an actual list? Almost better to just read the book 1000 Places to See Before You Die* and that will somewhat take care of that. My wife and I are well past the physical point of bungee jumping off of high bridges or skiing down Mt. Everest (Slovenian Davo Karnicar became the first person to ski down Mt. Everest from the 12,000 ft. summit, then went on to ski down six other high peaks including Annapurna, Eiger, and the Matterhorn; ironically, he died at 56 while cutting trees at his work place); but such desires were never really our thing even when we were younger. Besides, sometimes not having a bucket list (or not having thought of one) might simply mean that life for you is fairly content or that you feel that you've accomplished what you wanted and that you're not really interested in changing your routine; no need to jump on a plane or explore elsewhere because everything you need is really right here in front of you (think of those small-town villagers or pub gatherers, or at least how that sort of image is portrayed). But my neighbor posed exactly that question saying that now that my wife and I were "free" in a sense well, what was on our list? Of course we rattled off a few things, meeting my brother in Las Vegas** (2 days is plenty for us), perhaps another trip to go hiking in Sedona, the Cornish coast again, maybe even a cruise of some sort should the chance arise. No, she said, she got all of that, but what had we always wanted to do? And our immediate answer was...well, we didn't know. It's a bit tougher when the question gets posed in that manner, the answer needing to be a bit firmer than rattling off a simple New Year's resolution that can easily be broken; this was a question not only of goals but of ones which you could, well, cross off before you "kick the bucket" (as so aptly portrayed in the 2007 movie, The Bucket List).
Bill Bryson writes in The Body about our brains and our decision-making process, saying that the brain is: ...75 to 80 percent water, with the rest split mostly between fat and protein. Pretty amazing that three such mundane substances can come together in a way that allows us thought and memory and vision and aesthetic appreciation and the rest...The great paradox of the brain is that everything you know about the world is provided to you by an organ that has itself never seen that world. The brain exists in silence and darkness, like a dungeoned prisoner. It has no pain receptors, literally no feelings. It has never felt warm sunsihine or a soft breeze. To your brain, the world is just a stream of electrical pulses, like taps of Morse code. And out of this bare and neutral information it creates for you --quite literally creates-- a vibrant, three-dimensional, sensually-engaging universe. Your brain is you. Everything else is just plumbing and scaffolding...the brain manufactures all the components that make up our senses. It is a strange, nonintuitive face of existence that photons of light have no color, sound waves no sound, olfactory molecules no odors. As James Le Fanu has put it, "While we have the overwhelming impression that the greenness of the trees and the blueness of the sky are streaming though our eyes as through an open window, yet the particles of light impacting on the retina are colourless, just as the waves of sound impacting on the eardrum are silent and scent molecules have no smell. They are all invisible, weightless, subatomic particles of matter travelling through space." All that richness of life is created inside your head. What you see in not what is but what your brain tells you it is, and that's not the same thing at all...Like what exactly is consciousness? Or what precisely is a thought? It is not something you can capture in a jar or smear on a microscopic slide, and yet a thought is clearly a real and definite thing. Thinking is our most vital and miraculous talent, yet in a profound physiological sense we don't really know what thinking is. All of which got me thinking about that dang bucket list...
Taylor Swift, when asked by Rolling Stone about the views expressed on her song Americana said: It’s about the illusions of what I thought America was before our political landscape took this turn, and that naivete that we used to have about it. And it’s also the idea of people who live in America, who just want to live their lives, make a living, have a family, love who they love, and watching those people lose their rights, or watching those people feel not at home in their home. I have that line “I see the high-fives between the bad guys” because not only are some really racist, horrific undertones now becoming overtones in our political climate, but the people who are representing those concepts and that way of looking at the world are celebrating loudly, and it’s horrific. That interview was followed by a piece on migrants from South and Central America trying to cross the perilous Sonoran desert, a bleak and blistering landscape that has claimed an estimated 9000+ people, although most admit that those figures are likely much higher since so few bodies are actually discovered. And even those that make it might not face the future they pictured. The London Review of Books posted some of these comments from a piece on a visit to an immigrant holding facility in the UK: In October 2018, months after Trump announced that he was ending his policy of forced separation, a five-year-old Honduran girl called Helen, was seized from her grandmother, Noehmi, who had fled along with several other relatives after her teenage son was threatened by gangs. Helen’s mother, Jeny, had moved to Texas four years before. Arrested at the US border, the family passed through several detention centres, at the last of which the child was taken and placed in a cage. ‘The girl will stay here,’ the border guards told Noehmi, ‘and you will be deported.’ It took months for Noehmi and Jeny to track her down. Eventually they traced her to a Baptist shelter contracted by the federal government. Although she had known enough, even at such a young age, to assert her legal right to have her custody reviewed, when it came to filling out the requisite form, she ticked the box withdrawing her previous request for a hearing (officials helped her fill out the form). The UK does little better. The average age of the ten children separated from their asylum-seeking mothers in the Cambridge investigation was three: ‘They came at six o’clock in the morning. There were five, four police officers and one woman from DWP [Department of Work and Pensions]. They were not nice. They gave me no time to say goodbye to my children [aged four and two].’ Two women were separated from their babies while still breastfeeding; by the time they were reunited they had stopped lactating. Another woman, after being arrested, heard nothing of her children for three weeks. Her ‘manager’ told her she wouldn’t be allowed to see them until she had been to court.
So what are those people thinking, not only the mothers and children being separated of course, but the people doing the separating, the ones physically and emotionally pulling lives apart; how far would the justification of "just doing my job" carry such a person through the day? Would, or perhaps should, such diverse feelings come back to haunt some of them during their final days lying in a hospital bed, the book next to them, 1000 Things to Think About Before You Die. Each person is their own judge, their own mass of neurons firing away, their own conscience being "created." As the fires continue to rage in Australia and elsewhere, as floods and droughts arrive like twins throughout more and more parts of the world, as ocean life continues to wonder when we humans will stop dumping our chemicals and plastics and trash into their home,***and as I continue to watch beautifully photographed series of our diverse and increasingly devastated planet, all with tears in my eyes (Bryson says that we humans are the only animals that produce tears of emotion, something which biologists are still unable to explain), I have to wonder what's ahead. There's time now for me to think, my dog giving me those extra hours in the day now that she's gone...somewhere, happy, running free, I hope.
Generation Z is talking about WW III, and fear mongering and hate speech are both continuing to rattle their sabers...but really? I have to look at the other end, that side which barely makes the news, people like Xiuhtexcatl Martinez, age 19, and Kelsey Juliana, age 23. Both have been campaigning for climate change and human rights for over a decade (need I again point out their ages?). In a short piece in TIME, Mary Robinson (former president of Ireland and now chair of The Elders, "a group of global leaders advocating for peace, justice and human rights") said: As a director at Earth Guardians, Xiuhtezcatl has helped young people in more than 60 countries build environmental and social-justice movements. He has pushed the impact of the fossil-fuel industry on indigenous communities up the political agenda, and has powerfully communicated the climate crisis through his writing and music. Kelsey has raised awareness of the climate emergency in classrooms, rallies, film festivals and conferences in the U.S. and internationally. Together with 19 other young leaders, she and Xiuhtezcatl made a constitutional case against the use of fossil fuels with a landmark lawsuit against the U.S. federal government. In another piece the governor of Washington wrote this about 26-year old Varshini Prakash, executive director of the Sunrise Movement: Varshini and other young leaders have permanently fixed climate change into the nation’s conscience as a moral imperative, an issue of economic justice and a way to create millions of jobs across America. Personally, I find the leadership of Varshini and the Sunrise Movement to be some of the greatest sources for hope in our fight against the climate crisis. The young people are leading this fight, and because of them, we will all win. AARP talked of novelist Catherine Hiller setting a goal of mentally mapping the locations of all 195 countries on this planet (quick quiz...where's Suriname, Vanuatu, Gabon or Kazakhstan? That last country by the way, is the ninth largest in world and the largest surrounded by land!), and of Tama Matsuoka Wong diving into foraging (everything she planted withered while the wild plants thrived; why, she wondered, and what exactly were those plants?). Said Wong: Through friends I ended up meeting Eddy Leroux, the chef at Restaurant Daniel in New York City, and he was really interested in the edible plants I was finding. He said, “Bring me everything. I'll pay you.” And I replied, “I don't want you to pay me. I want recipes.” He thought I was really weird: She doesn't want money; she just wants some dumb recipes. Meanwhile, I was thinking, This guy's going to give me free recipes just for bringing in my weeds! I had 220-plus edible plants in my meadow, and he wanted to try all of them, so I started bringing him different ones every week, on my way to work. By the end of the year, we had a huge dossier of recipes...Foraging is different from harvesting from a garden. You're out there for hours, and you get to know that plant so well — its behavior, how it functions, every little aspect. We've lost that intimacy with the plants that are around us because we're always rushing. For me, foraging helps reconnect you to the rhythm of things, to the planet. Once you get that in you, you can't go back to being in an office. And then there's Nick & Bobbi Ercoline who started out stuck in traffic and ended up soaked and drenched at Woodstock (yes, they only later discovered that they were the blanket-wrapped couple pictured on the cover of the album). Still married after 48 years, they revealed their secret: "Don't stay mad,” Bobbi says. “People don't grow at the same rate. You have to be willing to let the other catch up or vice versa. It's never 50-50." Nick gushes, “My life goal is to dance with my youngest granddaughter at her wedding and have my wife with me." Gee, all of that sort of changes what I want to write down on my bucket list. Change myself or change the world? Treat myself or help others? For me, the clock is ticking louder and louder...time to start thinking. I would have enjoyed going to Woodstock...
*The book series has now expanded into subjects such as 1000 books to read, or 1000 places to eat, and 1000 things to listen to, all before you die of course; and I should also add that the author of the "places to visit" book is the official ambassador for Trafalgar Tours which is likely why she can travel so extensively without much expense, a subject that in itself would make a good book, to wit: How to Travel Everywhere for Free Before You Die, maybe?
**One fun thing I did do was peek at The Unofficial Guide to Las Vegas by Bob Sehlinger and found that it proved far more interesting that expected (my copy was from 2018 and was on sale at my library). Okay, it had all the usual shows and hotel reviews (and quite detailed at that which meant that the author likely really went to each of the shows and wasn't shy about which ones to avoid as noted in this comment on a magic show at Planet Hollywood: After slogging through poorly audience participation segments and a succession of gags you might find in any entry-level magic kit, Murray's (the magician) big finale is a three-way variation on the ancient Metamorphosis illusion which we've seen performed better by every other magician in town (including a guy working the sidewalk outside our hotel). After one badly botched trick, the bored-looking Sawchuck said, "Thank you for your pity." Take some pity on yourself --and any of your children who you don't want to grow up hating magic-- and skip this stale show. What I wasn't aware of was the dichotomy of the old and the new Vegas, both segments of which I apparently choose to ignore. One was the huge late-night club scene, that sort of get-past-the-doorman club where the young dress in anything that says "I have money" since the suggested tip just to get in is to flash a minimum of $25 per person to the doorman (and the author notes that even that might not be enough if the club is crowded); and the clubs are everywhere, taking up almost as much room as the author's reviews on the shows. And the other part was the seemy side of Vegas, the strip joints and dance halls that feature as much undressing and private booths as you want (for a price); but he notes the new law "that stipulates that you can offer totally nude entertainment or you can serve alcoholic beverages, but not both." He adds: Compared to the live adult entertainment in many cities, "girlie" (and "boy-ie") shows in Las Vegas, both Downtown and on the Las Vegas Strip, are fairly tame. For my wife and I, we have to just shrug our shoulders and perhaps be thankful that we're now past the point (and age) of caring about either of those scenes (and no, neither one will be on my bucket list).
***Wait, have you ever thought of all the "lost" fishing gear that is either purposely or accidentally discarded into our oceans? Okay, we've all seen a few images of turtles and pelicans trapped in old netting and such, but Hakai writes about a new study that came up with this: ...researchers estimate that fishers lost 8.6 percent of all traps, 5.7 percent of all nets, and 29 percent of all lines in 2017. This is far more than the United Nations 2009 estimate of 640,000 tons annually, a figure most often cited by groups such as Greenpeace and others (although their report gives you a more detailed review of the situation). Based on that UN figure, Greenpeace says that such an amount is equivalent to the mass of 50,000 double-decker buses...yikes!
Bill Bryson writes in The Body about our brains and our decision-making process, saying that the brain is: ...75 to 80 percent water, with the rest split mostly between fat and protein. Pretty amazing that three such mundane substances can come together in a way that allows us thought and memory and vision and aesthetic appreciation and the rest...The great paradox of the brain is that everything you know about the world is provided to you by an organ that has itself never seen that world. The brain exists in silence and darkness, like a dungeoned prisoner. It has no pain receptors, literally no feelings. It has never felt warm sunsihine or a soft breeze. To your brain, the world is just a stream of electrical pulses, like taps of Morse code. And out of this bare and neutral information it creates for you --quite literally creates-- a vibrant, three-dimensional, sensually-engaging universe. Your brain is you. Everything else is just plumbing and scaffolding...the brain manufactures all the components that make up our senses. It is a strange, nonintuitive face of existence that photons of light have no color, sound waves no sound, olfactory molecules no odors. As James Le Fanu has put it, "While we have the overwhelming impression that the greenness of the trees and the blueness of the sky are streaming though our eyes as through an open window, yet the particles of light impacting on the retina are colourless, just as the waves of sound impacting on the eardrum are silent and scent molecules have no smell. They are all invisible, weightless, subatomic particles of matter travelling through space." All that richness of life is created inside your head. What you see in not what is but what your brain tells you it is, and that's not the same thing at all...Like what exactly is consciousness? Or what precisely is a thought? It is not something you can capture in a jar or smear on a microscopic slide, and yet a thought is clearly a real and definite thing. Thinking is our most vital and miraculous talent, yet in a profound physiological sense we don't really know what thinking is. All of which got me thinking about that dang bucket list...
Taylor Swift, when asked by Rolling Stone about the views expressed on her song Americana said: It’s about the illusions of what I thought America was before our political landscape took this turn, and that naivete that we used to have about it. And it’s also the idea of people who live in America, who just want to live their lives, make a living, have a family, love who they love, and watching those people lose their rights, or watching those people feel not at home in their home. I have that line “I see the high-fives between the bad guys” because not only are some really racist, horrific undertones now becoming overtones in our political climate, but the people who are representing those concepts and that way of looking at the world are celebrating loudly, and it’s horrific. That interview was followed by a piece on migrants from South and Central America trying to cross the perilous Sonoran desert, a bleak and blistering landscape that has claimed an estimated 9000+ people, although most admit that those figures are likely much higher since so few bodies are actually discovered. And even those that make it might not face the future they pictured. The London Review of Books posted some of these comments from a piece on a visit to an immigrant holding facility in the UK: In October 2018, months after Trump announced that he was ending his policy of forced separation, a five-year-old Honduran girl called Helen, was seized from her grandmother, Noehmi, who had fled along with several other relatives after her teenage son was threatened by gangs. Helen’s mother, Jeny, had moved to Texas four years before. Arrested at the US border, the family passed through several detention centres, at the last of which the child was taken and placed in a cage. ‘The girl will stay here,’ the border guards told Noehmi, ‘and you will be deported.’ It took months for Noehmi and Jeny to track her down. Eventually they traced her to a Baptist shelter contracted by the federal government. Although she had known enough, even at such a young age, to assert her legal right to have her custody reviewed, when it came to filling out the requisite form, she ticked the box withdrawing her previous request for a hearing (officials helped her fill out the form). The UK does little better. The average age of the ten children separated from their asylum-seeking mothers in the Cambridge investigation was three: ‘They came at six o’clock in the morning. There were five, four police officers and one woman from DWP [Department of Work and Pensions]. They were not nice. They gave me no time to say goodbye to my children [aged four and two].’ Two women were separated from their babies while still breastfeeding; by the time they were reunited they had stopped lactating. Another woman, after being arrested, heard nothing of her children for three weeks. Her ‘manager’ told her she wouldn’t be allowed to see them until she had been to court.
So what are those people thinking, not only the mothers and children being separated of course, but the people doing the separating, the ones physically and emotionally pulling lives apart; how far would the justification of "just doing my job" carry such a person through the day? Would, or perhaps should, such diverse feelings come back to haunt some of them during their final days lying in a hospital bed, the book next to them, 1000 Things to Think About Before You Die. Each person is their own judge, their own mass of neurons firing away, their own conscience being "created." As the fires continue to rage in Australia and elsewhere, as floods and droughts arrive like twins throughout more and more parts of the world, as ocean life continues to wonder when we humans will stop dumping our chemicals and plastics and trash into their home,***and as I continue to watch beautifully photographed series of our diverse and increasingly devastated planet, all with tears in my eyes (Bryson says that we humans are the only animals that produce tears of emotion, something which biologists are still unable to explain), I have to wonder what's ahead. There's time now for me to think, my dog giving me those extra hours in the day now that she's gone...somewhere, happy, running free, I hope.
Generation Z is talking about WW III, and fear mongering and hate speech are both continuing to rattle their sabers...but really? I have to look at the other end, that side which barely makes the news, people like Xiuhtexcatl Martinez, age 19, and Kelsey Juliana, age 23. Both have been campaigning for climate change and human rights for over a decade (need I again point out their ages?). In a short piece in TIME, Mary Robinson (former president of Ireland and now chair of The Elders, "a group of global leaders advocating for peace, justice and human rights") said: As a director at Earth Guardians, Xiuhtezcatl has helped young people in more than 60 countries build environmental and social-justice movements. He has pushed the impact of the fossil-fuel industry on indigenous communities up the political agenda, and has powerfully communicated the climate crisis through his writing and music. Kelsey has raised awareness of the climate emergency in classrooms, rallies, film festivals and conferences in the U.S. and internationally. Together with 19 other young leaders, she and Xiuhtezcatl made a constitutional case against the use of fossil fuels with a landmark lawsuit against the U.S. federal government. In another piece the governor of Washington wrote this about 26-year old Varshini Prakash, executive director of the Sunrise Movement: Varshini and other young leaders have permanently fixed climate change into the nation’s conscience as a moral imperative, an issue of economic justice and a way to create millions of jobs across America. Personally, I find the leadership of Varshini and the Sunrise Movement to be some of the greatest sources for hope in our fight against the climate crisis. The young people are leading this fight, and because of them, we will all win. AARP talked of novelist Catherine Hiller setting a goal of mentally mapping the locations of all 195 countries on this planet (quick quiz...where's Suriname, Vanuatu, Gabon or Kazakhstan? That last country by the way, is the ninth largest in world and the largest surrounded by land!), and of Tama Matsuoka Wong diving into foraging (everything she planted withered while the wild plants thrived; why, she wondered, and what exactly were those plants?). Said Wong: Through friends I ended up meeting Eddy Leroux, the chef at Restaurant Daniel in New York City, and he was really interested in the edible plants I was finding. He said, “Bring me everything. I'll pay you.” And I replied, “I don't want you to pay me. I want recipes.” He thought I was really weird: She doesn't want money; she just wants some dumb recipes. Meanwhile, I was thinking, This guy's going to give me free recipes just for bringing in my weeds! I had 220-plus edible plants in my meadow, and he wanted to try all of them, so I started bringing him different ones every week, on my way to work. By the end of the year, we had a huge dossier of recipes...Foraging is different from harvesting from a garden. You're out there for hours, and you get to know that plant so well — its behavior, how it functions, every little aspect. We've lost that intimacy with the plants that are around us because we're always rushing. For me, foraging helps reconnect you to the rhythm of things, to the planet. Once you get that in you, you can't go back to being in an office. And then there's Nick & Bobbi Ercoline who started out stuck in traffic and ended up soaked and drenched at Woodstock (yes, they only later discovered that they were the blanket-wrapped couple pictured on the cover of the album). Still married after 48 years, they revealed their secret: "Don't stay mad,” Bobbi says. “People don't grow at the same rate. You have to be willing to let the other catch up or vice versa. It's never 50-50." Nick gushes, “My life goal is to dance with my youngest granddaughter at her wedding and have my wife with me." Gee, all of that sort of changes what I want to write down on my bucket list. Change myself or change the world? Treat myself or help others? For me, the clock is ticking louder and louder...time to start thinking. I would have enjoyed going to Woodstock...
 |
| Woodstock album cover; photo:Burk Uzzle |
**One fun thing I did do was peek at The Unofficial Guide to Las Vegas by Bob Sehlinger and found that it proved far more interesting that expected (my copy was from 2018 and was on sale at my library). Okay, it had all the usual shows and hotel reviews (and quite detailed at that which meant that the author likely really went to each of the shows and wasn't shy about which ones to avoid as noted in this comment on a magic show at Planet Hollywood: After slogging through poorly audience participation segments and a succession of gags you might find in any entry-level magic kit, Murray's (the magician) big finale is a three-way variation on the ancient Metamorphosis illusion which we've seen performed better by every other magician in town (including a guy working the sidewalk outside our hotel). After one badly botched trick, the bored-looking Sawchuck said, "Thank you for your pity." Take some pity on yourself --and any of your children who you don't want to grow up hating magic-- and skip this stale show. What I wasn't aware of was the dichotomy of the old and the new Vegas, both segments of which I apparently choose to ignore. One was the huge late-night club scene, that sort of get-past-the-doorman club where the young dress in anything that says "I have money" since the suggested tip just to get in is to flash a minimum of $25 per person to the doorman (and the author notes that even that might not be enough if the club is crowded); and the clubs are everywhere, taking up almost as much room as the author's reviews on the shows. And the other part was the seemy side of Vegas, the strip joints and dance halls that feature as much undressing and private booths as you want (for a price); but he notes the new law "that stipulates that you can offer totally nude entertainment or you can serve alcoholic beverages, but not both." He adds: Compared to the live adult entertainment in many cities, "girlie" (and "boy-ie") shows in Las Vegas, both Downtown and on the Las Vegas Strip, are fairly tame. For my wife and I, we have to just shrug our shoulders and perhaps be thankful that we're now past the point (and age) of caring about either of those scenes (and no, neither one will be on my bucket list).
***Wait, have you ever thought of all the "lost" fishing gear that is either purposely or accidentally discarded into our oceans? Okay, we've all seen a few images of turtles and pelicans trapped in old netting and such, but Hakai writes about a new study that came up with this: ...researchers estimate that fishers lost 8.6 percent of all traps, 5.7 percent of all nets, and 29 percent of all lines in 2017. This is far more than the United Nations 2009 estimate of 640,000 tons annually, a figure most often cited by groups such as Greenpeace and others (although their report gives you a more detailed review of the situation). Based on that UN figure, Greenpeace says that such an amount is equivalent to the mass of 50,000 double-decker buses...yikes!
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