Before the Bus

Life is fucking short, we all know that. The sane move would be to quit right now, buy a broken van, drive across Australia until you hit something, just to feel alive. Nobody does it. So I’m writing down everything I want to do before a Volkswagen bus plows me under.

I want to surf. Start an agency in London. Mix milk with beer and drink it. Kiss Keira Knightley and Nora Tschirner at the same time. Write something that sticks around. See the world from up so high it stops looking like anything. Get roasted on the Simpsons. Hand a million to a stranger on the street. Be in a Johnny Depp film. Conquer a country nobody’s heard of. Show up in party photos looking like I belong. Buy MTV and play the Ting Tings for a year. Have a monkey butler. Sleep with Siamese twins. If that doesn’t work, the Olsens bound together. Go to Tokyo. Time travel. Bodyguards who are beautiful and know karate. Piss from the top of the world. Say nothing for twelve months straight.

I mean some of that. The rest is jokes, ways of not looking too closely at what I actually want. Because if you admit I want to matter that’s a heavy thing, something you can fail at. But if you bury it under kissing actresses and owning a monkey, it’s just a list. Just something stupid in a notebook. Not a confession.

Maybe that’s the point of bucket lists. They’re not about doing the stuff. They’re about the wanting. And wanting is the only part that’s ever going to be real.