The Wild Writer’s Bucket List

I’ll give up my house and my car and live like a computer-toting, wild-writing gypsy.

I’ll travel everywhere. And I’ll fall in love every day. I’ll fall in love with carnival-like people who wear strange-colored clothing and tell the most surprising tales. I’ll fall in love with fantasy-inspiring places, from blue and unspoiled mountains to gray and decrepit city blocks. I’ll fall in love with mind-expanding ideas whispered to me by dark-browed, coffee drinking geniuses and I’ll fall in love with the simplest of experiences like a flower growing from the crack in a city sidewalk or a woman singing as she bakes bread in a flour-dusted bakery. I’ll have great sex every night with kindred-spirited gypsies who share my desires. And then in the thin light of early morning, I’ll set the dawn-gold lion of my imagination free from his cage and write.

To travel and write is to fall in love with the world.

I’ll sit in cafe’s and at bus stops and listen to fascinating people. Everyone has a good story to tell. I’ll be patient, coaxing and encouraging until people give up their stories, their histories and their secrets. I’ll let the scents, tastes, sounds and colors of the past wash over me through their words until I feel that I’m really living their history. Then I’ll write everything down, but not their secrets. In this way, I’m a bad journalist; I keep people’s secrets.

I’ll watch plays in London and New York. I’ll go to Italy and eat, go to Russia and drink, go to Japan and eat and drink. I’ll visit all of my friends houses around the world and surprise them by coming in their front door and saying, “I’ve missed you so much.” We’ll laugh and cry and talk for days. Then I’ll be off again. I’ll find the world’s best medium and ask him to channel all the people I miss who have died, just so I can tell them I love them one more time.

I’ll look at art everywhere: Amsterdam, Rome, Paris, London. I’ll feed orphans in India and dream about hobbits in New Zealand. I’ll go to the opera in Milan and have a beautiful wrinkle- free dress just for the occasion. I’ll find the fun in every place, find what is meaningful.

I’ll dance everywhere. And learn languages. And study painting. I’ll paint pictures and give them away to people who have hidden beauty inside of them.

I’ll help strangers anonymously by leaving them money in tiny Japanese gift envelopes. The less money I spend on myself, the more I can help others. I’ll see people reading my books on subways and trains but they won’t know I’m the author of the book they are reading. I’ll watch their faces for signs of emotion, rejoicing when they laugh and when they cry.

I’ll go to a church I’ve never been to and sit in the back or sing in the choir. It doesn’t matter what the religion is; the voices will be heavenly.

With the true heart of a gypsy, I’ll see the world as it really is and fall in love with it. Then I’ll set the dawn-gold lion of my imagination free from his cage once more….

… and write.