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| AARP member doing spot of must-reading |
By motomynd
This is ominous. I’m reading my daily news feed from adventure sports icon “Outside” and I notice a hyperlink down the left side of the screen from AARP. Outside Magazine was my gospel in an era when I wrote about, photographed, and competed in adventure sports for a living, and now its website is a good place for AARP to promote something? Ominous.
Mercifully, the link says “21 Great Novels It's Worth Finding Time to Read” (AARP.org) instead of something like “Adventure Sports for Guys Too Old for Adventure Sports”—but it still strikes a nerve. Being almost always willing to expand my horizons, I click the link.
The “21 must reads” include books such as Gone with the Wind and Andersonville—the former being famous, or infamous, depending on your point of view, and the latter being about a notorious Confederate prison camp of the same name. Also on the list are Lonesome Dove and True Grit. Which immediately raises this question: Who compiled this list? Maybe some 90-year-old who grew up in Georgia and moved to West Texas in the ‘70s? Avoiding every mini-series ever put on TV and never reading GWTW or watching the movie make the list as some of the great achievements of my own life, so I’m definitely not reading a single book on a list that includes such soap-opera fare.
Before you start with the “how can you judge if you never read the book or saw the movie?” let me ask you something: How much do you really need to know to make an assessment? Think Texas Chainsaw Massacre before you answer that question.
So why is it that every time I browse a website there is some sort of list of things “they” say I should do before I die if I don’t want my life to have been a waste? Who started the craze with these lists? They must be popular or they wouldn’t pop up all the time. Which means people must read them and may even take them seriously. How can that be? If you need someone else to come up with a list of ideas so you can think of a way to make your life meaningful, haven’t you already blown it?
The earliest list I can remember is December 1999, when Esquire Magazine published “The Life List: 175 Things A Man Should Do Before He Dies.” Along about that time Esquire also gave us a plentitude of other lists: “The 75 Books Every Man Should Read” and “25 Skills Every Man Should Know” and “The 75 Things Every Man Should Do” and on and on and on. Somewhere along the way I quit reading Esquire. I suspect it had something to do with too many pages wasted on lists, and too few pages of the good writing Esquire used to be famous for.
As I click on the “175 things” list I think, Yep, this was why I quit Esquire. Item #1 on the list: Date an Older Woman. Item #2: Lose Your Virginity to an Older Woman. Item #3: some long-winded mumbo jumbo about having your heart broken by an older woman.
This is profound thinking worthy of Esquire? At the age most guys are desperately ready to lose their virginity, it is a choice between an older woman or an under-age girl and possible jail time. As for dating an older woman, well, if you lose your virginity to her, doesn’t that sort of count as a date? Have your heart broken by an older woman? If that happens when you are past age 16, you need to grow a spine. If you are still dating older women when you are in your 20s, or—gasp—30s, you are on a downhill slope that soon drops off a cliff, and you may need professional help figuring out your problem. Yes, life with mom was great, but it really is time to cut the cord.
Okay, tell me I’m wrong. You like GWTW, pine for a Lonesome Dove sequel, think that fiction written about a legendarily horrific Civil War prison was a great idea, and you love lists. “Bucket” lists. “Must do” lists. “Best of” lists. Great, add them to the comments section below and we will all add them to our “Greatest List of Great Lists.”
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Copyright © 2013 by motomynd
| Please comment |
Great post Paul ! As far as lists go I'm usually dealing with a grocery list or a must do list. I agree with you on the lists you mentioned too much !
ReplyDeleteMorning Moto, I have or maybe always have had a problem remembering stuff. I get off doing something (like writing a comment)and that important project will no longer exist if it has not been placed on a list. However, most of the time I forget I have a list---sometimes that is a good thing. And I'm afraid that is what would happen to any bucket list I made. Also, by the time a person is old enough to even think about a bucket list, there are not that many things they are capable of doing. Unlike Chuck, most of us have beaten our bodies so much over the years, just getting out of bed hurts. So yes, I agree, bucket lists are stupid, unless you are 20 and shacked up with that older woman.
ReplyDeleteThere's one list, however, that I'm recommending today to the members of my Google Circles and my friends on Facebook:
DeleteA must-do item for today's list: READ MOTOMYND'S COLUMN!!! You'll be glad and grateful you did.
In fact, my body is so beaten that I rarely carry my own camping gear anymore. And if I made a bucket list, most of the things on it would now be beyond my physical ability.
DeleteBack when I was trudging back and forth between an office and a Dream Home, I had a bucket list. It involved Everest and the back streets of Casablanca, of course. Then I did a few things, and learned that an experience worthy of a list requires a big commitment. I haven't time or money for more than a few such - or luck enough to survive many more, I expect.
The only List I ever completed was the Colorado 14'ers. I half-heartedly went after the top hundred peaks, but still have a few to go, including two with too much loose rock for my taste. These days I mostly just wander into a new wilderness from time to time.
I was foolhardy enough over the weekend to tell Paul that "I think I have a worthy explanation why those lists are so popular (and even therapeutic for the right people). I'll provide it in a comment on Monday." I see it's Monday.
ReplyDeletePaul writes that "If you need someone else to come up with a list of ideas so you can think of a way to make your life meaningful, haven’t you already blown it?"
Well, I think a lot of people do need help from other people. Life overwhelms folks, they get beaten down, loss stultifies them, substances and strong drink claim them, they get seriously discouraged, even depressed, they find themselves in a dark wood and need a guide. I think so-called bucket lists inject some hope—even someone else's list. Maybe particularly someone else's list, in the case of a person whose self-confidence has fled (if there ever was any self-confidence).
Jesse Stone, in the Robert B. Parker novels and the eight movies adapted from them (or based on their characters)—starring Tom Selleck as Jesse, executive producer, and screenwriter—drinks a lot, and he drinks more when he doesn't have a criminal case to work on. He sees Dr. Dix about his drinking (and other things), and their sessions are among the most enjoyable scenes in the movies. In the fifth movie, I think (that would be Thin Ice then), Jesse is at loose ends and, of course, drinking more and pretty wasted most of the time. Dr. Dix suggests that Jesse "make something important." He does: he asks for the most recent cold case in the office files and goes to work on it. (He's a very good detective, with many years of experience in the Los Angeles Police Department before he was fired for being drunk on the job and ended up in Paradise, Massachusetts, where he was hired, ironically, because the Chairman of the Town Council had ulterior motives and thought he could bend Jesse to his own ends—how wrong he was!)
Anyway, "making something important" worked. Jesse drank less and pulled himself together.
I think that a bucket list can serve the same function for people.