Stuff I, V, Want to Do

1. Become 90% food self-sufficient. Growing fruit and vegetables, raising chickens, sheep, and pigs, hunting and fishing. The other 10% is for the wonderful exotics: seafood, chocolate, coffee, wine, that kind of thing.

2. Build my own house. I can't afford my mortgage, and I have a hunger to make stuff with my hands. I always have. I have almost everything I need to convert trees into lumber, and I certainly have the expertise. Now I just need the land and the time and the money for the stuff I can't make.

3. Move to Boulder. To my own land. This is a prerequisite for items 1 and 2.

4. Somehow overcome the dread, anxiety, and homicidal fury I feel when dealing with finances, especially taxes, which are killing me.

5. Figure out a way to have conversations with my family about what really matters to me. I have responded to being outnumbered by being silent, conciliatory, and neutral.

6. Finish my songs, orchestrate them for a small band of real musicians, and record us. I accept the possibility that I am delusional here, but I think some of my songs are really good, but definitely limited by my lack of proficiency on the guitar.

7. Learn how to write a narrative song.

8. Finish and publish my eccentric illustrated book about the sacralization of food, shelter, and love.

9. Either figure out how to act on what I've learned about my neuroses or quit therapy.

10. Figure out how to simplify my life, and really do it. I have too much going on, and I recoil from too much of it. One thing at a time.

11. Start painting again, specifically this idea I've been carrying around for years: a series of still-lifes and a series of portraits that get to that line between depiction and reportage. Y'know. THAT line.

12. Make some kind of indelible mark so that people will love, respect, and revere me. That's actually the motivation behind the music and book stuff, to be honest. So maybe here's a worthier goal: get to where I don't need the recognition and can just do creative work for its own sake, or maybe for ethical and aesthetic reasons. Be a self-starter.