Stuff I Want To

1. Learn Spanish so I can travel easily and so I can read Roberto Bolaño properly.
2. Go on a walking tour of someplace in these United States. Unite them: they are for me mainly a series of disunited airports looking out over identical barrens. Walk the Pacific Crest Trail or walk through southern Utah until parts of my body start to naturally slough off.
3. Write. Keep writing.
4. Learn a lot more songs from my own Personal American Songbook. I love how you can whip out someone famous's beautiful obscure song and it sounds like you just found it under a rock in the parking lot but it opens up worlds. To me, anyway.
5. Make beautiful coffee carefully every day. This is sort of a cheater one to help keep up esprit de core in the chill shadow of some of the harder ones. But unshallow.
6. Be conciliatory less often or at least not out of cowardice or reserve. Sheesh.
7. Learn to fecken cook more than a scant dozen things out of my own damaged noggin.
8. Yogayogayoga.
9. Commit passages to memory that transport me when I read them. They're so useful once you've got them. They can keep teaching you.
10. Talk about what I want to talk about even when others find it a bit boring or bewildering. Not to be rude or opaque, but just enough that I don't feel inaudible and fall altogether silent.
11. Keep working on the Build-Your-Own-America Kit. Whatever that is. Figure out what that is.
12. Write a book. Maybe. (Refer to 5 for courage.)
13. Follow Gary Snyder's excellent advice to learn at least one form of traditional divination. I'll tell you why later. No, you tell me when I'm going to tell you. See there?
14. Learn the names and habits of more plants. Learn more about geomorphology. Stuff like that so that when I return to the dirt we'll be on speaking terms.
15. Walk an hour a day even when I don't feel like it. The rhythm of walking straightens out my other rhythms real nice.
16. Write songs. Write bad ones. Dare them to suck, suck, suck. Relish the good ones. Play them to my darkness.
17. Ride proud in the humble body.
18. Return often to good friends among books and music. What's with this preoccupation with always learning stuff I'm going to forget anyway?
19. And conversely, learn omnivorously. Not stuff necessarily, just learn. Follow the faint buzz, that kind of learning. Keep at whatever's forming. New synaptic connections are the cambium of the soul.
20. Love right.
21. Plan practical things competently.
22. And conversely, give up on the trying to control the future. I'm resisting aphorism here, because anything you say about this should sound like benevolent chaos.