My brother posted his bucket list on Facebook, so I here’s mine. It’s a list of the top 10 things you would like to accomplish in your life before you “kick the bucket”.

01. Become financially independent (meaning I don’t have to work at all if I don’t want to because I have enough passive income to just play music, travel the world, write and spend time with my family and friends) before I turn 31. Last year, my goal was before I turn 30, but I think I’m going to be 6 months late of that mark.

02. Do a free standing back-flip. I wish I had done this a few years ago when I got health insurance for the first time in 8 years. Now I’m without coverage again and I just don’t want to risk it. I fell on my head without insurance a few years ago and they charged me $4K to tell me I was OK. I guess I’ll have to wait for completion of #01.

03. Write a novel. I haven’t even gotten to the first draft phase but I do have 6 Word documents with crappy titles, meager plot summaries, a few brainstorm snippets and two character outlines. I’m half way there, right? o_0

04. Speak at a TED conference. http://www.TED.com. On what? Whatever it is that I give to the world before #10 happens.

05. Master the Accordion. I’ve had an accordion for 8 years. I love it. It’s awesome. Every time I pick it up and play it, I get hypnotized by how awesome it sounds. If I were stuck on a desert island and I could take only one thing with me, I would still choose to take a boat but if loopholes like that weren’t allowed and I was forced to choose something that couldn’t get me off the island, I would probably take an accordion.

06. Produce a musical album. I love to sing but I know I’m not that good at it. After mastering the accordion, I’ll probably move onto that part, but I love music of all kinds, so I might pick up another instrument.

07. Travel the world with my daughter. My little girl is teh awesome!!!!11!!!one! I want to show her all the places I haven’t seen yet.

08. Learn to speak, read and write Mandarin Chinese fluently. And German, Russian, Arabic, Zulu, Hindi… I would also like to learn just enough of every language that I could pick out a strangers dialect and say a few simple phrases with confidence. Just a “Hey, you speak {language name}? Cool. I’m just learning.” It’s surprising what kind of connections come out of just knowing that.

09. Create a game or some other meme that will withstand the test of time, passing from generation to generation.

10. Become a singularity. Hey, screw this whole ‘before death’ thing. I plan to bypass that part.

Previous buckets kicked:

* Master riding the unicycle
* Learn a foreign language…not necessarily fluently ;)
* Buy a house
* Visit any part of Europe (went to London)
* Visit any part of Asia (went to Thailand)
* Have a child
* Start a business

Apparently, Gmail thinks I like SPAM:

I would expect Gmail to know enough to filter out its own words from Gmail adsense inclusion–or at the very least, filtering out the word ‘spam’ but maybe people really do visit their spam box, simultaneously thinking to themselves, I’d love some spam!

My friendships have been relegated to my dreams. I worked late last night, sleeping only to see my friends.

“Thanks for the book.”
“oh, yeah, glad you like it.”

Then we have a discussion on personal education philosophy and practices.
Sometimes, lately, I’m not sure if I had a conversation with a friend or if all happened in a dream.

“Didn’t we go to their house last week and play cards or something…?”
“No, it’s been a while.”

Optimistically, at least I remember having good times.

I used to lie awake, in bed, thinking about time travel, cause and effect, logical fallacies, the history of the universe, the microcosmic dust and the macrocosmic crust–anything unknown that needed a good hypothesis.

Now, I lie there thinking about innanities, filling out forms, paying bills, the state of the economy, work, work and more work. All these worries and obsessions, so human, are so restrictive.

I just can’t find it in me at the moment to become creative about beurocracy. This makes it difficult to sleep.

I used to start dreaming to fall asleep, starting with something abstract and twisting it until it was even more difficult to articulate. Soon, all would be a haze of dream and random thought stream.

I need this again.

Zombies are walking the streets. I’m gathering wooden stakes and plunging them into the heads of the infected. It’s not working so well. Blood is spattering everywhere and I almost get covered in the disease. The stakes are proving ineffective anyway. Some zombies are wandering around with the wood protruding from their sculls. I’ve torn out big chunks of their heads but they don’t stop.

“We need to get to a Costco!” I tell my friends.

“OK, but first we need to stop at someone’s house.”

“Who? Why?”

“She’s a neurologist; she’ll know what to do.”

“…OK.”

On our way to her house, we stop at a school to pick up someone’s kid. In one of the classrooms, textbooks are flying through the air, having grown large teeth, attempting to bite the children.
“This isn’t just a zombie infection! This is some sort of magic.”
“That’s great news!” Says one of my cohorts, “It’s not a disease! We just need to find a magician.”

One of the men traveling with us knows where to find a magician and he takes us to his house. Surprisingly, this magician doesn’t know anything about the zombie attack. He believes us anyway and takes us into the ocean. “There,” he says, “we will meet another magician who can help you.”

In the depths of the sea, we find many new life-forms that we have never heard of before.

A cube shaped fish with bioluminescent saturn-like rings around it swims by. It’s gathering energy kenetically from other fish and creatures swimming in the water. It floats into a school of fish who twirl around the cube frantically. The cube gets brighter. A shark comes, pushing energy into the water as it feasts upon the swirl of fish. The cube and it’s rings get brighter and more energetic.

“It’s like an alien.” I say.

“How do you know it’s not?” The magician replies.

————-
OK, this dream really does go on forever so I’m going to leave it at that. To remind myself of the rest:

* Cubic alien beast becomes a flying carpet under the sea.
* Old lady magician under the sea, threatens attack but recognizes the traveling magician as a former lover.
* Infiltrating the military and fighting the attack.
* Vines growing out of the ground to consume the army.
* An unused field with chained up trees, under attack of consumption. To rebuild or let die?
* Pretending to be a woman and using the restroom at a closed down supermarket.
* The creepy janitors
* The Costco is closed
————-

Let’s sum it up with a Common Craft Zombie Guide:

I just created a brand spankin’ new PGP key pair. Get my public key here: http://adam.shadowpuppet.net/AdamEivy.asc

I’m writing a book and I’m holding a virtual stack of 300 pages. There is easily another 200 pages to go. I take a break to look around the attic of some old, mysterious house I’m sleeping in. It’s late, probably just about dawn. My wife walks in the attic and sees me with a typewriter and a stack of pages, none of which are actually present in reality. I’m mixing space on my virtual console.

“It doesn’t have to be good.” I tell my wife. It just has to be complete. I need the whole story out on paper.

Somehow it’s just pouring out of me. I’m not even reading what I write so I’m sure it’s mostly garbage. I’ll have a hell of a time trudging through it later and marking down relevant sections–if there are any. I get this bad feeling that it’s all just dreamtext, phrases that sound fantastic when you are sleepwriting but which, upon conscious reading, turn out to be complete drivel. But, again, I am washed with a sense accomplishment. Crap or not, I’m writing a novel.

Working at a start up company is a lot of fun. There’s a ton of enthusiasm, the progress feels fantastic. You start with nothing and you evolve it into something stable, robust, sustainable, intelligent. Sometimes you even get to make something that takes off on it’s own and just goes and all you have to do is watch.

And when the economy is good, financing is good. The payout can be great. But there’s risk. There is a hard road to flatten, cobble, pave, paint and then sell to someone who needs a road. That’s the business of a startup. To make something great and see the payoff. Then we get to move on to something else. Hopefully, we don’t move onto something else before the current project comes to full fruition.

Today, I am officially unemployed. The entire company is laid off. With the market hit, some investors have to save themselves before making risky bets.

But all hope is not lost. There are some investors who have been waiting for this moment in the economy so they can get a really good deal on bankrupt and struggling companies. The buying is hot right now. I have done some of this myself. It’s a damn good time to buy up shares of companies you know will turn a profit.

So, I am going to be on hold, trying to see what happens over the next couple of weeks. Maybe I will get hired back, maybe not.

Time to touch up the old resume.

I’m a child, playing out a piano piece written by some old composer. He’s standing there watching me, making sure I’m doing it right.

“Ah, good, that part there is a little fast but it’s good that way.”

Many years later, I am an old man. I see the composer in a coffee shop, looking not a day older than when I was a child. It is apparent that he must die. He is the enemy, an agent from another faction. But I am old. What can I do? I befriend him. We discuss the changing scene of classical composition in modern times. He invites me over to his yacht where we drink and laugh about the past.

My family is with me now. We are all old. This is our vacation in some undisclosed European country.

“If he’s here, we need to run.” My wife suggests.

“We could catch a plane tonight. Grab only the items that are already packed.” I tell them. “I am going to see if I can finish this first.”

I head out to the yacht, uncertain of what I will do. Upon arrival, I see a figure leap from the mast and fall into a mesh of chain and rope in the front of the ship. It is the old man. He has hung himself on the bow. My arms fly into the air in a victorious flail of triumph. He is dead and I didn’t even have to kill him!

Interpol comes racing in, surrounding the scene. I scream at them. “He’s dead!” I laugh. “I didn’t do it but he’s dead. He’s finally dead.” I follow them over to the body and one of the agents grabs ahold of the man hanging from the chain.

“He isn’t dead yet. There’s breathing.”

My heart sinks into despair.