Twenty items I’d love to feel passionate about

By Ed Goldman

Every year in early March I haul out my Chuck-It List to see if it needs updating.

Unlike the conventional Bucket List a lot of people create and try to work their way through before their self-appointed deadline approaches—which too often is The Most Ultimate Deadline Of Them All—my Chuck-It list consists of things I’m pretty sure I won’t do before I face Saint Peter and he sends me back to take three more units of biology. 

Yes, this is a recurrent nightmare of mine. I wasn’t allowed to graduate from junior high school, senior high school or college until, each time, I completed a science course. I always chose biology, thinking it just had to be easier than chemistry, geology, physics, or animal husbandry. (That last one, I was disappointed to learn, is not a  matchmaking website operated by the ASPCA).

In any event, here are 20 things on my Chuck-It List for the remainder of 2022—which I suspect will still be viable in 2023, provided I am:

1. I will never again ride a skateboard or surfboard, use an emery board or whiteboard, nor serve on a nonprofit-anything board that has an identical mission statement as another one (“The purpose of this organization is to do really good things and to give back to the community, even though it’s never been proved we took anything from it in the first place”).
2. I continue to harbor zero interest in vacationing in Fallujah—or in Tijuana, Mexico, “the most murderous city in the world per capita”; Cape Town, South Africa, “the most murderous city in the world by death toll”; and Caracas, Venezuela, “the most murderous city in South America”, all according to traveltriangle.com.
3. I will never subscribe to the website traveltriangle.com.
4. I will never play stud poker in a casino nor amass a stack of unpaid parking tickets. In neither example would I emerge victorious.

5. I will never intentionally allow my sweatpants to slide below my backside, hum along with rap music nor stop believing that the perfect actor to play exonerated gunslinger Kyle Rittenhouse in the inevitable TV movie would be Justin Bieber.
6. I will never attend a Justin Bieber concert nor watch him portray Kyle Rittenhouse in a TV movie.
7. I will never jump out of a plane on purpose nor post snaps of me swimming with a porpoise.
8. I won’t let my grandchildren call me “Boompah”—principally because I’m not fortunate enough to have any. (This may be the one item on the list that’s negotiable. I mean, if I ever have one, hey, kids say the darnedest things. Also, I should point out that “Boompah” is what James Stewart’s grandkids call him in “Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation,” an arcane fact apparently known by only my pal, Sacramento attorney Russell Austin, and me.)

9. I have never bought nor will ever buy a lottery ticket—but will continue to decry the fact that I’ve never won the lottery.
10. I will never take a photo of my lunch. Or anyone else’s.
11. I will never use “lunch” nor “vacation” as a verb.
12. I will not substitute the word “holiday” for “vacation,” even though it sounds far more continental to do so.

13. I will never drink wine with a better pedigree than my own. 
14. I will not invest in a software product whose benefit to humanity, much less to me, can’t be explained in fewer than 25 words (none of which can be “platform”).
15. I will continue to eschew buying sushi at garage sales.
16. I will never stop using the word “eschew” simply because it sounds funnier than “abstain from.”