The Bucket List

I’ve took the name from the movie, ok. But it is not about it.

Swell to be billionaire or a billionaire’s buddy (like in the movie) and be able to bucketlist whatever you want. (my creativity is amazing: I create a new verb in English: to bucketlist! :))

Imagine instead you are churchmouse poor and have, theoretically, a couple of months to live (or so the doctor says)… Less funny than in the movies, isn’t it? Still, you have a couple of months or more to live, you are still autonomous, not in great pain and you’ll like to do something meaningful with what you got.

Exactly my situation.

While binge watching tv series is a possibility (just got through a phase like that, finished the 4th season of Six Feet Under – a very suitable and sometimes morbidly funny series) it’s not meaningful enough, not when your oncologist says to get ready and put your affairs (which affairs?!) in order…

Since drawing and painting, creating art, was my most meaningful activity – pleasant too – in the last 2 decades I suppose continuing doing that is a definite YES. Now the question would be how to do the most of that. Painting commercially it’s a possibility – and could leave something relatively valuable to my family – since I have no savings, no bonds and stocks (just a few credit card debts; my enormous – 30.000 $ ! – study debt – enormous no doubt for a lousy visual arts Certificate anyway)- was erased by a merciful Ministry of Education since I couldn’t have paid that anyway). But then it will lack significative originality and impact. It will be pleasant though to paint some more flowers (Luchian did it and did a wonderful job with it) or some nostalgic Transylvanian or Quebec landscapes.

I could also draw and paint a lot of self-portraits, documenting my days before my final agony… A bit too egotistical and too much looking toward his own belly button. Maybe a significative human experience? If I were famous already maybe it could even have some commercial value… But I’m not and probably never will be… It’s amazing how quickly we forgot even the indecently famous people, once they are dead and buried.

I could also let loose of myself/ let myself loose and draw and paint the most bizarre and scary nightmares of mine (don’t have many but still got some…), the most outrageous and morbid and crazy things my imagination could concoct. That would be fun. For me. Not for my children, wife and grandchildren…

Writing a book – a short one, evidently – also a thought that crossed my mind. I have one I began a few years – many years, in fact: must have been 2003-2004? and wrote about 39-40 pages… I could begin a new one, not a work of fiction but a kind of equivalent of Ibraileanu’s aphorisms, “Witnessing Life” (Privind viata). Am I wise enough? Am I skillful enough? Only one way to know it: by trying to do it…

Of course, painting, drawing, writing is to be done in my “spare time” since my mission in life, right now and in the foreseeable future, is to assist as much as I can, my daughter and my grandsons (and occasionally my other boys and my wife and father).

Not much of a bucket list, I suppose? no spectacular voyages, no extreme feats, no exotic living. And I wonder if I had money (checked today the lottery tickets – no luck for me; I’m lucky in my love life, as usual :)) I would do something different. Maybe visiting my father in Romania (with his grand-grandsons and grandsons maybe), maybe some museum visiting (Amsterdam, Paris, Madrid, Vienna, Brussels, Munich…) Nothing very fancy.

But then, I’m neither Jack Nicholson…nor Van Gogh…

Maybe some ear cutting would be more interesting? no, no, I’ll stick with the boring stuff…

And this is some work in progress, so that the post wouldn’t be imageless. It’s bad enough it’s not fancy…

Old OLt riverbed, Transylvania, near Saca