Some Things a Man Might Consider Doing Before Snuffing It, Part One

I have a very long list of regrets (Things a Human Needs To Know; Things I Should Have Done Differently Looking Back in Anger; Horrible Things Never to Be Repeated) and so here is Part One in a preemptive strike.  

• Learn to palm a basketball.  Perhaps dunk the palmed basketball.
• Save somebody from a sinking ship or a burning building.  Save somebody from a burning ship and you might not have to palm a basketball.
• Build your own home, if only to learn how hard it is to build one's own home.  Use the environment as an aesthetic and avoid electrics on principal/for safetysake.  If you're doing this in the City, ready a couple of one-liners for the crowd. 
• Learn a magic trick that's a bit more compelling than Got-Your-Nose or There's-A-Quarter-in-Your-Ear.  You will be faced with bored five year olds (they're all bored) and you could do worse than show them something they've never seen.  Perhaps you could actually remove your nose and then pull it out of their ears.  That is certain to delight.
• Avoid the martial arts.  If you're dressed in a karate costume because you want to appear tougher, you've already made your first mistake.  
• Watch as many martial arts movies as humanly possible.  If you get in a conversation with another man that moves beyond sports scores, insert your knowledge here.  Plus, the Wong Fei Hung films stand on their own.  
• Have some facial hair for a period of your life.  This could go well with your magic trick or interest in kung fu. 
• Busk. 
• Grumblingly, miserably, pettily, but eventually admit you were wrong about some things. 
• Memorize a good poem of decent length.  I'm working on one by Philip Larkin, but I'm beginning to regret carrying it around in my head.  Try one of Shakespeare's sonnets.  
• Don't kill mice.  It's much tougher to go about your business knowing one is on the prowl rather than gluing something a thousandth the size of you to a trap.  The bubonic plague was started by marmots in actuality.  Kill marmots.  
• Know how to cook.  People who can't cook for themselves -- cereal does not count -- should be left to fend for themselves and be refused service at even the worst restaurants.  Use butter in excess, that's my advice.  
• Loose a startling amount of money and then win it all back.  I've heard this advice elsewhere and agree with it with one major caveat: remember the sentence order.  That's quite important. 

A Statement of Purposelessness

I am unfashionably late to this party.  By now there are a billion of these things out here and while the Internet always has room for one more, do the people who browse it?  Serious doubts aside, I've got room for this thing (and a couple more blogs) and will set to writing for it for a couple of reasons:

• An exercise: whenever somebody says something particularly stupid, at drinks perhaps, pretend you're hard of hearing.  They'll repeat themselves over and over again until you let in, such that they are.  The point isn't to annoy or to let you hear them but to give them a chance to hear themselves?  This blog then is a chance to hear myself.  More people should put their thoughts down on paper or paper-substitutes.  For one, the world would be a cozier place with all the added thinking cluttering up the place.  For two, people would come to realize where their true thoughts lie (as opposed to regurgitation from the day's newspapers or, worse, believing those thoughts are your own), what they take for granted and as fact, and just how complex and gray things are.  That said...
• I believe there are yes and no answers to aesthetic questions.  I don't want to pull from science into the humanities (cultural theory and continental philosophy are the worst and falsest examples of this feeling of inferiority; read Clive James for better ideas on this) but I do think we can agree that Last Tango in Paris is better (certainly more worthwhile) than, say, Sex and the City.
• Blogs, TV, and much modern media can become a bit thoughtless in their need (audiences? advertisers? traffic?) to remain current and constant.  I can't make any promises on how regularly I'll update this thingy, but I will try to avoid the cynicism and snark (ugh) that has become common because it is easy to write, thoughtless, and occasionally enjoyable to read.  Still, I hate to have to face it every day and would hate writing it any more.  
• I'm trying to avoid promises here, but it's safe to say that I will rarely stay on topic or a particular tack.  That said, things I'm particularly interested include: movies, language and bogus language, music, meaninglessness, higher education, and design that uses the environment and environmentalism as its governing aesthetic.
• Space.  It's free here.  I want to give complex ideas their complexity.  I won't try and confuse with insidery jargon (I only know a few terms and try to avoid them for fear of misuse and because they bog things down where the best things should be simple) and I will err on the side of honest indecision rather than a quotable-but-false definite.  

That list might have been more for me than you.  If you do manage to slog through it and anything else on the site, thank you, thank you, thank you.  I do do it for you, you.  And so, with this delay behind us, we're off.