The Green Cat Rule: You have to call your bucket-list shots

Guy comes into the plant earlier this week who had seen something weird. We’re not going to tell you what. Let’s just say it was a unico. No, not a unico. Everyone’s seen a unico. There’s one at the Madoa I, or was last time we were there. They’re as common as toothpicks. Let’s have this guy seeing a two-headed gopher. He had seen a two-headed gopher. Totally rare. And he declared it to be a bucket-list experience.

Here’s our beef: Everyone’s being way too cavalier about throwing around the term “bucket list.” The term’s been around a while – it’s a list of things you want to experience or accomplish before you die, that is, “kick the bucket.” It entered the world-wide vocabulary after the movie of the same title, starring Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman, in which two men diagnosed with terminal illness, set our to check off their bucket list.

To continue with our beef: We’re saying the two-headed gopher guy didn’t actually have “To see a two-headed gopher” on his bucket list. We maintain that, sure, he was excited to have seen a two-headed gopher, but that he had retroactively put it on his bucket list and then immediately checked it off. You can’t do that. It’s like 8-Ball: You have to call your shot. You can’t just blunder into a three-rail bank shot on the 3-ball and call it good. Same thing with blundering into a two-headed gopher.

Now, it’d be a whole different story if the guy had gone out on an expedition in search of a two-headed gopher, then bravo to this guy.

But if you just list weird or cool or rare experiences after they happen, it’s not a bucket list. A list of accomplishments, sure, but not a bucket list.

We wish we’d had “To step on a beaver in the wild” on our bucket list before we stepped on a live beaver in the wild one terrifying night in Colorado, because that woulda been a tough get and a huge personal triumph. Instead, it was just weird.

Our bucket list is pretty doable, with things like “To ride on a blimp.” Done: The Goodyear and some other kind that was the longest in the world.

We don’t have “To fly with the Blue Angels” on our bucket list, though if we had it could have been checked off several years ago when we tued down the opportunity to fly in one of their planes but we tued it down because we didn’t want some Navy lieutenant flying his jet upside down and backward at 600 mph in order to make us throw up inside our helmet. We’re a blimp guy, not an F/A-18 Hoet guy.

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Truth is, for all our nitpicking about the official rules of bucket-listing, we don’t actually have such a list. We did ride on blimps, but we didn’t call the shots.

We want to go on a squalor tour of the South with our son, an Easte seaboard trip with our wife, a few days in Chicago with our daughter and, to polish off the list, die by a piano falling from a high-rise.

But, in the meantime, we’ll take our two-headed gophers – actually, we wish we’d come up with something else, because we’re feeling sorry for the two-headed gopher; let’s make it an emerald-green cat. We’ll take our blimp rides and beaver run-ins and emerald-green cats as we find them, and be glad we did.

Contact Tim Grobaty at 562-714-2116, [email protected], @grobaty on Twitter.

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