“Regrets…I’ve had a few…”
For some reason last night, I started thinking about the things that I’ll either never have a chance to do again, or never had a chance to do in the first place, because the opportunity went away before I was born or remotely near being old enough to do. Not exactly a happy subject, but it’s an interesting (if somewhat short; I didn’t want to spend a year thinking about this before I hit the “post” button) list, and maybe it’ll spur me, as well as as some of you fuckers out in TV land, to get off our collective asses and do a few of the things we’ve been putting off. Anyway, on with today’s pointless conversation maker. =)
Things I never had a chance to do in the first place:
1. Attend a Brooklyn Dodgers game at Ebbets Field: You’d think that, with me being a fan of the team I am, it’d be Babe Ruth this, Lou Gehrig that, DiMaggio this, Mantle that, Larsen this, but nope. I’ve totally caught the bug on this one over the past few years. The more I read, see and hear about this ballpark and that team, the more I think that I just might not have been a Yankee fan, at least not exclusively, had I been born in a different time. This is really about the only thing I feel like I’d want to do on pre-1960 planet Earth, which will probably appall at least a few of the people who read this. I’m sorry, but as glorious as the idea of grabbing a cavewoman by the hair, dragging her up a rocky cliff, and savagely violating her on top of a big pile of dinosaur shit that may or may not contain the remains of your friends may seem to some, I’m gonna file that one in the “probably a lot better on paper” pile and go to the ballgame instead. It just seems more civilized to me.
2. Hang out in two New York nightclubs that actually seemed to matter, Danceteria and Studio 54, during their heyday: I’ve actually been in 54 a ton of times, when it was the new Ritz, but never when it was 54, and as much fun as I had at the Ritz back then, it didn’t really register with me where I was until much later on in life. Now, given my general feelings on clubs, there’s a chance that, stripped of their mythical stature and placed in the here and now, they probably would’ve bored the tits off of me like most clubs do, but I would have at least liked the opportunity to be that fucking bored.
3. See Jimi Hendrix live: I’d imagine this would be kind of like watching someone reinvent the electric guitar on the fly, in front of you, while around a lot of people who were on a ton of really high quality psychedelics.
4. Meet John Lennon: I wouldn’t have necessarily wanted to see The Beatles, or see him perform. I just would’ve liked to have met the guy and talked to him for a little bit.
5. Be at Yankee Stadium when Roger Maris hit his 61st home run in 1961: OK, there is one Yankee-related thing I would’ve wanted to be there for, because Roger needed and deserved to have more people in the stands cheering for him on that day.
Things I totally blew my chance to do:
1. Meet Jack Kirby: I totally could’ve made it to one of the conventions he attended. Another guy I would’ve loved to have gotten to know, because not only did he create entire universes on his lunch break, he did so with a strangely populist, working-class sensibility, and a really dry sense of humor, if you’re looking for it. In some ways, from what I’ve read, he was a lot like Yogi Berra, if Yogi created universes. Same kinda streetwise Zen thing going on. This reminds me, I need to add Mark Evanier’s Kirby book to my Amazon list.
2. See Stiv Bators live: the day was December 30th, 1988. I was in New York, about 6 blocks from the Ritz (the old Ritz, which is now Webster Hall), and the Dead Boys were playing a show there that night. I didn’t have to be home at any particular time, I had nothing better to do, and I had the money to go to the show. For some reason, I went home. I still have no idea what the fuck I was thinking, but I’m pretty sure that’s the last time Stiv played New York before he died in 1990. I suck.
3. See Nirvana live: I had about a million chances to do this, most of them with Nirvana playing in places the size of my bedroom, and I was like “Oh, I’ll go next time…” every time. Last time they played New York was January of ’94. I had a ride up, I had barely enough money to snag scalped tickets if I got lucky, I *knew* somehow that it was probably my last shot, and I just got discouraged for some reason and stayed home.
4. Push my parents to get me a Commodore 64 with a disk drive and a modem, Christmas 1983, instead of that friggin’ Vic-20. Me being a kid, I didn’t want the 64 to be the only thing under the tree (which probably accounts for my leaning in my older years toward gifts and major purchases, for myself or others, being things that help further myself or the person I’m buying for, sort of a backlash reaction…), and my parents didn’t have a clue about the stuff beyond “OH MY GOD, THAT DISK DRIVE IS HOW MUCH?!?!?!” and “OH NO, YOU’LL RUN UP THE PHONE BILL!” So, now, I write stuff like this on the ‘net, and some of my peers are millionaires or world-changing visionaries. I’m not saying that the gear would’ve made me, and certainly a resourceful, focused, motivated kid would’ve gotten some juice out of the Vic-20 (if Jeff Minter’s reading this, I’m sure he’ll agree), but by ’83, a Vic was kind of like trying to kill the Cloverfield monster with a fly swatter.
5. Play Little League Baseball: I only got to do a year of this, late on in my childhood, on a team where I basically got ignored because I wasn’t friends with the coach’s son. Earlier on, despite the fact that my folks saw that I loved Reggie Jackson, loved baseball cards, and could use some work in the socialization and cooperation departments, they never wanted me in, because it was “too expensive” and because they didn’t feel like being bothered with the other parents, who probably were assholes, but you put that stuff aside and let your kid play ball. I might not have even known I wanted to do it, but I sure did spend a lot of time hanging out at that ball field for a kid who didn’t want to play ball.
So, basically, we’re talking about baseball, comic books, computers and music in a whole world and millions of years of experience. No Jesus, no Buddha, no Einstein, no long-lost relatives, and no truly world-shaping experiences by many peoples’ definition of that concept. What can I say? I know what I like. Anyway, what would y’all put on your respective lists?