Updated list as of February 2024:

1. Raise a happy family in a decent home with solid core values. This home must also have a music studio that can hold a 9 ft Steinway & Sons Model D grand piano, a DW drum set, and a PA system for all my musical friends to come and jam. It will also have regulation size ping pong and billiard tables in it. All of the things in the house must serve utility to build relationships with people.

2. Travel the world playing music, learn to produce music

3. Go on a road trip across the United States in a RV, and hit all 48 contiguous states

4. Ensure my parents get to visit all the places they’ve wanted to but could not due to raising me and my sis.

5. Acquire a restomod classic Porsche 911 from the 70’s or 80’s and teach my sons how to drive a manual shift car in said vehicle.

6. Attain conversational fluency in Japanese and French

7. Perform sneaky acts of massive generosity

8. To live a life of true meaning and purpose, and not to get sucked into the morass that is comprised of material consumerism and dehumanizing social constructs (which is easy to fall into living in LA).

   To me right now, it means to live a life of sacrifice for others and to show love when it is otherwise very difficult to do so. It’s challenging for sure, but gets more rewarding the more I do it in practice. As I struggle through my own vices and demons (of which I have many, not gonna lie), the more I see it apparent that I need a love that is only given freely by a historical character called Jesus Christ who willingly laid his life down to pay an ultimate sacrifice, and then survived death to tell the story. In my experience, it’s a limitless source of joy, solace, peace, and love that I use as fuel to give to those around me.

   But to be honest, it’s always an ongoing struggle to understand and grasp the concept of a divine being coming to Earth, living amongst us humans, and dying for this concept we call “sin” so that we can be seen as redeemed in God’s eyes. No matter how many times I hear it, it’s still a flesh and blood struggle, largely because my faith seems to be stalled in its adolescence. But one thing I cannot deny is that there is purpose in all things that happen in the world – and whether we like it or not, we all make choices based on what we believe.

   Everyone has a god they believe in – whether it’s the one and only true God, or some other god, something else, or themselves. The scary fact of it all is that the truth doesn’t care about what someone believes. It’s like if I don’t believe in or like the concept of an orange, does that make existence of the orange change? And just because I don’t have perfect information about the orange, does it make it any less real? In today’s postmodern politically correct society, it seems that people care more about not offending another person’s feelings more than anything. And again, what one person believes can be different from what another believes, but this simply doesn’t change the truth. I suppose this is the funny joke about truth. It really doesn’t budge on people’s opinions, whether they have them or not, or whether they self-medicate on vices to avoid or forget inconvenient realities. Or, as a friend recently told me, they’d rather stay with the devils they know than discover new devils they don’t know.

   Anyway, all of this to say, at the end of my days, I want to ensure that it was all worth it- that I enriched the lives of everyone around me with a contagious love. So far, this is the only way I know how, because it’s either this, or I should live a life of pure selfishness and gusto as I’ve seen many folks do. Why not, right? If this time we got on earth is all we’ve got, better get yours while the gettin’s good. The thing is, if that’s the path one wants to take, they better hope they were right at the end of their life lest it get cut short by OD-ing on a cocaine-fueled orgy on a yacht off the coast of Croatia. If they’re wrong, then it just seems that the downside of their bet would far outweigh the upside (see Pascal’s Wager).

9. Make it by my 50th birthday. To me, “making it” means not having an ounce of financial dependence on sources beyond my control. In practice it means a home run success of any one of my current ventures. I look at my whiteboard today and 80% is filled with items related to my W-2 source of income. I aim to eliminate this long before I’m 50 – and hopefully replace it with a whiteboard full of joy.

10. I’m sure I’ll have one more soon.