You Just Might Get It

I've never really been a "bucket list" type of person. Certainly I've had notions of things in my life I'd like to experience at some point, but once I got past "touch real boob," nothing else could really match that particular goal for urgency. I do not miss being a teenager. Or, OK, in my early 20s.

I've absolutely been lucky enough to see and do things that will go down as whatever the opposite of regret would be. The younger goofy Anglophile I was got to spend some real time in London and criss-crossed the UK by train on more than one trip. As a even goofier lifelong Tolkien dork, I've gotten to walk along the bottom of the sheer-walled cleft valley in Switzerland that inspired him to merely describe a thing that exists--that you can exist in--and only make you feel like it was otherworldly.

Also I had three kids. That was definitely something I aspired to, but I knew enough people who either achieved that goal accidentally or were biologically locked out of achieving it at all, so a lot of that felt too far out of my hands to count as a goal. Plus I feel like I should say a lot of the work of gestating and birthing I outsourced to my now-ex-wife at the time, so I can't claim a lot of credit for the labor involved. Like that regrettable pun, it's just a thing that kind I just put myself into the right position for and waited for it to redound to my benefit.

I have been the plus-one to a few other people's bucket list realizations, which has been great. This accounts for 100% of my visits to any national park or national forest or national monument. Every time I was the correct amount of amazed and appreciative, but none of those trips were ever going to be my idea. It turns out that most national parks occur almost entirely outdoors, which is also where they keep the bears.

I find myself on the brink of doing a thing tomorrow that I never seriously bothered to hope for, but is happening anyway. I have two tickets to the opening game by the US men's national team in a World Cup hosted here in the US. I don't really think I can call it an unbridled positive given a) the tickets were extortionately expensive and b) all of that money is going to the most hilariously corrupt world organization that isn't the Trump Administration. My two nosebleed seats cost a grand total of nearly $2600, but I've decided to call it a bargain and a boon considering the sequence of incredibly unlikely events that led to them being available. Consider:

-The World Cup was awarded to the U.S. as a co-host instead of some other petro-state as a vehicle for their sportswashing programs (see Qatar 2022 and Saudi Arabia 2030).

-There was a lottery for tickets. I happened to "win" mine but my girlfriend didn't. Totally arbitrary.

-Not only is the tournament partially here, but the U.S. team was based on the west coast, including the first game, in the greater Los Angeles area which is exactly where I live.

-Workers at SoFi Stadium negotiated a settlement this week, avoiding a strike and a picket line that I would have refused to cross.

There's no getting around $2600 is a lot of money, especially in my precarious employment situation. But, just like my human-child-creation experience, I didn't have to go out of my way at all to make attending a World Cup game live a reality. No travel or hotel or extra food expenses. A bargain, in that context! But that's the evil genius of FIFA, a cabal of cartoonishly brazen pirates banking on how happy and grateful the fan base will be to shovel over their disposible income into the money furnace they've built out of monopoly and graft.

It really, really sucks that I can't wait.