A Few Goals in My Life

May 1st, 2008
By Johnny Apocalypse

Everyone has a list of accomplishments that they want to achieve. Some of these are grandiose, like playing the banjo to a sold out crowd at Carnegie Hall, while others are fairly simple, say, learning to set the clock on your DVD player.

I’m no different. I have come up with several goals that I feel the need to accomplish, and instead of working on solving world hunger, I have chosen to let some readers in on my plans. Some are big, some are small but I hope to wrap them all up before I kick the bucket.

Drive cross-country with my knees
People drive with their knees all the time; while they are eating, lighting a cigarette, flipping off two cars at once. But I hope to be listed in the Guinness Book of World Records for driving from Denver to Seattle without touching the steering wheel with by hand a single time.

Since this would be a thousand-mile plus trek and I tend to be a fidgety person I’ll need something to keep my hands busy, and I have just the thing - playing guitar. Yep, the entire drive I plan to be throwing down the riffs of Led Zeppelin, Jethro Tull and Poets of the Fall, making my record all the more ridiculous and impressive.

So what if the year after I do this, someone drives from Texas to Alaska while playing Def Leppard on a harpsichord? Doesn’t matter to me. They may get the record, but that’s one goal I can cross of my list.

Turn a urinal cake into a urinal donut
That’s right, I want to piss a hole straight through a urinal cake. I generally figure that the pressure flooding out of my could punch a hole in a tank, but that’s apparently not the case. And since I doubt any restaurant is going to reserve a urinal just for me (after all, it wouldn’t be my accomplishment if several people created the donut), I have come up with a plan.

First, I get a urinal, complete with cake, installed in my house. Next I create a urinal donut by drinking and then disposing of a lot of coffee. Finally, I get a stick, fish it out of the urinal, wash it off and then send it to the Smithsonian where it will be preserved for ages with the label “coolest stupid achievement ever”, or “stupidest cool achievement ever”, or “what’s this bullshit?”

At least one person reading this is thinking “why the hell does Johnny have this goal?” Well, let me ask you this: why do so many people want to climb Mt. Everest? It’s a death trap, and hauling your ass up to the top of that rock must be a lot more work than it’s worth. The answer is simple, because it’s a challenge. And I’m no mountain climber.

Catch the Zodiac Killer
There’s a pretty decent chance that Robert Gray smith (author of Zodiac and Zodiac Unmasked) is right and that Arthur Leigh Allen, now deceased, was the Zodiac. All the evidence is circumstantial, but it adds up to a pretty convincing conclusion.

Me, I don’t always go for a “decent chance” that someone was right. In matters of criminal investigations I like certainty, and since no one managed to pummel a confession out of Allen before his death, it’s up to me to either catch the killer or rule everyone else out by process of elimination.

Here’s how I have been spending my nights in the park: I wait for someone to walk by and I stop them with a polite “excuse me, sir”. Then I hit them with the question.
“Are you the Zodiac?”
“What? No!”
Then I grab them by the shirt, “I’m not screwing around here, pal, are you the Zodiac?”
“No! I was only two years old when that happened!”
“You sure?”
“Of course I’m sure!”
“Okay then. On your way.”

I figure that if I question everyone who ever lived in America and was alive in the 1960’s, sooner or later I’ll get to the killer. Then David Fincher can make a movie about me succeeding where no one else did. And if I don’t get a confession I’ll assume that Allen was the killer and find some other reason to harass people in the park.

Accurately diagnose a rare disease
I am a huge fan of the TV show House and I also watch a fair amount of medical shows on the Discovery channel. As a result, I am starting to think that being a doctor isn’t as hard as everyone makes it sound.

I once thought about going to medical school when I managed to score a 98% in an anatomy/physiology class in high school, but then I remembered taking a chemistry class he year previous and busting my ass to get a D. I have come to the conclusion that no one really understands chemistry, and those who say they do are either lying or cheating.

So even though I won’t be getting my medical license within the next century, I still think I can diagnose a rare disease. How? Simple. Observing the symptoms. Just like a doctor.

Here’s an example: I come across a guy with a cut on his arm. The skin around said cut is wet, turning all variety of dark, freaky colors and is starting to smell like rancid dog food. Classic example of wet gangrene.

See that? Who needs chemistry when you have 5 senses and watch surgery on TV?

So how will I cure my “patient” after the diagnosis? I have no clue. That’s where the real doctors come in handy. After all, I never said anything about curing a rare disease, just figuring out what it is. Nope, once I tell a guy that he has chimerism I send him packing to someone who can legally fix him.

Grow my own coffee beans
Now this is a goal I can pull off. It won’t be easy since I don’t live in Columbia (which is fine since Columbian coffee is crap; French roast and Hawaiian Blend, now those are your money coffees).

I live in Colorado, where the climate is far too dry to grow coffee, so I’ll have to set up a greenhouse. Not one of those fancy glass structures, just a little tent made from a clear plastic tarp.

Then it’s just a matter of getting some good dirt, some pots and some coffee seeds. I’ll have plenty of tricks of the trade to learn (thank God for Wikipedia), plus I’ll need to get a bean roaster and figure out how to work that. Sounds like a good hobby to me.

Plus, once I’ve learned the basics I can do some experimenting. Would watering the plants with coffee produce a more robust and flavorful bean? If I mix some sugar into the dir will people still want to ruin the fresh-brewed ambrosia with several packets of Sweet-N-Low?

And if I ever start smoking again, I’ll have the greenhouse ready to grow my own tobacco too. As long as the ATF doesn’t have a fit.

Convince someone else to write a conclusion paragraph for this article
I’ve tried a few times to write a solid conclusion paragraph, but they keep sounding way too generic. “So there you have it” and “these are a few of my goals” and “good luck with yours!” and other cheesy smarm. Screw that. If I can’t come up with something good, I’ll get someone else to.

 

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