All The Things I Didn’t Do

I’m at the point in my life where I still have a lot of things I want to do, but there sure are a lot of things I didn’t do when I had the opportunity.

In the late 1970s, when I was in college, I didn’t drop out of college to try my luck as a stand-up comedian on the burgeoning comedy club scene in Manhattan, along with Jerry Seinfeld, David Letterman, and all of those guys.

Too busy studying.

After the 1986 recession, I could’ve used the strategies in Robert G. Allen’s No Money Down to convince property owners to sell me their homes or buildings for no money down and just take back paper.

I was too busy getting a law degree, for which, it turned out, I had no use.

In the late 1980s, I moved to Los Angeles but I didn’t have a chance encounter with a showrunner of a top comedy series, so I never ended up writing sitcoms.

I remember watching Frederick Wiseman’s documentary on public television called Basic Training and I thought for a while about enlisting, but the moment passed.

I remember reading in the early 1990s that you could travel the world on tramp steamers and other commercial vessels for very little money.

The accommodations were spartan, but you got to see a lot of the world.

Stayed home.

I thought for a while about leaving behind the chase for upper middle class respectability and becoming a carpenter and moving to Safed, a town in the Galilean hills of northern Israel, and I actually signed up for a course on carpentry.

But then I realized that I have no fine motor skills, so I would have been a lousy carpenter.

Also, I didn’t know anybody in Safed.

Instead of all those things, I got sober, grew up, got married, wrote a lot of stuff, ran a bunch of races and performed in a bunch of concerts and things like that.

So it’s not like I haven’t done anything.

I once read a book by a consultant — I wish I could remember the name of the book or the consultant — the main point of which is that life is basically like a long weekend.

You’re born on Thursday, he wrote, you spend Friday fighting the traffic to get out of the city, you have the weekend, and then you die on Monday.

I think, in a weird way, he’s right.

So…while I haven’t done many of the things I could’ve done, at least I did the things I actually did.

What about you?