1. REGRET IS LIKE THE PROVERBIAL potato chip, which is why I am reluctant to taste even one. Living a reasonably full life keeps any real regret firmly in its place; i.e., away. Yet while I regret nothing, there are some experiences which I would like to have but either cannot or will not swap for whatever I’d have to sacrifice to realize them. Think of them as wistful might-have-beens or alternative pleasantries:
2. Steve Jobs doing his annual MacWorld thing. I have friends who are Mac users, and I have friends who are Mac addicts who never miss a product rollout. Yet I have never so much as seen a video of Mr. Jobs’ yearly tech unveilment. Something there is about consensual dedication to intelligent (or any) tools; it would be nice to see the Fearless Leader revealing to the faithful their latest obsession.
3. One more Grateful Dead show. I was never a full-on Deadhead, but would see them whenever they played to their Bay Area homebase, and whenever I could, mostly between 1981 and 1990; the best show I attended was three days at Laguna Seca Raceway in 1988, with camping and girls and everything. It’s true that “there is nothing like a Grateful Dead concert” — it would be nice to know that the last one was the last one.
4. A few years ago, one of the cable stations ran a couple daily episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation. This allowed for the taping of the entire series; they were also running daily Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episodes, but we didn’t know then how good (sometimes better) a series it was; or we could now curl up some evening at Quark’s (or, for the hardcore, Vic’s) without bugging Netflix.
5. I think I passed up a chance to see DEVO live in the late 1970s or early 1980s. But I saw them in the ’90s, which was in some cases more interesting due to all the middle-aged punks with their kids. So it all works out eventually.