the wish list

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A follow up to 14,000 Ways to Type Brain Vomit, this is Barbara Ann Kipfer's list of 6000 achievements to check off, many of them subjective, even more of them impossible. It jumps between "be appointed ambassador to China" (page 209) to "be strong enough to lift a car" (page 228). Those might be bad examples, since you could easily check both of those off by being Hulk Hoganthe ambassador to China in my screenplay of China Dad. The problem with handing the reins of your life over to a book like this is, and this is only a theory, it seems like it's just some stupid bitch typing every single thing that pops in her head and publishing it. And to get a window into Barbara's brilliant mind, "weave my own baskets" (page 262) follows shortly on the heels of "weave a basket" (page 107). She also gives you the option to check off both "learn to box" and "take boxing lessons." Maybe there's a box for "have the plot of the film Memento based on you" or "suffer multiple concussions" in there somewhere. So if even the author and her worst-person-ever Editor didn't read this book, what kind of person would? Luckily, I got this copy from a used book store,and it's been used. Scattered through the first half of the book, dozens and dozens of boxes have been lovingly checked off. Strange boxes. Using these as clues, I'm going to try to figure out who owned this book before me.This is a good clue. Not very many people walk in space. However, game designer Richard Garriott went into space last year with DNA samples from a ton of people including Stephen Colbert, Steven Hawking and the American Gladiator "Beast." He would have taken Nitro's DNA to space, but that shit already happens every time he jerks off. Boom! So I guess maybe this doesn't narrow our search field down as much as I'd hoped. It does serve as a warning to any commercial aircraft flying over Nitro's hydraulic masturbation chamber, though.It looks like unfiltered solar radiation from the reader's space walk didn't have any harmful effects on his or her pulsing brood of baby eggs. This is much better news for them than it is for us.He or she squeezed a fictional bread monster? Either this book owner missed with the pencil or their time in outer space showed them things we can't imagine.Smart. Very smart. They know we're onto them.What luck that the author of the book included such a bizarre scientific achievement and then the book made it into the hands of the one person who achieved it! It's almost... too perfect.Wait, this is so weirdly specific that I'm starting to think the book was written backwards around these circumstances. Is this the author's own copy, written after returning from the stars? Maybe she got so tired of people leaving during the story of her 10 minute mystery novel shopping spree that she actually invented a circumstance where it could be appreciated.This narrows it down a bit more. It's either long-dead Swiss physician Adolf Fick or his partner Edouard Kalt. So we're dealing with time travel or a haunted book. I'll adjust my screaming accordingly.Heart-breaking to fans of irony, this one wasn't checked. I guess the reader took one look at themselves checking off boxes in a list of things to do with their life and realized this particular one didn't apply. They must have had some kind of epiphany, because the frequency of box-checking after this page dropped dramatically. They didn't even check off easy ones like "sleep with the door open." Unless... was this owned by the ghost of an ancient eye doctor astronaut held prisoner in time jail on charges trumped up by the floor cleaner industry?Well that throws a monkey wrench into my investigation. OK, so now we're looking for a lunatic space woman with jumper cables attached to her reproductive system, taking credit for inventing contact lenses.Uh oh. What the fuck does she have planned?What? Whoever this book owner is, we haven't heard the last of them. Some day the scope of their grand plans will all be explained, but probably only to the Super Friends after they are shrunken and helpless inside tiny jars.