A Meaningful Life with Bucket I-VIII

Lou’s headache was only in his head.

Bucket is the first installment of the A Meaningful Life series of shape-shifting shorts.

See: Primal Matter.

CONCLUSION

Bob’s dreams tell him to throw a lit match into a mailbox; make a donation; push someone off the roof of a building; play the lottery. His dreams come with all the necessary in formation: whose mailbox; which charity and how large a donation; who and where; which numbers. Whatever his dreams tell him to do, Bob does. Nothing ever goes wrong; he always wins and never gets caught. I’ve given Bob’s dreams a lot of thought. I’ve weighed the pros and cons. I’ve explored the moral and ethical ramifications. I concede that some of the things Bob does are disturbing. But I’ve come to the conclusion that to have this kind of certainty in life is worth the discomfort.

SABBATICAL

I support my wife in everything, even in her arguments against me. It’s this highly developed empathy of mine that makes it hard to live with me. Laura is a Distinguished Professor at City College; her field is Interpersonal Neurobiology. She’s now on a sabbatical from me, traveling to the last places on earth without Internet access, including Samoa, Tristan da Cunha, most of the Grand Canyon and some of the Black Forest. Laura made it clear that once her sabbatical is over she expects to come back to a different me.