Both Sides Now: On Bucket Lists, Heroes, and Sober January

Reflections on music, mortality, and finding connection

The road ahead is dusty and sun-bleached, winding through the Mexican countryside in waves of green and brown. My seventy-six-year-old mother is in the passenger seat, watching the landscape blur past the window as she belts out Jim Croce’s “You Don’t Mess Around with Jim,” stealing sips of water in the rests.

Outside, the air pulses with the colors and textures of rural Mexico—cacti standing sentinel, ochre walls glowing in the late-afternoon sun. Inside, our destination is oddly mundane: a Costco warehouse, 90 minutes from home.

The errand feels almost absurd. Trading small markets and fresh tamales for aisles stacked with industrial-sized ketchup bottles and pallets of toilet paper feels jarring, like a collision of two worlds. But this is the duality of expatriate life—a constant balancing act between immersion in the rhythms of a foreign place and the occasional pull of familiarity.

Here in Mexico, life feels slower, more tactile. Market vendors call out greetings as their stalls burst with color: pyramids of limes, smoky roasted chilies, stacks of warm tortillas swaddled in cloth. Every purchase is an interaction, a moment of connection. Yet there are days when I crave the fluorescent hum of a big-box store, where labels are in my native language and the layout is a map I can follow without thinking.

This drive, with my mother in the passenger seat, captures that tension perfectly. The fields and hills seem to stretch endlessly, a reminder of the vastness of this life I’ve chosen. But our destination—a place built for scale and efficiency—is a portal to a different version of me, one still tethered, however lightly, to the comforts of where I came from.

This is the push and pull I’ve learned to live with: the richness of the unfamiliar pulling me forward, the grounding of the known pulling me back. It’s not a choice to make but a space to occupy—a liminal place where both coexist, uneasy but full of possibility.

As Croce’s raspy tones fade into silence, the playlist shifts. Joni Mitchell’s Blue unfurls through the speakers, and the car transforms. My mother leans back into her seat, her singing quieted, as if the weight of Joni’s voice has stilled her.

The Songs That Shape Us

Joni’s Blue is an album for winter. Its sparse instrumentation and raw honesty match the stark clarity of the new year—a time of resolutions, recalibrations, and reflection. This year, Blue feels especially resonant as I flirt with Dry January, an experiment I’m half-committed to.

Listening to Joni’s lyrics, I can’t help but notice how alcohol threads itself through her stories, a quiet character in the background of her yearning and resilience. In “The Last Time I Saw Richard,” she paints the shadowed corners of dark cafés, cynicism pooling like stale coffee as she laments, “Only a phase, these dark café days.”

In “A Case of You,” love becomes a kind of intoxication, the ache and elation of it captured in a single line: “I could drink a case of you, and still be on my feet.” It’s not just devotion—it’s excess, a metaphorical tipping back of something too potent to resist.

In “Carey,” Joni invites us into a scene of breezy indulgence, singing, “Let’s have a round for these freaks and these soldiers, / A round for these friends of mine.” There’s wine and laughter, an air of spontaneity, and a sense of escape. It’s a moment where indulgence feels like celebration, a way of finding joy amidst the uncertainty. Yet even here, there’s a flicker of longing for something deeper, something steadier, beneath the revelry.

These lyrics are a mirror, reflecting back a version of myself from another time—a younger, freer, and perhaps more reckless me. I see myself in my twenties: Wednesday nights at The Brazen Bean, where the air smelled faintly of olives and juniper, and $3 martinis were the evening’s ritual. Casey and the crew would slide into the high-backed chairs, laughter spilling across the table before we’d even ordered. Conversations started light—anecdotes about the day, playful jabs—but as the drinks disappeared, our talk would deepen, veering into dreams and confessions, a kind of raw honesty amplified by vodka and gin.

Later, there were the late-night jam sessions at Alberta Pub, where the hum of a guitar competed with the clinking of pint glasses. Beer bottles as numerous as ideas tossed into the air scattered across the table like punctuation marks in a conversation that had no intention of ending. Someone would start a melody, tentative at first, and then voices would join in, loose and unpolished but full of heart. The hours passed unnoticed, blurring into a haze of music, voices, and amber-colored light.

And then there were the solitary nights—the candlelit hours when I’d sit at my small desk, a bottle of Rioja within reach, the glow of the flame casting flickering shadows on the page. I’d tell myself the wine was necessary, that it softened the edges of my thoughts and let the words flow more freely. I was certain, in those hours, that I was touching something profound, that the magic was just out of reach but close enough to taste. The wine was more than a drink; it was a companion, a co-conspirator in my pursuit of meaning.

Looking back, I feel the romance I attached to those moments, almost palpable—the camaraderie, the creativity, the sense that anything was possible. But the mirror also reveals the shadows: the mornings after, when my mind was sluggish and the words from the night before seemed much less profound. The conversations that felt so alive in the moment dissolved into fragments I couldn’t quite make shape of. The moments of brilliance I thought I was chasing obscured by the very haze I’d created.

It’s not that those nights weren’t meaningful—they were. They shaped me, gave me memories I treasure and lessons I carry. But they also remind me of the fine line between indulgence and dependence, between spontaneity and escapism, and how easy it is to confuse one for the other.

Dry January and the Long Shadow of Alcohol

The New York Times recently reported on the Surgeon General’s push for cancer warnings on alcohol, a call to strip away the subtle veneer of glamor that alcohol has long worn in our culture. The article doesn’t flinch—it lays out the risks with stark clarity: heightened cancer risk, liver damage, and the cumulative toll that even moderate drinking can exact on the body over time. It’s the kind of truth that feels both necessary and uncomfortable, like staring too long into a mirror that reflects more than you were ready to see.

For me, the article doesn’t ignite a crusade but rather stirs a quiet contemplation. I haven’t sworn off drinking entirely this January—there’s still wine in my kitchen and the occasional thought of opening it on a slow evening. But the idea lingers, nudging me to reassess. What’s the role of alcohol in my life? Is it celebration or crutch? A tool for connection or avoidance?

Alcohol has a way of embedding itself into the stories we tell about ourselves, especially in the arts. The mythos of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Kerouac is inseparable from their whiskey-soaked pages and wine-stained letters. They’ve been framed as romantic figures, tortured geniuses chasing transcendence through the bottom of a bottle. Their works often read like fevered confessions, the bottle both muse and antagonist.

And yet, these stories are tinged with tragedy. Hemingway’s brilliance was eclipsed by his eventual collapse into depression and alcoholism. Fitzgerald’s jazz-soaked prose could not buoy him from the despair that marked his later years. Kerouac, once a voice for freedom and spontaneity, became a cautionary tale of creative self-destruction.

The haze of intoxication, so often framed as the key to inspiration, isn’t the same as the art itself. It doesn’t foster brilliance so much as mask insecurity, numbing the fear that we’re not enough without it. The seductive nature of alcohol lies in its ability to quiet the critic within, to make the impossible seem possible—but the cost is often a heavy one.

The Surgeon General’s warning feels like a moment of reckoning, not just for society at large but for me personally. It’s a reminder that the stories we tell about alcohol—whether through literature, music, or our own lives—are incomplete if they don’t also acknowledge its shadows.

Dry January, even in my half-commitment, becomes less about abstinence and more about curiosity. What happens when I remove the haze? What do I find when the wine glass is replaced with tea, when the late-night buzz is swapped for the clear stillness of an early morning? Perhaps the answers are less dramatic than I imagine, but the very act of asking feels like a step toward something quieter, sharper, more real.

The Nature of Bucket Lists

A bucket list is an act of defiance—a whispered rebellion against time. It’s a way of saying, I will not let life pass unnoticed; I will claim my moments. But it’s also a quiet reckoning with mortality, a recognition that the clock is ticking.

The idea of this list, for me, has always been both dream and anchor. I imagine myself walking the Camino de Santiago, the ancient trail stretching out before me, each step a prayer. I picture a hot air balloon lifting me into the sky, the world below rendered small and impossibly beautiful. I want to see as many great musicians as I can while they’re still here—and while I am too. I want to publish another book, to hold its weight in my hands and know that my words might outlive me.

These aren’t just activities. They’re longings, deeply rooted in the need to feel alive, connected, and present. They remind me that life isn’t measured in years but in moments—the raw elation when you’re lifted into the air, the quiet satisfaction of mastering a new craft, the awe of hearing a familiar song played live for the first time.

Maybe a bucket list isn’t about checking off milestones, but about seeking the flash—the spark of being alive, fully and without hesitation, in the face of all that is fleeting.

Looking Both Ways

Driving back from Costco, the Mexican sun dipping low behind the hills, I glance at my mother. She’s quiet, lost in thought, or perhaps in the echoes of Joni’s California playing through the car. I wonder how much of her life feels like it’s been lived in song, how many memories she holds that are shaped by melody and rhythm. Just then, she pipes up and says, “You know, this song reminds me of hitchhiking south on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley back in the hippie days,” a broad smile spreading across her face, her eyes glinting with a flicker of youthful mischief.

At this age, I find myself at a crossroads. My twenties feel like a distant country I once inhabited—the future, though uncertain, feels urgent—a canvas waiting for me to pick up the brush, inviting me to create with intention, to move with purpose.

As Pema Chödrön writes in How We Live is How We Die:

“This very moment is the perfect teacher, and it’s always with us. Just seeing what’s going on—that’s the teaching right there.”

This moment—the drive, the music, the mundane task of gathering groceries and creature comforts—is a lesson in presence, in finding connection amidst the routine. The song changes, the sun dips lower, and the landscape softens into shadow, but something lingers: the sense that life is made not of grand gestures but of these fleeting, shimmering instants.

It’s in the cadence of Joni’s voice, the warmth of my mother’s singing, the quiet contemplation of a list that grows not just with things to do, but with ways to be. This is the flash—brief, illuminating, and wholly alive—that reminds me the moments we chase and the ones we stumble upon are often the same.