I’ve been working for weeks to get a new project up and walking on its spindly legs before a pride of lions happens upon us. The Naked Cartoonist is my members-only newsletter for weirdos who enjoy thinking around corners and exploring the parking lot carnival of human civilization.

You’ll also get photos, videos, and non-cartoon art from my personal life, and I’ll throw in some giveaways and other fun surprises now and then to thank you for your company.

Below are two free articles to give you a general idea of where I might be going and how I might get there. Both have similar themes but one is more humor than philosophy, the other more philosophy than humor.

When you’re ready to try it out, CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFO. I look forward to (metaphorically!) getting naked with you.

Bucket List Dos and Don’ts

Your bucket list should not bring you closer to the bucket.

by Dan Piraro

(4 min read)

A lot of people use the term “bucket list” to describe things they want to do before they die. I recently came across an online list of some of the most common items on people’s bucket lists and found some of them to be curious choices if not flirtations with the Grim Bucket itself.

A quick search of the origin of the term “kick the bucket” revealed something surprising, as well.

Since at least the 18th century, the term has been a part of our English vernacular as a euphemism for dying. But what has dying got to do with a bucket and why would we kick it? The etymology is fairly macabre.

In the days before convenient (and deadly) processed meat, people used to kill and butcher their own animals. There was a wooden contraption of some sort that they’d hang an animal from by its feet while slaughtering it. As it died, the twitches and spasms would make it kick the wooden thing, which for some reason was called “the bucket.” Against all odds, those death throes, and the poor beast’s innards pouring onto the ground gave birth to a light-hearted phrase that eventually inspired a charming Hollywood buddy comedy. Ah, the strange twists and turns of human civilization.

So people now commonly have “bucket lists”: things they want to do before they die. Here are some common ones according to another dubious twist of civilization, the internet:

Skydiving: This is a romantic name for an admittedly questionable activity: jumping out of a fully operational airplane while still in the air. It should be called “fate tempting,” or, at the very least, something more accurate like “dirtdiving” because the sky you’re falling from isn’t the most important element, it’s the planet rushing toward you at 120 mph. As hard as it is to believe, people pay money to put their entire lives and the emotional well-being of everyone who loves them at risk of abruptly ending a few minutes later. To do this is to take everything you’ve learned, achieved, and cherished, as well as all of your hopes and dreams for the future, the lives you may irrevocably change for the better, the cures for terminal diseases you may discover, the hilarious cartoons you may draw, and the children you may have and all that they may contribute to life—all of that and more—and trust it to 2.5 lbs of nylon and some string. The only thing I can think of that would be more dangerous would be to dress as a tree and enter a cage full of hungry tigers on the assumption that they will think you are not food.

Okay, I admit that I did this once (dirtdiving, not pretending to be a tree among carnivores). It’s as scary as having an affair with Taylor Swift would be, knowing that her boyfriend is a 250 lb. NFL tight end. But I’ll never do it again. (Jump out of a plane, not the Swift thing.) I’ve checked that off my bucket list without kicking it.

Visit every continent: This is a pretty popular bucket list item and one I used to fantasize about. But it made more sense before the airline industry was taken over by fear of terrorism and stratospheric greed. I can no longer afford to fly to every continent—I can barely afford to fly from Mexico to Texas anymore—nor am I Buddhist enough to tolerate that many strolls through airport security. If I have to endure one more strip search and a repeat of the baggage X-ray ordeal because I thoughtlessly left half a bottle of water in my backpack, I’m going to switch to traveling by donkey or kayak. If only so many people had not brought down commercial airliners with a couple of mouthfuls of water!

Climb a mountain, run a marathon, go bungee jumping: These are all the same. If you were the kind of person to do these things, you’d have already done them. If you’re not, you’re probably going to get maimed or killed. I recommend watching a few movies about tragic mountain climbing incidents and see if that doesn’t quell your desire to conquer the Himalayas. Then test your marathon suitability by running around the block and seeing if you think you want to do that 894 times without stopping to empty your bladder or colon. Then notice that bungee jumping is the same as dirtdiving, except it is a rubber band and the tensile strength of your spinal cord that stops you from embedding yourself in the ground without a shovel or a coffin.

Swim with sharks: This is on the list of popular bucket list items I saw and it confounds me. If you’re really planning to swim with sharks, I’d advise that at the very least, you wear a tree costume and hope they cannot smell your edibility.

As for me, I’m not prone to bucket lists and have no burning desire to do something special before my brief residence in this sack of animated meat that people call “Dan” is over. I’m a big believer in the adage, “The way you spend your days is the way you spend your life.” I spend my days writing, drawing, painting, laughing at my stupid dogs, and loving the people in my life. If I can keep doing those things until my consciousness wanders off to another dimension, that’ll be good enough for me. Sharks, tigers, and racing toward the surface of a planet at more than a hundred miles an hour don’t have to be part of it.

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FOMO, Bucket Lists, and Reincarnation

You might be surprised what a little uncertainty can do for you.

by Dan Piraro

(12 min read)

For decades, I reflexively pooh-poohed all things “woo-woo.” Things like the power of crystals, energy healing, homeopathy, applied kinesiology, a higher power, and reincarnation were all in the category of things not proven by science, and that’s all I needed to know. If science didn’t recognize it, neither did I. There were two fundamental reasons for my fervent stonewalling: 1) I didn’t go to college, and 2) I was raised amid a sea of hypocrisy. Don’t worry, I’ll explain.

The College Thing:

As a kid, I was a very good artist. In high school, I was certain I wanted to build my life around the arts: drawing, painting, sculpting, writing, music, theater, you name it. I was equally certain I did not want to live as my father was living, going to an office building downtown five days each week to a job that systematically smothered his soul. No wonder he left the house every morning looking as though he were dressed for a funeral.

As high-school graduation approached, I was told I needed to plot my college career, but I did not want to go to college. My parents were not cool with that and my mother somehow managed to secure for me a fine arts scholarship to a major university. To appease her, I attended for a semester and then dropped out. I was on my way! (To a string of minimum-wage jobs.)

That decision instantly installed a big, invisible chip on my shoulder. My status as an uneducated boob with a minimum-wage job did not match my self-image. I began to project and protect my intelligence vehemently. Part of that ego facade was to embrace anything the intelligentsia espoused, and one of their favorite pastimes was to ridicule pseudo-science and religion.

That brings us to my second reason.

The Sea of Hypocrisy Thing:

I grew up in a part of the U.S. called the Bible Belt, which has a level and quality of religious ideology that can drown a person in contradictions. They preach about miracles, but the populace lives the same sort of un-miraculous lives as everyone else. They preach about loving one’s neighbor, but they overwhelmingly vote for politicians who demonize immigrants, non-whites, women, and the LGBTQ+ community, and build physical and financial walls between the in-crowd and the “undesirables,” all while cutting education and aid to the poor. They also violently defend the right to stockpile guns.

What all of that has to do with anything Jesus reportedly said is anyone’s guess, but I was certain it was not a club I wanted to belong to.

They could also be tremendously superstitious. A surprising number of them are afraid of Ouiji Boards.

Yes, in those parts, some evangelical sects still preach that Ouiji Boards are a hotlink to Satan, giving the Dark Lord a way to influence children and steal their souls; as though a soul were a candy bar you could slip into the sleeve of your coat and sneak out of the store with. I had my doubts. My sisters and I played with Ouiji Boards innumerable times and I can count on one hand the number of times it instructed us to kill our parents and burn down the house.

All of that put me in the same camp as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins. They were a couple of cranky intellectuals who were nobody’s fools, and that’s what I aspired to be.

Flash Forward Forty Years to Now-ish

As is often the case for people in the latter third of their life, I began to reassess my beliefs and opinions. My wife is particularly open-minded and I began to find that quality much more attractive than the know-it-all Professor Science role I’d been playing. Instead of slamming the door on anything that isn’t a part of the required curriculum at MIT, she tries things on without judgment to see how they fit. She doesn’t doubt anything proven by science (she had been a biology major) but neither does she think nothing exists in the universe that has not already been discovered and described. This open-minded approach worked so well for her that I found myself opening my mind, too, just to see what might wander in.

At first, I didn’t fling my mind open all at once, I just peered through the peephole. Then I opened the door a crack and peeked out with one eye, then two, and eventually, I risked facing the unknown fully with the door wide open. To my surprise, I found that exchanging my hardcore beliefs for uncertainty was tremendously liberating. Suddenly, I didn’t have to always be right for fear I’d be seen as stupid or gullible.

I didn’t immediately believe a bunch of weird stuff, but I did begin to notice things about my previous beliefs that were every bit as unproven as anything I had denounced. I found this new perspective to be much more fascinating than arrogantly pretending I know what reality is in all cases.

Reality is subject to our perceptions and beliefs, and everyone’s version of it varies from a little to a lot. Seen in this way, it is immediately obvious that we have some role in choosing our reality. Deciding if a glass is half empty or half full is a simple example of such a choice. I now advocate choosing one that makes you happy. Why the hell not?

I’d heard that science can be as much of a religion as religion. I didn’t get that at first but I do now.

For instance, living in Earth’s bubble, it is easy to assume that time is constant and spaces always have limits. But when you leave Earth, none of that is true; just ask Einstein. And what is gravity? It is something we all accept as a fundamental given and it is so ubiquitous it verges on boring. But get this: No one knows exactly what it is or what causes it. No one.

We’ve all heard that space is infinite, but what the hell?! How is anything infinite? Or eternal? Give me a moment to wipe down my walls because my head just exploded. Quantum Physicists now routinely say there is almost no chance there are not infinite other dimensions. What? Where? What’s the real estate market like there? Do they allow water bottles on planes?

Furthermore, we do not know what consciousness is or where it comes from, so how can we say with certainty whether it existed before our birth or lasts beyond death? And how did it start? Currently, we cannot know these things, and maybe we never will.

Here’s a big one: We do not know what Life is. That magical substance or force that makes something alive as opposed to a group of inert elements is as inexplicable as the enduring popularity of enormous, baggy pants that require a person to shuffle as though they’ve been surprised by a fire alarm while on the toilet. We know how to nurture life, how to feed it, how it reproduces, and how to kill it, but we’ve no idea how it started or what the force that animates things actually is. Not. A. Clue.

We’ve all heard that life probably started spontaneously when random elements were tossed together by chaos, but the most important word there is “probably.” Is that the best we can do? It’s like saying that airplanes probably began when some pieces of metal, some fabric, and a bag of pretzels were tossed into the air.

We can futz around with the “building blocks of life” forever and never create so much as a living bacterium, much less an Albert Einstein or even a toddler who can be taught to wave bye-bye.

To be clear, I am NOT denigrating science. Not even a little. Its accomplishments are the reason you’re reading this without my having to scratch it into a rock, walk to your cave, and hand it to you. It’s also the reason you didn’t die of polio or smallpox when you were a child.

Yes, the evolution of living things is an accepted fact—we’ve seen it happen—but how life got started in the first place is a mystery as opaque as where Bigfoot has been hiding all these centuries in a state as small as Arkansas. To believe as a “fact” that life emerged on this planet by accident is as religious as believing it started in the Garden of Eden. One myth is as good as another.

These are some of the mind-blowing things that came to light by allowing myself to be uncertain. And in doing so, I discovered there is tremendous power in uncertainty. In fact—and we pseudo-intellectuals love facts—being uncertain is the only way you can be certain you are not fully investing yourself in a falsehood.

Finally, We Come to Reincarnation

You’ve perhaps heard of the concept of “young souls” and “old souls.” We’ve all noticed that some people seem to naturally take a wiser, more philosophical view of life, endeavoring to know themselves more deeply and leave the world a better place for their having been here, while others just want a lot of money and power and the tacky crap that comes with it, and don’t give a thought to who gets hurt in the process. Long before I opened my metaphorical door to uncertainty and still thought I “knew” reincarnation was nonsense, I found the old soul/young soul model an extremely useful shorthand for describing this common phenomenon.

But what if some system of repetition is actually how things work? After all, eighty years isn’t nearly enough time to learn everything about our lives. That’s not even enough time to read all the books I’ve got stacked next to my bed, much less untangle the mysteries of existence and the universe. “One and done” seems hopelessly unfair.

Since we don’t know what consciousness is, much less where it comes from, we cannot say with certainty how long it lasts. Maybe, as so many wise “old souls” throughout history and across cultural and religious divides have asserted, consciousness is eternal. If so, maybe our consciousness takes multiple journeys in various bodies and circumstances in some kind of educational process. Perhaps as we gain experience and wisdom—though we don’t bring specific memories with us from life to life—our wisdom endures and our quality as humans slowly increases.

This would not only explain the difference between people like Mahatma Gandhi and Donald Trump but also why some children seem born with adult-level skills, what we call “talent.” And what is the harm in believing you’ve been here multiple times? I can see no major downside. (Well, one—I’ll get to that in a moment.)

But there are plenty of upsides. I was born with a lot of art talent. While still a young teenager, I could produce paintings and drawings with the skill of an adult professional. I’ve always felt like I was born knowing how and needed only to wait until my physical coordination matched the images in my mind. I now believe I’ve spent time as an artist before. Why not?

Maybe I did, maybe I didn’t, but a basic belief in this kind of nebulous system is also good for relieving FOMO (fear of missing out); I’ve done cool things before this life and I’ll do cool things in others later, so I don’t have to worry about never getting to visit China or master the didgeridoo. It also makes that huge stack of books that I want to read before I die seem less daunting. Anytime I’m tempted to think, “There just isn’t enough time,” I soothe myself by thinking, “I’ll get some of this done next time around.”

Of course, the one downside of believing we’ll be back again and again is that we may not relish the idea of seeing what kind of world the current trend toward authoritarianism will create, or what climate change will do to the planet.

But, since I can’t know those things and I’m choosing my reality anyway, I add a codicil: With accumulated wisdom, a consciousness’s lives tend to increase in ease and satisfaction. With a few exceptions like two divorces and chronic pain in my neck from a whiplash injury thirty years ago, this life hasn’t been too bad, and I expect my next one will be even better. For one thing, I learned from that whiplash injury that just because a light is green, you shouldn’t just sail through the intersection at full speed, lest some less patient soul is attempting to sneak through after their light has already turned red. I’ve also learned not to marry every woman I have the hots for. I’m definitely taking that bit of wisdom with me!

And if the world really is on a collision course with human stupidity and won’t be worth returning to, maybe my consciousness will choose to spend a few millennia in a less objectionable dimension with some of the fun characters folks meet during ayahuasca trips and the like. I just added that to the reality I’m creating because it makes me feel better. Who’s going to prove me wrong?

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