MY WHOLE-LIFE RÉSUMÉ

Here are a few of the things which make me feel like my years on earth haven't been a complete waste of time. When I'm old - older than now, I mean - I'll look back on this list and say, "That... that's what made it all worthwhile." 

I played on an ultimate frisbee team that won the gold medal at the World Ultimate Frisbee Championships, so that makes me a "gold medal athlete." This from a guy who was voted in high school least likely to complete the fifty-yard dash.

I've published several books, and because even in this day and age there's something about print that says permanence, there's an odds-on chance that, even after I'm dead, someone will still be reading words I've written. 

I worked as a proposition player (prop) in a poker room once. I only lasted three days. I lost so much money so fast that I couldn't afford to keep the job. But it's still cool to be able to say that I worked as a prop once.

I've been fired from a job.  More than one, in fact.  I consider this a point of pride.  Anyone who's gone through life without having been fired from a job is probably (okay possibly) playing it way too safe. 

I have won several poker tournaments. My mother must be so proud.

On a bright spring day in the early 1980s I jumped out of an airplane with a parachute. Woo-hoo!

I have brewed my own beer.

I have crashed many parties, with or without my own beer.  Once I crashed a bunch of Halloween parties by going costumed as a party crasher.

I recruited and trained New Zealand's first generation of situation comedy writers. How the heck did that ever wash up on my beach?

Speaking of beaches, I once wrote my name and address on the back of a frisbee and threw it in the ocean in Fiji. It turned up in Australia six months later and the couple who found it sent me a picture.

I married the woman I love.

Back when they still had such things, I made a record album, a folk-sounding thing called Word Processor. One of its songs, "I Smoke 'Cause I Like to Cough," got played on NPR's All Things Considered. 

In the late 1990s I met my great-uncle, Bernard Vorhaus, a Hollywood director who had been blacklisted in the 1950s and had lived in exile ever since. I asked him if he felt badly about being branded a communist. "Hell," he said, "I was a communist. Still am! Why do you think I left?"

I owned an IBM PC Junior, the dinosaur of the computer age. It transformed me as a writer -- the "delete" key set me free.

In a little tavern in California gold country once I found 2000 poker chips dating from the mid-20th century, and bought the whole lot for peanuts. It was like finding buried treasure, and way more satisfying than panning for gold. 

I've taken psychedelic drugs.  

I've seen Stonehenge.

Not on the same day.

I pissed off William Goldman by trying to write a sequel to Magic without his permission.

I've seen my name on the credit crawl of television shows and films.  I never imagined that that would happen.

I've been to Europe dozens of times, but, thankfully, to Malaysia only once. You know the expression "tropical paradise?" Kuala Lumpur is just like that, only without the paradise part.

I've been to Nicaragua more times than any chele**, possibly, except for some business types, CIA operatives and Southern Baptist missionaries. Off and on over three years, I helped make a television show there designed to "teach the young people of Nicaragua to think for themselves and practice safe sex."

I have received residual checks from the Writers Guild of America. They come in green envelopes. I call them "greenies," and love them quite a lot.

I bought Harlan Ellison's old Army uniform at a charity auction. It came with a letter of provenance in which he thanked me for buying it and declared, "Youse is good people."

I wrote more than 5000 questions for Sports Jeopardy Online.  That's a whole lotta sports trivia -- none of which I can now remember, of course.

I don't want to sound all mushy, but I had a family who loved me well.

I acted in a movie; I could get a SAG card if I wanted.

On a day when the streets of downtown Kingston exploded in riot, I was uptown teaching a group of Jamaican women how to write short films about women.  Can you say cognitive dissonance?  

During my four minutes of fifteen minutes of fame, I was described by CNN as "the sage of poker of our time."

There's so much more I could add to my whole-life résumé, and no doubt will in time. (One could say that I'm adding to it every day.) But I want to stress that my whole-life résumé can in no way be as important to you as your own. Take a moment to jot down a list of things that have brought your life joy. Do it now. It's a thing that will bring your life joy.