I love lists.  Lists are the lifeblood of civilization.  After all, how did the caveman conquer the mighty Mammoth?  He made lists.  Mammoths, lacking the opposable thumb and language, were unable to make lists.  To whit:

1- Check wife for lice   2- Pray to sun and moon god and the Flying Spaghetti Monster  3- Kill neighbor for trying to check wife for lice  4- Find recipe for caveman stew (caveman meat provided by clan who lives down by the river)  5- Arm everyone with spears  6- Find mammoths  7- Stampede mammoths toward cliff  8- Put other neighbor in front of stampeding mammoths as he also seems to want to check wife for lice  9- Try and figure out why apples fall down and not up

Here is the mammoth list ……………………………………….

As you can see, the mammoth (as well as a couple of overly friendly cavemen) are about to meet their demise.  Lists are the chasm that exists between man and animal.  Just for fun, a mammoth list would look thus:

1- Eat grass  2- Crap grass  3- Eat grass  4- Crap grass 5- Take a nap  6-Eat grass  7- Crap grass 8- Stomp the shit out of some stupid bipeds who are trying to stampede me off a cliff 9- Eat grass

If only mammoths, if only.  But, as we know, mammoths exist only as frozen mummies in the Siberian tundra.  Idiots.

Anyway, I bring up list making because my wife refuses to make lists.  She abhors lists in the same way that nature abhors vacuums.  I, too, abhor vacuums.  I can’t stand the noise they make.  I know I am talking about two different kinds of vacuums.  It is just a pet peeve.  Like when people don’t make lists and then we have to go back to the grocery store on back to back days during the Christmas break and stand in line with a bunch of fat people in Packer jackets and camouflage whose kids have crap all over their face.  Gross.  I don’t understand this lack of hygiene.  It’s not like soap and water are in short supply.  The first item on their list should be a damned wash cloth.

As noted, lists make life worth living.  Without them, the world descends into a Dantean chaos, fraught with blue devils and Virgil.  (If you have ever read the Aeneid, you have known true boredom.  On the top of lists of What Not to Do: 1- Read the Aeneid.  No wonder Dante sent Virgil to hell.)

List of people in hell:  1- Hitler  2 through 27 million- Hitler’s helpers  2a- Ronald Reagan 3- Stalin  4- Darwin (God did that, dummy!)  5- Virgil

Other things not to do:  1- Ride horses described as “a little headstrong”  2- Fly in a plane (I just watched Sully which confirmed everything I already feared)  3- Roller skate in a buffalo herd  4- Call bison buffalo   5- Vacation in Buffalo  6- Urinate on a wire that doesn’t appear to be electrified  7- Pick lice from your neighbor’s wife (It’s in the bible you know)  8- Drink a mystery shot  9- Drink six mystery shots  10- Pull someone’s finger  11- Listen to someone who says you have “plenty of room” when backing up your new truck  12- Believe in “trickle down” economic theory  13- Be urinated on by a woman in Buffalo after drinking half a dozen mystery shots.

I will refrain from adding the aforementioned finger into this final list item.  Decorum is also on my list.

Of course, the above list is inexhaustible.  I’m just using it as an example.  The list could also be Things to get at the grocery store so we don’t have to be tortured on the return trip.

For example.