PEOPLE KEEP ASKING ME, “What are you going to do when you retire in June?” Along with that they want to know, “What’s on your bucket list?” I tease a lot and make up silly things on the fly, but mostly I’m honest when I say, “I don’t want to know.”

My bucket list is wispy and intangible. It’s mostly empty by design, with a few items rolling about in the bottom of the bucket. I want to be adrift, directionless, disconnected and mobile. I want to wake up each morning, for as long as I can stand it, with no agenda. I want to wear pajamas for as long as I like, and have fuel in the tank for the other times. I want every day’s agenda wide open to impulse and suggestion.

Nothing fills most of my bucket by design. Desire to come to terms with nothingness drives me. I want an extended multisensory hiatus. Shut down the conduits to my brain. Kill the feeds. Step back into the silence and calm to Nowheresville.

Being happy and still in a comfortable position between peaks and valleys without sensational distractions, no input but my own thoughts, no actions but by my own volition, inner calm and all that, that’s where I want to be. There I shall remain, until I can’t stand it anymore, then I’ll go do something.

Natural attraction at the time is how I will select my retirement hobbies. I don’t want to predict now what is in store. I’ll just smoke meat and play pinball waiting for it to happen.

For kicks, to celebrate my freedom, I have a few desires. I want to plan a trip on a Tuesday and leave on a Wednesday, then come back on a Monday, no, make that Tuesday, ah, heck, I’m staying until Thursday.

Dreams and urges of the open corral pixilate me. I want to be on holiday in Nevada City for a week and when it’s over, instead of driving directly back to Benicia, we drive to Florida for two weeks, then on to Gatlinburg.

Sunday nights will go through a positive connotative shift. Sunday nights will no longer mean, “Time to go home. We need to drive in weekend traffic. We’ve got to leave the party early. Got to go to work on Monday.”

Sunday nights will now come to mean, “It’s Sunday night? Huh. Sonovagun. Hey, turn that up. I love that song.”

To extend a simile with a metaphor I see becoming a senior and retiring like driving a motorcycle down the highway of life. We get to go between cars. We can travel during the week when the highways are less clogged. We can rent rooms at mid-week rates. We can book vacations for any off-season location on Earth, or in-season, what the heck. We still have the senior discount card to play.

I wish to go on an extended fishing trip. Fishing does not have to be involved. It needs to be a road trip. Highways won’t do. It also needs to include walking, hiking, maybe backpacking. It’s part of my search for nothingness. I want to sit along a river, build a fire while the coffee is perking, take long walks and reconnect with my natural self.

For a dozen years I was the backpacking adviser at the high school. We took off every chance we got, every vacation. Then I hurt my back in 2000 and couldn’t carry a pack or whitewater raft. The club dissolved.

After 12 years of chronic pain, one evening, two years ago, after a week of local adjustments because I was really suffering, I was rolling on my hardwood floor in the living room, on my sore spot, and POP! my back slipped back into place. It felt like ice water tingling down my legs. I stood up and realized I was standing differently. I was straighter. My back snapped back to normal after 12 years. Still works fine. I’m going back to the woods.

Nothingness is important to me because I need to see how I feel not teaching, being “Off the air.” No audience of youth with open ears and eyes to take in the wonders I describe — how will I deal with that? No more Dante. We turned out the lights in the Inferno this year. This week students are planning performance tributes to Dante’s central themes.

What will my extended quiet feel like? Inferno? Paradise? Will I settle in? Will I deprogram from the habit of talking to 33 people at a time? Will I sub?

June will come when it comes. No rush. I’m enjoying myself now. Every lesson is bit special this year. I’m savoring every novel, every discussion, every writing. At the end my activities, when I recollect my handouts — my life-long labored stapled manila packets of practice and quiz materials — I don’t have to refile them. Ker-plop they go into the recycle bin. Whee! Take it away.

I see senior students in the hallways who were once my freshman students. That was just yesterday, wasn’t it? How can they be seniors already? My, how time flies. No, I’m not anxious for June to get here.

How can I be a senior already?

Steve Gibbs teaches at Benicia High School and has written a column for The Herald since 1985.