60 Things Worth Shortening Your Life For
It's from Esquire Magazine and without getting too specific, the list includes (among other things) unhealthy but delicious foods, extreme surfing, organ donation, bullfighting, butter, drugs, and punching Barry Bonds in the face.
In short, you really have to read the whole thing.
Here's my favorite:
32. Carousing with the Mob (by Colum McCann)It happened one night in a bar near the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, Russia. I was researching a novel and found myself deep in conversation with a number of ballet dancers. Don't laugh. Dancers drink. Dancers smoke. Dancers believe in the short life.
Two in the morning. We had all been overserved. It was time for one last song. I closed my eyes and belted it out. The bartender grabbed me by the shoulder. "Shut up," he said. I've heard the complaints before. "Shut the f-ck up," he said. "Look."
I turned and saw a number of impeccably dressed men walking into the bar. They were packing guns. One of them stopped and stared at me. It was as if all the oxygen was gone from the air. They cased the bar and abruptly left. I started singing again. The bartender grabbed my arm. Seconds later the real mob -- without their well-dressed bodyguards -- walked in: fat and unshaven and scruffy. Each had a bouquet of beautiful women on his arm.
"Leave," my ballet friends whispered. "Leave now -- and quietly."I walked across the room. I picked out the meanest fucker of them all and hunkered down beside him. He looked as if he'd just strangled Vladimir Putin's mistress. There are times in life when we must throw out the anchor, even when it's unattached to a rope. "You want to hear an Irish song?" I asked him. He stared at me, his mouth quivering. I was suddenly quite sober. He took me by the collar. I could feel my heart beating in my cheap white shirt. He said nothing but slowly broke into a grin.
The drunk man often navigates by the stars beyond the ceiling. Still to this day I cannot remember what song it was I sang, but I do recall that fifteen minutes later I was party to the spectacular sight of three great Kirov ballerinas dancing on the long wooden table of the Shamrock Irish Bar on Dekabristov Street, performing ballet moves with three very large Russian mafiosi, shots of vodka thrown back and forth, and the dancers outlasting them, and outcharming them, with ease.
As they left the bar -- it was five in the morning -- the Mafia leader put his arm around me and said that he would help me if ever I was in trouble. "What do you do?" I asked, trying hard to be naive. He turned and looked me straight in the eye. "I am . . ." he said, stumbling toward the door, "...I am a Russian baby-sitter."
-- Colum McCann
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Categories: About Me
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Oh great, just what I needed, more "devil’s choices." As if fast motorcycles, cars, airplanes, women and food weren’t going to kill me soon enough (actually, I have given up the last two for (far) better alternatives).
Years ago, when I was (mis) diagnosed as hypercholesterolemic, they wanted to put me on a “restrictive” diet, i.e. no dairy, no meat fat of any kind. I asked, “So Doc, how many years will I lose for not giving up pizza and ice cream?”
The last thing I want to regret when I’m about to die is how I lived.
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April 20, 2007 02:36 AM