(Side note: isn't it annoying when people announce that they heard something on NPR? You know they're just bragging about the fact that they listen to NPR. But I digress.)
Anyway, I heard on NPR that Mark Twain smoked 20 to 30 cigars a day. I don't even know how that's possible when you factor in eating and sleeping, but he did (is NPR gonna lie about Mark Twain? I don't think so).
The great writers always seem to have unhealthy vices. Look at F. Scott Fitzgerald. He drank 20 to 30 glasses of scotch each day. (Ok, maybe not that much, but I'm probably close, considering the fact that he managed to drink himself to death by the age of 44 [before he finished The Last Tycoon, the beginning of which leads me to believe it could have surpassed even Gatsby]. But, again, I digress.)
I began to wonder what kind of unhealthy vices I could cultivate to enhance my writing skills (that's how it works, right?). I tallied up my unhealthier activities and came up with the joy I get from eating shredded cheese out of the pouch in front of the open fridge and the effortlessness with which I can sleep for 12 hours at a time.
That probably won't turn me into a Twain or a Fitzgerald, but it might make me a better blogger. Plus, I'll need something to do indoors when my cheese-eating, sedentary lifestyle makes it so that I can't make it out of the house without the jaws of life and a flatbed truck.
Never let it be said that I didn't suffer for my art. :)
I still say Gatsby is tops.... Good point, though, about the relationship between artists and their vices. I wonder if the vices merely point back to the frailty of the artists, and it is this frailty that causes both the vice and the genius. So, Fitzgerald and Twain and Faulkner suffered, and their suffering produced great art and great vices.
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