Drinking and smoking yourself to death aren’t as cool as they used to be.
From Breathing Lessons, one of 296 sayings written by John Sarris over thirty years.
From Alfred’s journal
There is an old man who comes to the bench by the hardware store on Tuesdays, and today he had a paper cup of coffee instead of what he used to bring. He told the pigeons, and so also me, that his brother went at sixty-one and it was not romantic, it was a hospital room with a television bolted to the wall. When I was younger I thought the poets I admired were burning something beautiful, that the glass and the cigarette were part of the writing. Drinking and smoking yourself to death aren't as cool as they used to be. I have watched a good many things die outdoors and none of them looked like a photograph. What I cannot work out is when it changed, or whether it was ever true and we only agreed to say so.
He reads what you tell him and writes a page of his journal back, with a few of these chosen for you. It costs nothing and asks for nothing.
More like it
- Breathing is the metronome of life.
- I'm too old to have a mid-life crisis.
- We take many things for granted that become precious once we lose them.
- It hurts more pulling out of a trap than getting caught in one.
- Animals know when to sniff and when to bristle.
- Waiting for someone else to change gives you a reason not to.