Wednesday, July 16, 2003

Going overboard

A friend of mine, a noted Mark Twain impersonator, tells a story attributed to the author that's always been a favorite of mine when justifying one vice or another.

Twain told of being called to the bedside of a dying friend. "Tilly," he said, taking the woman's hand, "if you listen to my advice and do just what I say, I can cure you."

The woman gave a feeble cough, sat up meekly and looked into his eyes. "What must I do, Mr. Twain?" she asked.

"Well, first," Twain said, "you've got to give up smoking cigars. You've got to stop drinking liquor to excess. You must stop carrying on until all hours of the morning, and you must cease carousing with young men of questionable morals."

"But Mr. Twain, I can't give up those things," Tilly protested. "I don't smoke. I don't drink liquor. I have been in bed by nine every night of my life, and I have never carried on with young men."

"Well, there it was," Twain would say, warming to his audience. "She was doomed. If she had cultivated just one or two of those habits, they might have saved her. She was like a sinking ship with no freight to throw overboard."

I certainly don't have the frontier eloquence of Missouri's favorite son, but I've made a few observations recently as I endeavor to "toss some freight overboard" and rearrange the hold.

1. If you tell your friends you are writing a book or remodeling your house, it becomes, for the duration of the project, the principal topic of conversation. "How is the book coming?" they'll ask every time they see you. "Finished the house yet?" After enough annoying inquiries, you'll be tempted to chuck the project altogether.
   
   It is a similarly bad idea to tell your friends you're planning to change your life.


2. Like a toaster oven or a hair dryer or a computer, it is far easier and more expeditious to make a new person than it is to fix an existing one. Or so I'm told anyway, having no intention of procreation and all the messiness attendant thereto.


3. If you get off on instant gratification, you had better get over that right now.


4. Young men of questionable morals are, frankly, a damned good reason for charting a new course and swabbing your decks. Just don't ask any questions you're not prepared to hear the answers to. Finding out that the lad you're flirting with was two years old when you were a high school senior can lead to crying jags, and that just gets in the way of the work.

Temporarily buoyed by some air pockets in the lower decks, I go bobbing along on a sea as still as the tomb.