Great idea:
Poorly executed:
That’s three 6-foot USB cables, scarcely bigger than the Amazon Frustration-Free label. True, opening the boxes was frustration-free, but at least ten of those cables would have fit in just one of the smaller boxes.
The first time I got shot (27)
So of course everybody eventually had their own pet junkie. (258)
I just trod on the neck of one of them while Tony did the other one in. (265)
Fat Jacques was our cook, who now doubled as the heroin dealer. . . . Jacques emerged because I said, “Who knows how to get some good shit around here?” (297)
We’d pull into Monte Carlo for lunch. Have a chat with either Onassis’s lot or Niarchos’s (300)
We use to go to Saint-Tropez to score all the bitches. (301)
And they threw us a bag of weed. And in exhange we told them which were the best whorehouses in town. [Socializing with a US Navy ship in the Mediterranean] (301)
Switzerland was my base for the next four years or so. I couldn’t live in France for legal reasons or in Britain for tax reasons. (337)
The way it was explained to me, the winner is the one who can make a quick horizontal cut across the other’s forehead. The blood will fall like a curtain. (345)
I don’t mind a polite arrest. It was their manners. (365)
One of my [Freddie Sessler] biggest pleasures has always been the ritual of opening a sealed bottle of cocaine. (373)
He [Marlon, his 7-year-old son] acted beyond his age. Necessary when we were being busted. “Er, Dad?” “Yeah?” (He’s waking me up, shaking me.) “The men in the blue suits are downstairs.”
And I didn’t know that I’d fractured three ribs on one side and perforated the other lung until a month later. (532)
My Recipe for Bangers and Mash (525)
Finally, one dawn when the time was running out, I said, for fuck’s sake, of course you can marry her [his daughter], and threw him a skull bracelet to remember the moment. (527)
There was Syphilis, a big wolfhound I had. (529)
I accidentally disposed of Ronnie’s pet parakeet. I thought it was a toy alarm clock that had gone wrong. (531)
Crocodile breath. You don’t want to feel it. (534)
It wasn’t too long after Mick’s ribbon cutting that he called me to say, I’ve got to tell you this now: Tony Blair is insisting that I accept a knighthood. (534)
[Paul McCartney] just turned up, said he’d found out where I lived from my neighbor Bruce Willis. (537)
And I had messages from Jerry Lee Lewis, from Willie Nelson too. Bill Clinton sent me a note, get well soon, my dear friend. The opening line of my letter from Tony Blair was “Dear Keith, you’ve always been one of my heroes . . .” England’s in the hands of somebody who I’m a hero of? It’s frightening. (542)
Indeed.
_______________________________
Richards, Keith and James Fox. Life. 1st ed. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2010.
This is our new front door that I’m finishing:
In the dining room, because that’s the only place that works. When I do just about any home-improvement project, and especially anything involving permanently pigmented liquids, I tend to make a huge mess and inexplicably end up surrounded by every tool we’ve ever owned. Hence, the perimeter of the dining room here. Even I can’t figure out how the mess got so big when all I’m doing is staining and varnishing new wood. As his name implies, Captain OCD does not do well with messes such as this, but he does a very good job of not complaining.
Because I’m also lazy, I often convince myself that I’ll be very careful and so don’t need to change into old clothes before prying open the can of dark brown, oil-based stain. But every time I don’t change out of my paint- and stain-free clothes, those clothes end up as my new painting clothes. Perhaps I’ve grown up a bit, because this time I’ve been careful to change into old clothes before so much as looking at the can of varnish. After changing into the same T-shirt and sweat pants I’ve worn the last couple of days while working on the door, I wiped on a fresh coat of varnish last night before I went to bed. Once in bed, I was surprised at how strong the varnish smell was in our bedroom.
Not till I got up this morning did I realize that I forgot to change and slept in the varnish-splashed T-shirt.
Then:
Now:
Not sure what Captain OCD, on the right, said that C2, in the middle, found amusing, and C1, on the left, found horrific. You can see that Captain OCD wore his good watch to the commencement.
Friends since they met when they were two years old, twenty years ago. Both new college graduates, from schools on opposite sides of the country.
A perfect day for someone else to begin planting the garden in the old hot tub in the deck.
The dirt on those jeans is one day’s accumulation. Now you know how they get that way.
It would be easier for me to poke my eyes out with a fork than to plunge my gloveless fingertips into the dirt like that.
Those things on the ends of his arms? Tools.
This is not the way to train the puppy (6 months old here) to stay off the couch.
Spring break is so hard.