https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/17/magazine/willie-nelson.html
"Willie Nelson has a long history of tempting, and cheating, death. In 1969,
when his home in Ridgetop, Tenn., caught fire, he raced into the burning house
to save two prized possessions, his guitar and a pound of “Colombian grass.” He
has emphysema, the consequence of a near-lifetime of chain smoking that began
in childhood, when he puffed on cedar bark and grapevines, before turning to
cigarettes and then — famously, prodigiously — to marijuana. In 1981, he was
taken to a hospital in Hawaii after his left lung collapsed while he was
swimming. He underwent a voluntary stem-cell procedure in 2015, in an effort to
repair his damaged lungs. Smoking has endangered his life, but it also, he
thinks, saved it: He has often said that he would have died long ago had he not
taken up weed and laid off drinking, which made him rowdy and self-destructive.
Now, in his late 80s, he has reached the age where getting out of bed each
morning can be construed as a feat of survival. “Last night I had a dream that
I died twice yesterday,” he sang in 2017, “But I woke up still not dead again
today.”
Still, some close calls are closer than others. One evening in early March
2020, the singer and his wife, Annie, were sitting outside the sprawling log
cabin residence at their ranch in Spicewood, Texas, in the Hill Country about
30 miles northwest of Austin. It was warm and clear. The sun was going down.
“We were watching the sunset,” Annie recalled not long ago. “And these little
lights started to zip across the sky. The first one kind of flashed past in the
distance. Then there was a second, which went by a little closer. All of a
sudden, the light went right past us — like, two feet over Will’s head.”
The couple scrambled into the house and got down on the floor. According to
Annie, the neighbors were “having another one of their gun parties. Apparently
they got drunk and left a bunch of kids with semiautomatic rifles.” The police,
she said, explained that the lights came from tracer bullets. “I said, ‘Are
those even legal?’ But of course, nuclear weapons are legal in Texas. I told
the police to please just pass along this message: ‘Dude, you don’t want to be
the one that kills Willie Nelson. Especially in Texas.’”
“Anyway,” she said, “that was the beginning of our Covid quarantine.”"
Via Esther Schindler, who wrote "This is a great article. Funny, thoughtful,
poignant. Recommended."
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
