Is This Sanity?

DURING THE LAST YEARS of my drinking, I was fully aware that I was heading toward insanity or death, and I couldn't understand why people made so much of it, as though if I stopped drinking, I'd live forever. People who don't drink, I used to point out, are headed for much the same things: senility and death. I preferred to precede the inevitable with a few years of gay, full living, rather than decades of fussing over my health so that I could eventually wear dentures and a hearing aid and try to remember the names of people I'd known most of my life.