During my infancy as a writer, I idolized Jack Kerouac and On The Road, a novel I later realized serves as a gateway drug to literature for a certain type of young man—which, in my mind, makes the novel quite useful.
Kerouac wasn’t the only person I was into. There was also Charles Bukowski, Henry Miller, and Hunter S. Thompson.
What did all of these guys have in common—aside from excellent prose? They lived hard. They drank a lot, did a lot of drugs, reportedly slept with lots of women, and often found themselves in questionable situations.
During this period in my life, in which I was just beginning to take this vocation seriously, I believed that being a writer, or at least being the sort of writer I decided I wanted to be—exciting, stimulating, and even polarizing—required living the way in which these early heroes of mine lived.
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