brinksmanship

"
      While I’m writing this, my mother calls to say my grandfather’s had a series of strokes. He’s unable to swallow, and his lungs are filling with fluid. A friend, maybe my best friend, calls to say he has lung cancer. My grandfather’s five hours away. My friend’s across town. Me, I have work to do.
      The waitress used to say, “What will you be doing when you’re old men?”
      I used to tell her, “I’ll worry about that when I get there.”
      If I get there.
      I’m writing this right on deadline.
      My brother-in-law used to call this behavior “brinksmanship,” the tendency to leave things until the last moment, to imbue them with more drama and stress and appear the hero by racing the clock.
      “Where I was born,” Georgia O’Keefe used to say, “and were and how I lived is unimportant.”
      She said, “It is what I have done with where I have been that should be of any interest.”

      I’m sorry if this all seems a little rushed and desperate.
      It is.

"

chuck palahniuk, stranger than fiction