As far as reading with “sleep deprivation”…that’s a condition I’ve been dealing with for the last 16 years…rarely getting more than 4 hours sleep at a time…unless I have some HST style ‘herbal relief’. Read into that what you will..but it’s a true condition…(and definitely ‘too much info’ haha.)

I picked up a new book last week. It’s called:

‘Hellraisers: The Life and Inebriated Times of Richard Burton, Richard Harris, Peter O’ Toole and Oliver Reed’.

I’m not a boozer, so I don’t actually know why this book appealed to me. And I’m definitely not the sort to pull wild & crazy drunken antics. Nor one to try proving my masculinity by how many shots I can drink. To me, that’s really ‘old-school behavior’.

But this generation of guys seemed to admire the fact that a ‘real-man’ was able to climb up drain-pipes and crawl into women’s windows…or else go on three day drunken binges where they woke up in other cities or countries…rarely remembering how they ever got there (and often looking outside to see their car smashed into a tree or something).

These guys prided themselves on being able to hold a bar-ful of people’s attention, for hours on end, with tales of their wild escapades. And oddly enough…this Oliver Reed fellow was always able to do a perfect ‘held push-up’, on a bar-counter…holding his body perfectly vertical…even after having consumed 126 pints in 24 hours (there’s a photo to prove it).

Yeah. This is definitely ‘old-school’ British and Welch behavior (and the sort of lifestyle that HST must have tried living up to).

This is one of the few non-fiction books I’ve ever read that doesn’t have any chapter breaks. And the writer does a fairly good job of telling the four different biographies in a sort of simultaneous chronological order.

Though this sort of bombastic behavior doesn’t appeal to me at all personally…it IS fun to read about drunken and famous millionaires whose main desire is to shock people with their zany antics. I can’t remember the French phrase for this syndrome (‘Terrible Infant’?) …but these guys really spent a lot of energy trying to prove who could do the wildest things.

In a way, I think they wanted to be thought of as the ‘maximized’ English version of the Rat Pack or something.

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