60 Things Worth Shortening Your Life For.

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"4. Giving a buddy a kidney.
You only need one. Hopefully.

5. Black Cat espresso from Intelligentsia Coffee & Tea.
A triple. Note the exceedingly heavy body, with chocolate, caramel, and dried-fruit notes. Also note that you're vibrating. That means it's working.

8. Butter.

9. Drugs.

11. Blowhole diving.
Jump in and get sucked by the current through tunnels forged over thousands of years of erosion. Timing is everything. It should feel like being flushed down a toilet, not like smashing your face on rock. Hone your skills at the "easy one" in Laguna Beach. (Ask a local.)

15. Smoking Cubans (In Cuba).

16. A night on the town with Kiefer Sutherland.

21. Smashing the cameras of paparazzi mercilessly hounding Angie, Scarlett, or Halle.

29. Playing tackle football past the age of 25.

30. Narco Diving.

The Bahamian island of Andros is a sheer-walled skyscraper, lapped by the six-thousand-foot-deep Tongue of the Ocean, where a diver can kick out a few yards and fall right off the continental shelf. While the abyss is free to all, Small Hope Bay Lodge offers a guided dive called Over the Edge of the Wall, down to 185 feet. It's not for the impulse-control challenged; at that depth you will be thoroughly narced, as in nitrogen narcosis, the dreaded Rapture of the Deep.

Why one gas should produce euphoria and another mere unconsciousness is not easily explained. But at about a hundred feet, a strange sea change begins to come over your brain, thanks to the increased partial pressure of nitrogen at depth. The muted colors of dangling sponges and the melancholy shapes of massive plate corals leap out at you, laughing. All at once, you're in on the cosmic joke. Truly, you are tiny, so freaking tiny, yet oceanic in your newfound wisdom. All is one -- and then some! Cap'n of the Good Skull Lollipop, you soar in space as you slowly fall, blessing basses and wrasses and intoxicating gases. At last you touch down on a little sandy ledge, a catwalk worthy of the north face of the Eiger, overlooking blue-black inner space. You may ask yourself, referencing the Talking Heads, How did I get here? And you may experience the profound confusion of an honest philosopher, which some people do not enjoy. But Jerko -- it's just scuba diving. You're only high, frying your synapses on pressurized dope. Confusion and death await those who linger too long.

So don't. Head for the surface and you'll come down as you go up, into the brilliant Bahamian light, no longer such a smarty-pants, perhaps, but still on vacation.

-- Bucky McMahon

32. Carousing with the Mob.

It happened one night in a bar near the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, Russia. I was researching a novel and found myself deep in conversation with a number of ballet dancers. Don't laugh. Dancers drink. Dancers smoke. Dancers believe in the short life.

Two in the morning. We had all been overserved. It was time for one last song. I closed my eyes and belted it out. The bartender grabbed me by the shoulder. "Shut up," he said. I've heard the complaints before. "Shut the fuck up," he said. "Look."

I turned and saw a number of impeccably dressed men walking into the bar. They were packing guns. One of them stopped and stared at me. It was as if all the oxygen was gone from the air. They cased the bar and abruptly left. I started singing again. The bartender grabbed my arm. Seconds later the real mob -- without their well-dressed bodyguards -- walked in: fat and unshaven and scruffy. Each had a bouquet of beautiful women on his arm.

"Leave," my ballet friends whispered. "Leave now -- and quietly."

I walked across the room. I picked out the meanest fucker of them all and hunkered down beside him. He looked as if he'd just strangled Vladimir Putin's mistress. There are times in life when we must throw out the anchor, even when it's unattached to a rope. "You want to hear an Irish song?" I asked him. He stared at me, his mouth quivering. I was suddenly quite sober. He took me by the collar. I could feel my heart beating in my cheap white shirt. He said nothing but slowly broke into a grin.

The drunk man often navigates by the stars beyond the ceiling. Still to this day I cannot remember what song it was I sang, but I do recall that fifteen minutes later I was party to the spectacular sight of three great Kirov ballerinas dancing on the long wooden table of the Shamrock Irish Bar on Dekabristov Street, performing ballet moves with three very large Russian mafiosi, shots of vodka thrown back and forth, and the dancers outlasting them, and outcharming them, with ease.

As they left the bar -- it was five in the morning -- the Mafia leader put his arm around me and said that he would help me if ever I was in trouble. "What do you do?" I asked, trying hard to be naive. He turned and looked me straight in the eye. "I am . . ." he said, stumbling toward the door, "...I am a Russian baby-sitter."

-- Colum McCann

33. Drinking Alone.

I know that everything I'm about to say has already been said better by George Thorogood. And listen, I aced health class back at Sedgwick Middle School, and so I know that drinking alone means you're an alcoholic. I know too that being an alcoholic is bad, that alcoholism turns you toothless and yellow and moaning in the dark.

Until I was thirty, my biggest fear was that I'd end up drinking alone. Like every day. Like full-time. But now I'm thirty-five. I've got a nearly regular job. I'm married, and I've got a daughter. This means I'm almost never alone. And that's great. That's the best thing that's ever happened to an idiot like me. And yet...and yet...I miss drinking alone. I miss walking into a bar early and without intent. I miss sitting there talking to no one. I miss ordering a Harvey Wallbanger only because I've never had a Harvey Wallbanger and because I might never summon the courage to order a Harvey Wallbanger in the company of others.

The more I think about it, my mistake was worrying too much about drinking alone. I should've drunk alone more often. All the stupid things I've done...and no one to see me do them. All the stupid things I've said...and no one to hear me say them. Yeah, the drinking alone might end you early, but sometimes it sounds like heaven.

-- Benjamin Alsup

43. A Home Firearm.

My entire life is a series of hedged bets. As the fifty-four-year-old dad of a seven-year-old, I take no uncalculated risks. I don't let the gas-gauge needle fall below the quarter-tank mark. I set the ADT alarm every night. You could not pay me to travel outside the northern half of the Western Hemisphere. Everywhere lurks doom; I acknowledge its inevitability by avoiding all danger at every turn. When I can, I avoid turns.

I spent a long time living dangerously. I was the guy they sent into the pharmacy with the forged quaalude prescription. The guy who sold weed by the pound to the outlaw bikers. The guy who ate ham-and-cheese sandwiches on Yom Kippur. Now I'm the guy who insists that his wife clean the dryer vent twice a year so the lint doesn't catch fire.

Still, a few feet from where I now sit typing on the third floor of our home in a Garden State suburb of leafy calm sits my shotgun. The safety's on, but it is loaded. I don't hunt. And though my penis would win no bar bets, the shotgun doesn't make me feel larger. It is what it is: the most fearsome, effective, legal home-protection device around. Is it a danger to me and mine as well? Many studies say so, but I haven't seen a study yet that helps me get to sleep at night.

Call me crazy. Call me an ugly American. But don't expect me to call 911 if you break into my house -- not till I've blown your head and neck clean off your shoulders.

-- Scott Raab"