Tuesday, Jul 08, 2014

According to his daughter Margaret, J.D. Salinger often used to drink his own urine, apparently for curative reasons (hopefully not for refreshment). He also had some other offbeat practices: He spent time in his own Orgone Box (invented by Wilhelm Reich as a sexual stimulant); he favored a macrobiotic diet (which at one point turned his skin a kind of ghoulish green -- and it didn't do much for his breath); he tanned himself to a dark, dark brown by sitting in a sort of homemade shed, equipped with metal reflectors; and he practiced his own form of acupuncture: instead of the standard needles, he ground down wooden dowels -- the kind that holds furniture together -- into pencil points and jammed them into his kids skin when they got ill. 
And in his spare time he locked himself in his private bunker and wrote.