WHAT’S SO FUNNY: Don’t try this at home

For your consideration on a party weekend:

We’d all like to eat or drink or smoke whatever we want without bad results. And we all know we can’t. Or at least, we don’t think we can.

But I may have found a way — a way that doesn’t depend on doing the right thing. It’s tricky, though.

First let me explain that I tend to consume things alcoholically even if what I’m consuming isn’t alcohol. As we say in AA, anything worth doing is worth overdoing.

In my youth I drank a lot of daily beer. I eventually had to stop, and it wasn’t easy, but one of the things that helped me was replacing the beer with a nonalcoholic drink I could load up on just as much.

At first it was cola. Later it was diet cola. These drinks had caffeine in them, and I found I could become just as dependent and excessive with them as I had with beer.

Then last January Patti Jo saw a piece in the New York Times that said cola, even diet cola, can cause kidney problems if you drink more than two a day. Since I drank about a dozen a day, I saw a possible connection to my three kidney stones.

The cola days were over. I needed another minor source of caffeine that I could drink alcoholically. I made the switch to diet orange soda. (It doesn’t seem to matter what any of this stuff tastes like.)

At about this time I evolved my new diet theory, which I’m happy to share even if it means missing the chance to expand it into a best-seller.

It’s my Rotating Organ-Attack Diet, or ROAD, the central idea of which is that you can ingest all the substances you’re warned against and still live indefinitely as long as you switch substances before any of them can destroy the organ they’re most harmful to.

This requires delicate timing and some luck, but the idea, I’ve convinced myself, is sound. I quit smoking shortly before it destroyed my heart and lungs, and gave up alcohol just prior to my liver exploding. After switching to a kidney attacker, I moved on to a safer caffeine source in aluminum cans — cans that may contribute to Alzheimer’s. I’ll eventually switch to plastic bottles, if I can remember to do so.

With this regimen I’m always doing something wrong, but it’s never the same wrong thing I did before. Ideally, I’ll live to 100 and finally fall apart all at once and nothing first, like the wonderful one-hoss shay.

I can’t recommend that you try my diet until I’ve prolonged the study to determine whether it really works. I’ll keep you posted, though. You’ll hear from me, or you suddenly won’t.

SHERWOOD KIRALY is a Laguna Beach resident. He has written four novels, three of which were critically acclaimed.