Track Mangoes

Every year a group of aging hippies throw a massive Halloween party in the secluded hill town of Montague, Massachusetts. The owner of the mansion on said estate offers, among other things, a potluck, a concert, a tree swing, a bon fire and a drum circle. This year, one of the more compelling elements was the candle-lined pathways that led to secluded areas where I found people either smoking kush or having sex.

As I watched an elderly couple scurry out of the woods half clothed I was perplexed and mildly unnerved: I thought these kinds of pagan ritual were only something about which we academics read. I looked on in disbelief at the abundance of people on acid passing joints left and right, the food and drink abounding, and the nymphs hanging from tree vines asking me if I wanted to "come play." At one o'clock in the morning however, party was cut short-as most good things are-by the police.

Why? Someone invited the kids.

They showed up around midnight with beer and brawn. As they poured in through the front gates I could almost smell the text messages heralding the "totally awesome party" spreading through electronic space like a diarrhea in a daycare. These kids did not arrive in costume. They heckled the crowd, partook of the potluck tables without contributing to it, and drank all the booze. As the sound of breaking bottles echoed ominously through the woods it became clear to me that what was once a good thing had been overrun by my own kind-snotty college students.

Normally I would be quick to support the debauchery of my fellow teenagers. They have a talent for underscoring the puritanical sensibilities of "old farts," which has essentially become a semantic stand-in for the more descriptive "bourgeoisie." I observed, that night, a mass of young people take advantage a group of aging hippies (granted: aging hippies with trust funds) and the safe space they had created for the consumption of drugs and alcohol.
Where was the disconnect? Should the hippies have Seen It Coming? Or do we hold the teenagers accountable for being %#$@-heads? And most importantly, is there a preferable mode of partying that we can cultivate at Macalester.

The short answer is, "NO."

The long answer is that there exists a conflation of debauchery with decadence that leads Macalester students astray. We overvalue the hyper-masculine mode of partying, the ones the cops can smell, and this reflects our shallow understanding of ritual. In the case of Montague, it almost felt as though a bunch of hammered jocks had crashed an X fueled love-fest, an experience the more seasoned partiers of Macalester can surly attest to.

But what exactly is the difference between debauchery and decadence? In the first place, both are connected, it seems, to nature. Pagan decadence has been a symbol of the "organic society" as far back as you want to trace it. Theorists such as Baron de Montesquieu and Edward Gibbon would argue that the organic metaphor of decadence became best articulated in ancient Rome.
Smooshing culture and nature together, however, causes major problems. When we apply "the natural" to the specifically "cultural" we get stupid teenagers: I am an animal and so I must drink and party hard enough to behave like one. After Oscar Wilde, a cultural "performer" of sorts, it became clear that decadence was the application of social customs to human necessity. Decadence is, in short, the recognition of that necessity within a universe that might smite us at any moment.

Debauchery is tragic: the drunk-kid breaking a window is essentially the fallen king, shaking his fists at the sky, realizing that he never had any control over his fate from day one. Decadence is comedic: a reconciliation with uncertainty through being fabulous(!).

Decadence, for our purposes here at Macaleser, is a far more complex understanding of "partying." While debauchery is masturbatory, decadence has a purpose in society. Nobody cares about your emotional problems, but everyone loves it when you look spiffy.

When we party at Macalester we shouldn't do it to blow off steam all over someone else's property. We party to cultivate that steam, to rejuvenate the happiness the academy vampirically sucks away. Debauchery only requires that we are sour and lonely and stupid and bitter; anyone can walk into a random party and break things, but it is the genius who uses finesse.

In closing, I'd like to point out the obvious critique that decadence is aristocratic and therefore evil. Again, what a shallow understanding of decadence, for how many wealthy, paternalistic students do you know who take it upon themselves to vandalize property? That's the true aristocratic entitlement. Decadence is just a synthetic fur coat and a box of Franzia.

The recent upheaval of anti-smoking regulations on campus has forced a few of us, smoker and non-smoker alike, to ask “why?” Why do we smoke and, as such, why are we so cynical about not being able to do so within whatever-it-is feet of doorways.

The answer to all these “whys” resides in the first cigarette. Every smoker remembers his first cigarette with fondness. This seems strange when one considers that tobacco, at first, induces nausea and dizziness. Cigarettes require that one become addicted to them before they induce pleasure.

And therein lies their mystery. Unlike heroin, ecstasy, alcohol and cocaine--all of which are rewarding from the first dose--addiction precedes tobacco's pleasure. Once hooked, each cigarette provides a small dose of nicotine that satiates the desire for itself, like a knot that constantly winds itself up only to be untied. So the question is not “why do people smoke?” but “why do people go out of Their Way to start?”

The simplest answer, meaning the one that non-smokers will give you, is that it looks “cool.”

Why, they ask, are smokers trading their health for a vacuous image? But it is not this simple and one living off mac’n’cheese might do better to interrogate his own health. There have been countless anti-smoking campaigns that attempt to do dislodge tobacco from its romance with “coolness,” yet teenage smoking abounds in ever increasing numbers.
People might start smoking to look cool, but it’s certainly not why they continue. At some point you’re addicted and, as my friends say, the party’s over. You look bad. You smell bad. Your mouth tastes like tar. People continue smoking to alter they way they perceive, not to alter the way they are perceived.

I have often joked that when I quit smoking I will do it cold turkey--with the exception of cigarettes after sex, during European films or long baths, when angry, drinking, inside a Wisconsin diner, and/or, finally, in pensive solitude. Once addicted, a cigarette punctuates with pleasure the occasion you take to smoke it. Some might call it a system of “rewards.” Just like school children who make tick marks in their notebooks, counting down the minutes until school’s out, so do smokers stratify their life into sections.

There is one other constituency that also does this: prisoners.

Prisoners tick away the days with chalk on the walls of their cells and, as the theory goes, by chopping the days into perceptible units of chronometry time moves faster and less oppressively. Likewise, it is not the cigarettes themselves that bring happiness to the smoker, but the way in which they change the smoker’s perception of time. Non-smokers expereince time sequentially. Smokers experience time relatively, that is between occasions. The Greeks called the former chronos, which was is quantitative and continuous, and the latter kairos, which was qualitative through relativity.

It is not the pleasure itself that is most appealing; it is the tick of addiction’s clock and the way it structures our lives. We’re addicted to kairos, not nicotine. And this is why the patch is the most effective way to quit smoking: it delivers a continuous stream of nicotine, thereby robbing the smoker of kairos while also satiating desire.

Anyone who is paying attention feels that time is tyrannical, especially the college student. He is imprisoned in school, at home, by his bubbling hormones, his roommates, his family, his teachers, and a system that can neither understand nor accommodate him, but to which he is forever in servitude. Life moves for the college student as it does for the inmate: slowly, grueling, never ending. This is why smokers trying to quit will tell you that the days drag on, that they feel stupid, fat, and bored. For ex-smokers, the life they live is simply a dull progression towards death. Non-smokers, then, are the lucky few who were born too daft to need cigarettes.

Considering smoking’s prevalence among the working class, I would like to set aside the bourgeois paternalism implicit in these new smoking regulations. My labor is to illustrate that there is a way to persuade students to quit smoking, and that way is to make their lives more bearable. Unfortunately, I have never known this administration to be concerned with such trivial pursuits and would certainly never hold them to the task of making our lives worth living.

So the next time a smoker politely asks “mind if if smoke?” you will know that the correct response is not “care if I die?” but “sharesies?”

***

This is an updated version of this article: http://trackmangoes.blogspot.com/2010/01/how-to-get-teenager-to-quit-smoking.html

A note to the reader: I have finally whined hard enough and the Mac Weekly has given me the column I asked for. What follows is the very first submission that may or may not actually run this week. The column is called "The Scamp" and this essay is an adapted/polished form of this older essay: http://trackmangoes.blogspot.com/2009/12/on-resentment-religion-government-and.html

ENJOIE

On Retraction Letters

There once was a man who tried to kill his cousin, a saint residing at a monastery. He attempted murder several times with such elaborate schemes as unleashing rabid animals and giant boulders. Each time, however, the saint came out miraculously unharmed. It took many subsquent attempts before the jealous cousin realized, wandering down a river road, that he was in the wrong and it was precisely at that moment that the ground opened beneath his feet and he was subsumed into hell.

Every preacher’s dream.

It took me years to realize that I had experienced similar changes of heart. Younger, I could never find them, simply because I always looked for them in the results they produced. But changes of heart don’t produce results or anything like it. Regardless, changes of heart abound everywhere, fruitless or otherwise.

For example: I once composed a collection of poems for a magazine in Oregon. When they received the submission they said that, on top of being poorly written, the poems were lewd. In the nights following this dismissal I fantasized about the editor sending me a retraction letter that read something like this: “Dear Jens, I have never understood the complexity of the human spirit until I read your work. Please forgive me for everything I’ve written. By the time you read this I will be dead.”

And that, of course, is the only letter a writer ever wants to receive.

Unfortunately no letter came and, taking their critique to heart, I changed my hobby from writing to photography, a passion that ended in a similar fashion—with someone telling me I was bad at it. From the wreckage of photography came film, from film dance, and from dance I returned writing, back where I had started.

Everyone changes their mind all the time to no particular end, and if this comment seems jejune to you it’s only because I feel as though I have little to no explanation for the anti-climatic ending of the following story, one of my favorite stories of a change of heart, one that involves our very own Mac Weekly.

In 2008 I transferred here from Hampshire College, where I had been writing a column for their newspaper, The Climax. Thinking highly of myself I asked the newspaper staff at my new academy if they wouldn't also give me a column. They said that they’d consider it, which in the writing world--I think I’ve ascertained--means “piss off.” But I insisted, so they asked me to put my money where my mouth was and submit a prototype to be run in the opinions section.

What resulted was a single article that, according to the Mac Weekly website, attained the highest readership that week. It was entitled “Sarah Palin is a Feminist.” A couple days, three angry girls, and one death threat later I asked the staff if that was the kind of thing they were looking for and they told me I’d be better off writing crosswords.

That was when I peevishly decided to become a wine enthusiast.

I never did fantasize about an apologetic retraction letter from the Mac Weekly, but I am immensely thankful to the latest staff members for allowing me to have the masturbatory, pleonastic column I asked for all those years ago. With that in mind I would like to invite the Macalester Community to partake in “The Scamp,” a bi-weekly box of words about which you are bound to have mixed feelings.

Earlier that day Bruce had been sitting in a cafe reading Justine when a classmate approached him (an obese socialist who loved to talk about metaphysics and wear tee shirts, on which were vaguely creepy sayings referencing a mental illness [schizophrenia perhaps] which, of course, he did not have) and asked whether or not he was going to vote.

Bruce laughed. "Oh," Bruce replied, taking his coffee mug in his hand and tilting it forward, only to find that it was empty. "I guess I forgot that that was today." The fat philosopher laughed and stood in the middle of the cafe twirling his hands in the air and spitting all over Bruce's table, going on and on about how a society free of coercion would not need the right to vote. Bruce took this to mean that a citizen could simply intuit a leader. As the boy spoke the heads of the people in the cafe turned like wind vanes on a balmy day. Bruce's brow began to furl.

The boy's diatribe ceased when he announced, loudly, that he was going to take a shit. He retreated into the cafe's bathroom, not having bought anything and Bruce seized the opportunity to get up from his table and head to class early. As he exited the cafe, ringing the bell on the swinging screen door, he looked back in through a large glass window at the table where he had been sitting, at his empty white coffee mug, and at the expression of the woman who was sitting next to the bathroom on her Macintosh laptop: it was one of distress.

After he left the cafe, Bruce ambled past the church and noticed a sign on the window that read "VOTE NOW!" He stopped on the sidewalk, holding his copy of Justine close to his breast, and starred at the sign. He could see his own reflection in the window, and past it several old people with graying hair and coke bottle glasses sitting behind a table while people from the adjacent neighborhood milled about filling out forms and sliding them into red, white, and blue counting machines.

It was at this time that Bruce caught an unpleasant odor that upturned his nose and caused him to look behind himself. The fat socialist was walking towards him, taking tiny steps with his thin legs that jutted out from his body like toothpicks from a potato. Not owing to anything, Bruce entered the church and decided to vote.

A diamond in the rough:

The reality of death has come upon us and a consciousness of the power of God has broken our complacency like a bullet in the side. A sense of the dramatic, of the tragic, of the infinite, has descended upon us, filling us with grief, but even above grief, wonder. Our plans were so beautifully laid out, ready to be carried to action, but with magnificent certainty God laid them aside and said, "You have forgotten -- mine?"

Scribbled in a notebook O'Connor kept during her first year of college, about two years after the death of her father. She was seventeen.

Bruce sat on the edge of his bed in his dimly lit room with his head in his hands and no pants on. The girl was laying back on a pillow. She picked at her nails and periodically reached her arm in a strange contortion behind her body in order to position the overhead lamp clipped to the bed frame to point towards her hands. She had to, at least, be able to see them.

"I don't really know what happened," Bruce said finally, running his hands through his hair.

He turned to face her, but she promptly turned off the light and rolled over onto her side with her back facing him.