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.

They help me gaze at my shoes.

Can't wait for Wednesday.

The following is an old excerpt that was cut from my novel, "A Shibboleth," which, god help me, I will finish this summer.

The next day Lara Anne saw India with both of them, and more. It had been dark--the sun hiding behind a graphite colored blizzard cloud. No matter the weather, they were all standing outside the dormitory building, smoking and talking, talking so loudly that their words could be heard on the top floor of the large brick structure by students trying to study, gritting their teeth at their desks and asking their roommates why chivalry was dead. The only sound that was louder than the sound of their yapping was that of the windows slamming shut.

And there was a girl also. Smoking also. She was just as skinny as she remembered Brock to be, though slightly shorter, with dark hair, cut in strange and violent angles. The makeup around her eyes was applied thickly and with a hand that Lara didn’t want near her face, applying makeup or otherwise. She wore a small pencil skirt with brown natty stockings. They jutted out from the bottom hem of a very large, very thick wool sweater. The top hem of the sweater hung down below her collarbone, exposing her clavicles, which stuck out like mole holes in a soccer field. She looked like a molting bird. She stood out from their crowd as she ambled round and round them, circumambulating the clique, with an expression of disgust plastered to her face.

It was a girl she had often seen before. She even visited her house several times. She was a drug dealer. She dealt drugs to freshmen, who bought marijuana mostly and synthetics on special occasions. She was a drug dealer and her name was Sylvia. She lived in the dorms, Lara saw her there sometimes after classes, but her boyfriend, Brock, lived in a house off-campus. The house may have well of been her house too because, though she lived in the dorms, she didn't, as she insisted, live there. She lived at the house on Corsair Boulevard.

The house on Corsair Boulevard was privately owned. It backed up against a giant concrete wall. Behind the wall was a freeway that seemed to cut the expansion of the neighborhood instantly. The house was at the end of street, in a cul-de-sac with some trees. Cheap grey siding ran around it. Every thin pane of glass around the sun porch was cracked. A set of crumbling concrete stairs led up the front door, which was disproportionately gothic looking with it large brass knocker that hung in the teeth of some hideous gargoyle.

The last time Lara had been to the house on Corsair Boulevard there she had gone with India and left alone shortly thereafter. Inside the house a brown carpet expanded from their feet to the living room, where Sylvia sat, wearing a small cotton tank top with ribbons for straps. Behind her was the doorway to the kitchen, where the sound of sizzling onions could be heard. India and Lara sat down at the large dining table. India set her brown lather bag near the Sylvia’s foot. Her toenails were painted. Three guys in tight jeans and clever T-shirts sat on the couch, slumped down with their hips practically higher than their heads. “Indie Indie Indie,” Sylvia said from the table.

“Sylvie Sylvie Sylvie,” she replied. India sat down in a chair next to her. Lara got an uneasy sensation, like there was a tension she couldn’t feel but knew was there. So she ambled into the kitchen where she thought she might feel safer or perhaps get a glass of water. What she found was not a glass of water, or anything like it. She found Brock standing at a stove with a frying pan in front of him, sautéing onions. He stood there with his hands at his sides. Onions burned on the sides of the pan as if they had been there for a long time, as if someone had forgot about them. But how could Brock forget about the onions if he was standing right there? Lara stood in the doorway and watched him.

“Onions cooked?” she said. Brock turned around and looked at her with vacant eyes, as if he had been blinded by something but knew she was still there.

“Huh?” he muttered. “What? Yeah. They’re cooked.” Brock was wearing a pair of baggy jeans that clung to his hips with a leather belt and a bright green vest with no shirt on underneath. He turned his head back to the pan. “You’re India’s friend,” he said starring at the onions.

“Roommate,” she corrected. She paused for a moment and corrected herself. “Well. Housemate.” They hadn’t shared a room since sophomore year.

“Whatever.” Lara heard a noise come from the living room and turned around. One of the boys slumped on the sofa had got up and was bouncing up and down on it, like a child on a king size mattress. When she looked back at Brock he had dumped all the onions onto a plate. He sat down on the floor, cross-legged, and started eating the onions with his hands. “Want some?” he said, looking up at her.

“Sure.” Lara walked over to him and they sat down and ate the onions.

“Whose side are you on?” he asked. Lara starred at the piece of onion on his chin.

“What?”

“I said whose side are you on?”

“Oh. That.” Lara turned back to the dining room but she couldn’t see India. “I don’t take sides,” she said. “I’m just here to observe.”

“Observe what?”

“The, um. I don’t know. The.”

“The freaks?”

“No that’s not really what I meant.”

“It’s kind of what you mean though.”

“No.”

“It’s fine.” Brock got up and spooned more onions onto his plate. “Do you eat meat?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Do you want some ham?”

“Sure,” she said after a moment of hesitation. Brock sat down in front of her again. This time, in addition to his onions, a chunk of bread sat atop the plate with a slice of ham draped over it. Brock broke the bread in two pieces and put the ham in the middle. He squeezed it together and took a bite, tearing the bread away from the chunk the way a cat chews meat off a bone. Lara couldn’t take her eyes off his nails, short, jagged, and dirty. On the corner of the thumb she thought she could see a spot of green, where it had been painted weeks earlier. He shoved the sandwich into her face and she took it up and bit in to it. The meat was salty. The bread was slightly stale around the edges and was so hard it nearly cut into the sides of her mouth. “Goob,” she said finally. She had meant to say “Good." A piece of dried bread hit the roof of her mouth and she could taste blood on her tongue. She winced and Brock went on eating.

“Lara,” a voice said from behind. It was India standing in the doorjamb. Her head hung like a jacket on a hook, her hair in front of her eyes. She looked as though she might tumble on top of Lara and Brock, splayed on the kitchen floor, sending the onions, the ham, the bread flying into the wall, and the plate too, shattering into several large, sharp, ceramic pieces. But as India stood there, her hands just caressed the edges of the doorjamb, as if the only way they could hold her up was by caress. The she laughed. She smiled. She leaned forward like a trapeze artist, grabbing onto the frame and leaning forward. A piece of her hair fell forward again and then back onto her face. It got stuck in her mouth and just hanged there. She had a single braid amongst all the other hair that had a wooden bead fastened to it. The strand hung toward the floor like a pendulum, swinging. “It’s all done,” she said. India looked at Brock who had not looked up to see her. Her lips slightly parted, as if she was about to say something, but instead she stood up and headed purposefully towards the front door.

Lara got up off the floor, wiping the crumbs on her pants. She looked back at Brock on the floor, bovinely swinging his jaw. “Thanks for the food,” she said. He nodded and looked up at her. His eyelids hung low. He fluttered them for a moment, then opened them again as if Lara had appeared in the door for the first time.

Outside India was trying to light a cigarette underneath a streetlamp. She had slid her jacket on her shoulders. As she lit the cigarette her elbows raised and brought the hem of the jacket above her blouse. Under her blouse was an undershirt. Underneath that was a line a persimmon colored line of flesh running around her stomach, started and ended by her belly button poised in the center, like a diamond on a ring. India lit the cigarette and lowered her elbows. She blew a thick plume of grey smoke that rose up to the streetlamp. “Ready?” she asked.

Lara nodded and walked toward her. “Yup,” she said, sliding her jacket on over her arms. “Brock is strange,” she noted.

“Yes. He is very strange,” India said looking down at the sidewalk.

“I see him and Sylvia around together more often,” she added. “Just the other day, outside the dorms. She was wearing this cotton sweater.”

“That’s my sweater,” India said suddenly.

Lara paused a moment and frowned her eyebrows. “Wait,” she said, holding up a finger. India took a long drag of her cigarette and exhaled. As she looked up at the lamp, the light flooding over her face, she blinked several times. Lara opened her mouth, the words coming up out of her throat, but getting stuck there. It was like holding in vomit after drinking. She pressed hard, and tried not to let the words pop out, because she already knew the answer, but by the time Lara had uttered the words, “Why would Sylvia have your sweater?” it would be too late to have realized that India had been crying.

Kids at the Wheeler House, St. Paul, 2010.

It's going down. This Wednesday. High noon. Ethan Rutherford's Fiction class will engage in a kickball game against Peter Bognanni's screenwriting class. Who will come out on top? Who's penis is bigger? TUNE IN NEXT TIME TO FIND OUT!?!

Is it wrong to participate in this gross display of masculinity? Probably. Does that make me want to do it more? YOUBETCHA. Who will I fight for? Hollywood, obviously.

When we talk about masculinity at Macalester we tend to speak in terms of "construction." This is ridiculous. Masculinity is not constructed, it is real, it has an essence, something undeniable, something linked directly to the balls. Nor is it a disease, as the second wave feminist movement and its residue would have you believe.

The last civilization to worship female powers was Minoan Crete, a civilzation that, ironically, fell to natural causes and, most likely, the invasion of a more technologically sound empire. Beyond this, there is not a shred of evidence supporting the feminist fabrication of "Matriarchy." There has never been one, anywhere, at any time.

I still marvel at the intensity of a woman driven by obsession. Ann Radcliffe. Emily Dickinson. Cleopatra. And I always find myself seeing it more readily in men, perhaps due to my sexual taste and the lens it affords me. While the canon seems to paint a picture of a male propensity towards that sadistic drive for art, one cannot help but remark that when such a drive manifests in women--that self-mutilating derangement which, in its alternate forms of crime and ideation, is the disgrace and glory of the human species--it always bubbles up in a more interesting way than man could ever muster.

Someone once said that there was no female Mozart because there was no female Jack the Ripper. They had obviously never heard of Aileen Wuornos.

Photos to be posted from the kickball game at a later time.

Days shy of 45 years after he patented the idea of wine in a box, Australian winemaker Thomas Angove has died at the age of 92.

Angove was also the first winemaker in Australia to use stainless steel for the storage of wine in bulk, in addition to introducing new varieties of wine grapes to his home continent.

It was only a few days before I would get out of school and head on a month long endeavor of couch surfing that I found myself in an empty dorm room holding a bag full of wine, removed from its box, above the head of the editor of my school's newspaper. The night had been a long one in which I discovered that a slushie from Super America could most efficiently mask the taste of gin and that, yes, sometimes there really was a worm at the bottom of the tequila bottle.

Blacking out is a peculiar phenomenon.

David sat on the edge of the bench staring at the sidewalk with his chin pressed tightly against his chest. The wind whipped pieces of his hair into his eyes and onto his cheeks like pieces of leather being slapped against the flesh. A crumpled piece of sandwich paper sat next to him on the bench, moving slightly, a half eaten pastrami on rye within. David's cell phone, a chique thing so thin it looked as though one might be able to break it with two fingers, was open in his hand, a message across the screen from one of his friends who had been arrested the night before.

There had been a protest outside of a factory up North. Students from David's school had gathered there. They were killing people, not directly, David told those who asked, but indirectly, yet it was murder nonetheless. Murder or something like it.

Not an hour before David sat on the bench he had been standing in a line to get a sandwich from a cart that passed by the school every day at noon. While he stood there a girl had come up to him, flipping her hair and licking her teeth, asking him how the protest had gone. "Yes, fine," David told her, and she laughed slightly and asked him if he wasn't aware that they had all been arrested. "Yes," David said again, "I was there." She told him that she was glad that he wasn't arrested, though she couldn't imagine how on earth he got away. "It just wasn't worth it," he told her, "I've been arrested before." "For protest," she would ask with a smile and he would nod and she would tell him that she thought the police treated actual criminals with more respect and he would agree and say that activism was a tough business and she would laugh and he would forget what he had just said and purchase a sandwich from the man with the cart.

"What'll it be?" the sandwich man would ask him. The girl, standing behind and adjusting the straps of her purse, would laugh and say that she always went for the pastrami. David would order the pastrami even though he had promised a week ago that he would take a break from meat eating. And the sandwich man would mumble to himself in a breathless way something while he spread the mustard across a slice of white bread with a broad silver knife. David would lean in closer, opening the folds of his wallet, pulling out money, but really trying to hear what the man was mumbling.

It was when David handed the man a 10 dollar bill that he realized the man was saying the Shema, mindlessly reciting it under his breath, smiling the whole time.

The man opened the cash register and the sound of the bell drove David into a hot spell. No longer able to shove the change into the pockets of his snugly fitting jeans, David would throw the remaining change into the man's tip jar as the girl behind him stepped up and started to recite her order.

"Did you hear," she would tell the man. "They were all arrested last night."

Squirrels came up to the bench, eating pieces of lettuce and pastrami that had fallen at David's feet. The girl was sitting somewhere off in the distance devouring her sandwich. From his bench David could see the white strings of her headphones hanging out of her ears like a doubled headed tapeworm, moving, writhing, going deeper and deeper as she sat. The phone was still in his hand, frozen there, as if he were about to drop it on the sidewalk. His lips were moving as if kissed by a hot coal.

David was trying to recite the Shema but couldn't remember the words.

"The amount of money and of legal energy being given to prosecute hundreds of thousands of Americans who are caught with a few ounces of marijuana [1 ounce = 28g] in their jeans simply makes no sense - the kindest way to put it. A sterner way to put it is that it is an outrage, an imposition on basic civil liberties and on the reasonable expenditure of social energy."
-William F. Buckley

It is traditional for Buddhist monks the shave their head on the quarter moon, a day of cleansing and renewal, devoted to the deity Vajra Satva. However, in a bout of laziness, I asked my Tibetan tutor at the monastery at Mirik if this was necessary. He responded by saying that if you have trouble remembering to shave your head on the quarter moon then you should try to do just that, but if you always feel compelled to shave your head on the quarter moon then you should try your best to shave your head when you feel like it.

So today I implore you to take a moment of self reflection, of reconsideration. If you are an avid marijuana user, step back and try to remember why you started in the first place. If you feel your children are at risk of becoming stupid, why not step back and try to remember that they could out-Facebook you in any state of mind. If you worry about "gateway" drugs, try to remember the things you did you feared at first. If you feel you have friends with whom you might never smoke, reconsider. If you feel you have friends with whom you are high more often than not, why, isn't today the best of days to take that sober walk? down the street and through the air, catching whiffs of the smoke plumes as they pass under your nose?

The sober moo about purity. The hazy moo about that state which one might define as "chill." But what are we to do with the man in between: a cow who barks, not knowing what is expected of him.

The girl sat on the back porch looking out at the ghats on the river, the trash pieces and dismembered heads of animals floating past as the woman thrashing sheets in great blue tubs full of soapy water wiped the sweat from her brow, smudging across her forehead the vermilion she had placed on her head earlier that morning. And as she watched the woman walk up the bank of the river back to the hotel from whence she came the girl gingerly sipped at her chai which seemed, to her, richer than the chai she had been used to drinking.

Oh! she remembered suddenly. The waiter said it had been made with buffalo's milk! But why? Heaven forbid the other students would see her sitting on that porch with it--yes, the students who were all spending the afternoon rummaging through the markets adjacent to the slums, chattering away about the "real India" and all the legless beggars they had seen by the side of the road earlier that day. How upsetting! one of them would say, while the others would respond in a symphony of approvals whilst holding up silver rings to the light for inspection, finding a flaw in it, and placing it down again.

Earlier that day the girl had tried writing a letter before she found herself in tears (why, she didn't quite know) at the desk and tossing her alarm clock violently against the wall.

The sun had been out that day, though cast in a thick curtain of the city's smog. Were there worlds beyond which they could never touch, she thought, or did all that is possible enter their consciousness? She could not tell. . . . Perhaps life is a mystery, not a muddle. . . or was that too whimsical? Perhaps the hundred Indias which fuss and squabble so tiresomely are one? She had not the apparatus for judging.

"OH GOD DAMNIT!" she squealed.

"What?" said the boy sitting behind her.

The girl turned around, quite startled, with the expression of utter terror and confusion cast about her face. The boy put down his newspaper and uncrossed his legs, tipping his sunglasses down on the bridge of his nose. "Oh, nothing," she said, standing up to retire into the foyer. "I was just...going...back to my room."

The girl left the chai on the porch's railing, steaming. As the boy saw it, catching light as the smog cleared, the woman washing laundry had left the river bank, though he thought not of it, for he had not seen her previously, and the river looked, at once, how it used to be and how it was, but not in the least how it appeared to her.

Portland wasn't actually from Portland. She only told people she was because every time she did they would smile at her and tell her that they had always thought about moving there after college. And the people who knew watched her with half drawn eyes and noticed the peculiarity of her mannerisms, the way she drank her coffee, and spoke in the winter. Despite the fascination nobody would have her because she cried far too much; but New York kept her around for the same reason.

New York was a dirty girl. Some people found her irresistible, others found her trashy. Nevertheless, if you asked it of her, she would get you off quicker and harder than any broad you had ever met. She had years of practice and knew just what it was that made you tick. Still, every time you left her house, covered in the cacoon of her musk, you couldn't help but feel a little violated.

New York and Portland were sitting at the lunch table starring at Minnesota. Minnesota, they knew, was shy, yet pretty. She had a modest sense of style and always kept her hair back in a loose pony tail. She was talented too, and both New York and Portland appreciated that she tried just a little bit harder to make you completely and comfortably satisfied.

I seldom hear my own name. Generally I've been referred to by saccharine terms of endearment. My family has given me many, my favorite being "Poo-Goo," a play on the Tibetan "Pugu," meaning "Kid," most frequently used in a pejorative sense. In elementary school I was referred to as "Jensy," and "Jensy-Poo." In middle school I was known as "faggot" or "that kid who wants to turn you gay." Upon moving into the liberal inner-city, my friends, many of whom were gay, referred to me as "Jenzabelle" and "Nippolean," a play on Nepalese (my heritage), Napoleon (my penchant for the french language), and Nipple (?). When a fatty scholarship subsumed me into the thightly knit circle of Portland's private education, having developed a reputation as a Libertine, I was often referred to as "Pacific Rim." In college I've heard "Jensicle," "Jenzelle Washington," and "Jenzle Bear." Most currently my roommates refer to me as "Dick," "Douche," "Boiye," "Papa Parrot," and "Baba Hadoor," a play on my Nepalese given name, Bamba Hadhur.

The terms of endearment given by our parents is no mystery, "Little One," "Young One," etc. Yet the nicknames manifest in yet stranger cultural ways, such as the quintessentially American habit of referring to our presidents by their initials. This power of the nickname to dismantle the materiality of an object has been widely studied by post-structuralists and perhaps explains the phenomenon of the human desire to refer to genitalia through grade-school abstractions, even late into life. Naming, for these paranoid theorists, is a violent act.

The Bible tells us the most secret name of God, the Shem Ha Meforesh, could be uttered only by the high priest in the afternoon of Yom Kippur. Alone he enters the Holy of Holies and there would say the name. Rope tied around his ankle, so that, should he die while in the Holy of Holies, he could be gotten out. No one else, of course, was permitted to enter, for the power of God would slay the unholy. Hence, if the high priest was insufficiently cleansed or impure of heart he would die upon entry. Just like the lot of us.

I am hard pressed to find any individual who, when asked if they would enter the Holy of Holies, would not, for a moment, in the very least, pause. For the question is not Would You Go In That Room, but Are You Pure?

Take the tale of Rumpelstiltskin. Trapped in a tower a girl must complete the impossible task of spinning flax into gold in three days time, or ELSE. All hope is lost until a dwarfish creature helps her along in return for her first born child. The flax spun to gold, the daughter marries the Evil King and bears a child. Little Man comes back and demands the child payment for his services. When the daughter just-can't-let-go the little man strikes her a deal: "Guess my name and I'll leave you alone." Upon realizing that every man in her life is, in fact the oppressor (the father who sold her, the king who raped her, and the little man who deceived her) she guesses his name and is free from strife. What is this but the myth of psychiatry?

To say one's own name is more painful than any act of self-mutilation. For, when we refer to ourselves by our own names, a sociologist would tell you, we conceptualize our being on terms that we have seldom created. The deeper aspects of our self-image come even more powerfully from our experiences with other people. And just as the rape victim who wonders "was my skirt too short" knowing-the-self can be used to oppressive ends. But this is no mystery.

What is mysterious is the extent to which such a "looking glass self" reaches into what a Christian might call the "soul." For our very consciousness is not, as Cooley would have us believe, social. Or at least not purely social. For that pause upon entrance into that Room Where God Dwells is a reflection upon this fundamentally American question: is there something inside me which is authentic?

It comes as no surprise to me, then, that secular humanists believe in the power of the ritual act of religion, the value of the "community," solidification of the tribe, identification with the totem, all outside of a regime. Of course these people, addled by Foucault, belive in the power of the tribe: they don't believe in god. At least not in a meaningful way. And it is certainly not that they don't believe in God. A true atheist sees the bloodshed that religion has brought upon the world and runs through the streets preaching the path to salvation. No, these secular humanists believe in nothing at all, save for, perhaps, the benefits of circle songs and potlucks.

"But wait!" you will say, and you are right. Anyone who has spent a modicum of time in an American Studies course knows that no one in their right mind would ever say, "Everything is pretty good." To do so would be blasphemy. Instead we say, Your bigotry, your racism, your hatred stem from your ignorance and your backward way of life is detestable. And these people who act as the butt of our own hatred are the supposed monsters. That is, in the very least, debatable.

Perhaps this is what Lady Gaga is trying to tell us, that we are, all of us, in fact, monsters paving the path of our own destruction, and since we are on the verge of killing ourselves through war, and famine, and environmental crisis, through hate crimes (from the left and right), and destitute we should at least look good while we do it. She is, I feel, a pop Oscar Wilde. Well, not her, per se, but the army of gay men that are employed full time to keep her standing.

As Freud taught us, the resistance is the neurosis itself. And it is not the employment of the name itself that is oppression, nor is it simply our awe of the secret name of god, but the manipulation of our awe. So as the government assigns colors to levels of threat we must come to the understanding that such a stratification is the avowal that there is, indeed, no threat at all, or that if there is a threat there is little to nothing we, or the government, can do to stop it.

Simply "owning" the name does not remove it from that system of oppression we so often like to think we're in. My love of referring to myself as a "fag" does not change the fact that others will think it unseemly, just as Malcom X disowning the name given to him by the white man does not solve the problem of racism in and of itself. It's never enough to "take it back," whatever that means. For the construction itself is far more powerful for the absence of its content.

I had my first cigarette when I was 16 years old. My father had a party at his apartment in Portland the night prior and the next morning I found a pack of Camel wides underneath the sofa while I was looking for my cell phone. I remember feeling the utmost sense of intrigue. I didn't quite know what to do with them. I couldn't smoke them, that would be an obscene breech of parental trust. Would he be able to smell it? What was even the correct way to smoke a cigarette? I hadn't the slightest clue.

We didn't have any matches in the house, but my father lit incense every morning as part of a religious ritual with a wind resistant barbecue lighter. So I stuffed that in my jacket pocket and headed outside. I rounded the block and lit up on a corner with the miniature blow torch. Does anyone inhale their first cigarette? I did. I think. The only reason I believe I inhaled my first time, not for lack of wanting to sound like a pubescent pariah, of course, but I believe this because I got sick. Collapsing on my sofa when I returned home I thought I would never smoke again. I wondered why anyone started. I felt alone and weak and full of poison.

One might think that such an unpleasant experience would exist in my mind as the stuff of nightmares. But I've been smoking ever since, and I can only recall the memory with the utmost fondness. Unlike the heroin addict, who is constantly trying to recreate her first high (a time she will, unfortunately, never manifest), the smoker remembers their first cigarette as the beginning of a great era of ill famed joy.
The interesting thing about cigarettes is that they don't actually give you pleasure until you've become completely addicted to them. Every smoker must go through and initial period of disgust before the fun starts. People report nausea, vomiting, dizziness, uncomfortable rise in heartbeat, etc. So this beckons the question, why would one start? Why would anyone subject themselves to the rigorous task of becoming an addict? It isn't pleasant. It isn't fun.

The simple answer (given by anyone who has never smoked before) is that smoking looks "cool." It enhances your image. Makes you look more mature. Non smokers, with their do-good chicanery, chastise smokers for adhering to, or perhaps buying into an image. The non-smoking soccer mommy (inside her SUV, bleached hair held back in a furious pony tail sticking out of the back of a Nike cap, her hands clad in leather gloves clenched tightly to the steering wheel, her Pearline teeth grinding when the man in the Volvo cuts her off) accuses the smoker for selling out!

There have been countless attempts by anti smoking campaigns to counteract the "cool" image smoking supposedly provides; and yet, teenagers continue smoking in ever increasing numbers. What about maturity? As long as kids have a reason to believe that they aren't respected as adults (read, eternity) then they will, I suppose, continue to smoke. But these justifications are far too simple. For sticking that dollar bill in that bucket isn't really about wanting to help people in Haiti, is it?

What is more, every day there are constant real-life reminders for kids of how closely tied to class smoking is. The chef standing out back during his smoke break or the janitor having his morning cigarette is a far more powerful and persuasive image than a smoking camel, despite what paranoid cultural theorists would have you believe. The child, on his way to school, is more intrigued by the the bus driver. The waiter. The college student. These are things children are far more likely to see and deeply internalize as parts of their cultural milieu. Not Audrey Hepburn with her ivory cigarette holder. Not Sherlock Holmes with his Kabash pipe. Not stuffy old men in humidors. No. It is the malcontent working classes and angry youth subcultures that convince children to buy a pack.

But what is it about these classed images that is so persuasive to children? What do they see in these people that makes them want to forgo that initial period of disgust? Why do kids start smoking? What is so intriguing that they will temporarily suspend regard for their own health in order to experience something they can't yet understand?

These adults on their smoke breaks or the hipsters outside the concert hall represent a human experiencing a particular state of being, a particular sensitivity to an alternate perception of time movement. When the child spots his father at his desk toiling away, buried by paper work, she sees a man oppressed by chronology. But when she sees her school teacher furtively sneaking out for a cigarette she sees a woman reveling in occasion. For the primary purpose of a cigarette is to deliver a single dose of pleasant nicotine.

What is it about the state of being addicted to something that is so desirable? Forget the image. What does addiction bring to a kid's life that isn't already there? Is it that there is some desire for addiction itself operating here?

I have often joked to friends that when I quit smoking I will do it cold turkey, with the exception of my cigarette after after sex, during European films, long baths, inside of diners in Wisconsin, when angry, when drinking, when around other smokers, and in pensive solitude. (I suppose you can be celibate over and over, but you can only be a virgin once.) Everyone has their preferred moment for smoking. Sure, you can step outside and take a moment to yourself, but to punctuate that moment with a pleasurable indulgence of one's addiction causes the mind to forge an association with celebration in the midst of a grueling day.

Just like prisoners who tick away the days on the walls of their cells with chalk, each cigarette serves to stratify day's hours. Wake up. Have a cigarette. Eat lunch. Have a cigarette. Go home. Have a cigarette. Make dinner. Have a cigarette. Watch a movie. Have a cigarette. Go to bed. Dream of cigarettes. By chopping the hours into perceptible units of chronometry the days move faster and less oppressively. Indeed, it is not the cigarettes themselves that bring happiness but the way in which they change a person's perception of time, which is perhaps why it is said that quitting smoking is tougher that quitting heroin.

This is why the patch is simultaneously the most and least effective way to quit smoking. On the one hand it delivers a massive dose of nicotine that is spread out through the day in a continuous stream. On the other hand, it robs the smoker of rhythm. For it is that rhythm, the tick of addiction's clock, that is most appealing to a smoker, not the pleasure of nicotine itself.

Anyone who is trying to quit (myself at present) will tell you that the days drag on without cigarettes. The ex-smoker begins to gain weight and feel fat. Smoking causes a shortness of breath that gives a rush of blood, causing a smoker to talk rapidly and with urgency. A quitter, then, reports feeling stupid and slow. The unsympathetic non-smoker will say "Get over it." But if the non-smoker felt fat and stupid they too would sulk around the house in a bored stupor. The smoker's fundamental perception of how time moves is essentially less boring and more fun. The ex-smoker can only remember such a happiness. A non-smoker will never really understand that. So, if a smoker has ever told you that she doesn't want to quit because cigarettes make her happy it's because They Do. When a child sees a smoker, she sees a person indulging in a truly happy moment. What is more persuasive than that? It's a miracle more kids aren't smoking! Perhaps the solution is never to start.

So, the question as posed in the title still remains open. How do we get kids to stop smoking? Making cigarettes look cheap, immature, and ugly simply won't work. We must ask Why, child, do you feel a need to change your time perception as such? What is so terrible about your existence? Unfortunately we cannot ask this because the child's response will not matter to us. The ubermensch is so because he chooses not to listen to the morality of slaves. He tramples over the meek just as adults write off the sorrows of children as immaturity, teenage angst and moroseness. But to the youth, it never feels so abstract. As adults we cannot remember the rawness that immobilizes the teenager to a mopey mess. As adults we tell children to enjoy their childhood while it lasts, just as "professionals" tell college students. But how can they when their existence is characterized primarily by suffocation?

The child feels the need parse out the hours of the day because, to him, time is tyrannical. He is imprisoned in school, at home, by his bubbling hormones and the intensity at which he experiences the world. Life moves for the child as it does for the inmate: slowly, grueling, never ending. The adult smoker smokes because he must, because otherwise he might off himself. For smokers, life without cigarettes would be unmanageable. For ex-smokers the life they live is not life at all, simply a dull progression towards death, not the hurdling existence they once knew. Non-smokers then seem to be the lucky few who were born too dumb to need cigarettes, too deaf to hear the violence of their surroundings, to blind to see the reality of the world they're living in.

So, in order to get the child to quit smoking we must eradicate his desire to smoke and in order to do that we must make his life worth living. And that is an impossible feat, to be sure.

In light of recent deaths all I can possibly say is this: NOOOOOOOO!!!

I remember reading The Catcher in the Rye in middle school and identifying with its broody protagonist, Holden. At the tender age I can remember feeling utterly kindred with him, contemptuous of everyone yet humored by the fact that no one could pick up on the fact that I was making fun of them all the time. Gosh, those were the days.

In college we seldom get time for pleasure reading. However, I made it a tradition to take The Catcher in the Rye with me every time I ventured into the sauna, the beating heart of Macalester's "Nard" center. There I would sweat out the day and all the frustrating elements that reviled me while reading about someone so molested by the world I could only feel better about myself.

Teenage angst. The ultimate detox.

Coming back to The Catcher in the Rye makes me realize just how wonderful the book really is. A middle schooler can pick it up and identify with Holden whole-heartedly, while the young adult understands that Holden is, often times, being ridiculously petulant, and the fully matured adult could reads it and is stricken with an emotion I have yet to know. Something tells me too that it's an emotion I wish not to know and that, I feel, is evidence that Mr. Salinger has done his job in becoming part of this troubled brain of mine.

With my ear pressed tightly
against a concrete wall
I hear my heart
as it puffs and purrs,
but when it's pressed
against my dear
I cannot tell
if it were mine or hers.

On testing the toxicity of LSD-25 on animals during the late 1930s:

Cats, mice, chimpanzees, spiders, all weathered massive amounts of LSD-25 without apparent physical damage, although there was considerable behavioral oddity. Spiders, for instance, created webs of remarkable precision at low dosages, but lost all interest in weaving at higher ones. Cats exhibited a similar variability, ranging from nervous excitability to catatonia. But the most prophetic test, although no one realized this at the time, was with the chimps. One day [Ernst] Rothlin injected LSD into a lab chimp and then reintroduced the animal to its colony. Within minutes the place was in an uproar. The chimp hadn't acted crazy or strange, per se; instead it had blithely ignored all the little social niceties and regulations that govern chimp colony life.

Jay Stevens, Storming Heaven

An apocalyptic note for the New Year. The following quote is from Jaron Lanier's (Founder of Wired magazine) You Are Not a Gadget. Here he is talking about facebook:

"The real customer is the advertiser of the future, but this creature has yet to appear at the time this is being written. The whole artifice, the whole idea of fake friendship, is just bait laid by the lords of the clouds to lure hypothetical advertisers—we might call them messianic advertisers—who might someday show up...The only hope for social networking sites from a business point of view is for a magic formula to appear in which some method of violating privacy and dignity becomes acceptable."

Before you call me pessimistic, I implore you to Check It--he was prophetic: Facebook's Great Betrayal