Track Mangoes

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.”

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.