I'm going to drop this and leave. I can show you where it went last time; I had a few of you kind and generous people get into my head and inspire thoughts that we're not allowed to talk about here either.
Either way, six years ago today, I came home from a new job, my first job with the title "engineer" in it, to tell my father - an engineer of 32 years how it went. He was laying on the bed, aparently dead of a heart attack or stroke as he was putting on his slippers. There was no autopsy, the M.E. said cause of death was "natural causes". The receipt from the liquor store was dated the 13th; there were two empty half-gallons of gin in the closet. A gallon in 30 hours was deliberate.
Because smoking four packs of cigarettes a day, starting when he was 12 until the day he died is "normal". Because after throat cancer cost him his tongue and he drank Gin through his feeding tube a quart at a time, this was "natural causes"
REDUX: Even for snafubar, this diary is absurdly long, and as my own editor, I’ve gone on strike. You’ve been warned.
Some of you may remember this. I deleted this diary because some people like to get a reaction out of people, then blame them for it. I tend to give people what they came for, so if you like to push buttons because you know it will hit a sensitive area and cause a reaction - I'll give you exactly what you came for and never, ever, apologize for it. You asked for it, you got it.
Some disclaimers: This diary has absolutely nothing to do with any organization or group within the DailyKos that calls itself "GUS". They did not inspire it, they don't endorse it, and although many of their group told me that it's powerful and they liked it (and one of them explicitly asked me to put their tag on it, which is what started all the trouble) I did not write it for them.
Got it? No GUS tag, no endorsement by any member of the aforementioned group. I wrote it originally before they existed; I suggest no link whatsoever to their efforts here.
Clear enough?
I'm sort of posting this because of the recent CBS news story about how the FDA is using graphic imagery in their anti-smoking ads.
For those of you apoplectic and indignant about the governments "shock tactics", grab a tissue and get over yourselves. The pictures are not fiction. The people were real. And if you play Powerball that has odds somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 million to 1 that you might win, but smoke when there's a 1 in 100 chance you'll get sick in some form, I gotta say you need remedial math. Either way, it makes my brain itch.
I promise you every one of them thought they'd go quick like a heart attack, and on their own terms. My father never thought he'd live eight years after having his jawbone removed from his chin to his ear and eventually his entire tongue. I assure you that when I tell you that the whole house smelled like spoiled egg nog all year round, it was not intended to shock you; it's a fact that when you mix Gin with liquid nutrition (Ensure) it smells horrible. And when they've cut out your tongue, your stomach is open to the air forever more - it's just a jar without a lid, and the smell of whatever you eat will always come out your nose and mouth because there's no muscle or tissue there to close it off anymore.
For those of you who say this is gross, thank you for being so astute. Wait until you come in from a crisp November day and open the kitchen door to the smell of rancid milk, alcohol, and smoke. Must be Thanksgiving.
Some commented on my anger, my "hatred". Yeah, there's some of that. But I don't hate someone for something inate in their physical characteristics or their heritage; not one person who smokes is forced to, and if they dont' like inspiring the wrath of people like me - hey, we are glad you noticed, because we don't appreciate having a reason to be irritated.
Freedom to do what you want comes with having the spine to live with the consequences. I smell smoke, I see dead people. One dead person, really, but it's hard to get that image out of my head when he showed me his mouth. Clive Barker and Wes Craven don't have a thing on the surgeons who do "The Trotter Procedure". When I smell smoke, even from the third car in line who just flicked a but out the window and mine are rolled up, these are the images that flash in my brain.
I don't do it to gross you out, I don't do it to shock you. I lived this life, and if I'm obligated to throw a blanket over it like it was a car with a beheaded body inside after the rollover.
As so many have admonished me who take no responsibility for the reactions they inspire in me, I know have endorsed their methodology. I write it because I lived it, what you do with it is up to you and out of my control. I will not shelter you from it though, for it is a true story.
I have the same attitude towards drunk drivers and people who don't wear seat belts - I'm not the one who made the images of the horror so graphic when someone dies for a preventable, stupid reason.
Smoking is the same beast. Sure, you're free to smoke - but you're not immune from the consequences, and you don't get to blame them on someone else, nor are you immune from the reactions. That includes the reactions from people like me, who smell cigarette smoke and has flashbacks to the day my father's tongue fell out of his mouth and onto his lap like a piece of fatback - that was not filmed in a studio for shock value. Free speech means you also own what comes next, and you are responsible for the reaction. Fair enough?
And for those of you who really have integrity, google "The Trotter Procedure". Surely right now, some hospital somewhere at this very moment is prepping for this surgery - my dad wasn't the first to have it, and he won't be the last. If you ask Roger Ebert (who had it) or wait to find out what might happen to Michael Douglas, maybe they can provide you with the bona fides for you to accept that this is not a story only sung by Snafubar's one man band. you. Surgeon's don't name a procedure nor teach it to other doctors if they only think they are only going to use it once.
I do remember what Michael Douglas said on Letterman about his cancer:
"If you're going to get cancer, throat cancer is the kind you don't want"
He may have said Stage 4 is the kind you don't want, but if we're going to worry about minutae...
Either way, I can vouch that there are few sentences with more truth in them. I wish him well. My dad survived eight years. He survived the cancer; he could not survive the agony of losing his mouth.
I won't put up pictures; the imagery of my words should be enough.
NOW - pay close attention, I want there to be no equivocation, no ambiguity, no misunderstandings in my words: (This is for a particular member of the Daily Kos community who doesn't like to be called out, but who's last words to me were "I STAND BY EVERY FUCKING WORD")
I don't want the government to make you quit smoking.
Let me repeat that:
I don't want the government to make you quit smoking.
Did you hear me Mark? Can you read that?
I want you to have the intellectual integrity, the inner strength to believe in yourself, and the common sense to do it for your own reasons.
If this story helps, carry it with you.
If this story doesn't help you, that's not my problem. It was a true story. You're not going to ask me to censor my life or cover up my father's so that you don't have nightmares or guilt.
I have both, what will you do for me?
This was a real person, I knew him for all of my 37 years. What shocked me most about him was that he was a brutal, unforgiving pragmatist. He was an atheist and an engineer; there were no excuses, no mystical causes, never was he content with "I don't know". He worked until he found a solution, for that's what engineers do. But on this one issue of his personal indulgences for alcohol and tobacco, he made Doestoyevsky proud. He did something that he knew would hurt no one on earth more than himself, just to prove that he had the freedom to do it.
He was the one who would point his finger down my nose and say, "Son, you're better than this. You know what the right thing to do is, now stop making excuses and do it".
And in his last years he came to be the most surreal example of everything he told me to fight against. This story is not about my father; it's not so much about tobacco and smoking really, as much as it is about the sociological impairment that groupthink can blind people with. Inside your head you know something is wrong; but as long as you can find a crowd and establish solidarity with them - you're good.
Note below the passage about the morphine: the doctor gave him an open prescription for Morphine; but he did not want to be "addicted".
Smoking four packs a day and pouring a quart of gin directly into your stomach through the feeding tube, apparently that's not addiction. Someone is going to have to explain this to me.
Lastly, I wince when I see young people smoking. (I just hang my head when I see adults and elders do it) I cry for them inside my soul, for they all live with the same tragic lie that would have made Shakespeare write a sonnet if smoking had been so popular in his age as it is in ours. (Shakespearians surely smoked, but they never met the marketing power of RJR Nabisco - Nicotine! Now with cookies!) All the young smokers all have the same line: they all say, "well, I'm OK now, I'll quit when my health catches up to me"
And then when their health catches up to them, the older versions of those people all say,
"well, no reason to quit now!"
My neighbor across the street? Two years of bladder scrapings, Chemo, a colonectomy, more chemo. He switched to unfiltered cigarettes when he started treatment.
A year later; his bladder was clean; obviously his colon was gone - now they found it in his lungs.
He says, "There's a lot of cancer in the area".
Ahem.
My dad died at 70. My neighbor isn't 60 yet.
My dad "quit" after the first surgery. He said he woke up one morning three months after the surgery and his legs would not stop kicking, so he had a smoke and they stopped. That was his justification to start smoking again; so that four years later they did the same surgery on the other side of his mouth - not a regrowth of the old cancer, they got it all - but a new growth.
That one, when it finally cost him his tongue, made it impossible to swallow that mucus smokers hack up in the "smokers cough" (he already had no saliva, as the radiation treatment originally intended to avoid the surgery had destroyed his salivary glands) - so he would start drowning and have no way to keep it from going into his lungs. Hard to fathom someone drowning in their own fluids. There are other stories about the suction pump on the kitchen sink filled with the mucus; reminded me of a drink we used to make in college called an "abortion" - it was Bailey's Irish Creme mixed with Chambourd (Raspberry liquior that made the milk curdle). Makes it tough to eat a sandwich in the kitchen with that staring back at you.
One more thing: My father was a Republican. In 2004, Two weeks before he died, I drive him to the polls knowing his vote for president was going to cancel mine out. I'm not sure how he would have felt about health care, because he had IBM's best medical insurance, Medicare, AND a few hundred thousand dollars in the bank. He was "grandma" that Obama's death panels was supposed to kill.
Seems he beat them to the opportunity.
So there he was, with doctors and hospitals ultimately spending over $500,000 during the eight years since his diagnois, for the radiation that did not work, the two surgeries, four years of liquid food in cans, aftercare, and treatment - all the while Dad stands with his hands on the valve to keep it wide open, consuming the two things that arguably brought him all this misery in the first place.
Freedom, oh glorious freedom!
He said I was better than that. I thought he was, but if you just mention the word "addiction" all is forgiven. Wow.
freedom is something almost sacred yes - but it honored when it is wasted on the most selfish and ignoble causes? I was ashamed. I imagine some other person wishing they had either insurance or money to save their life and being told that they get nothing; but those who play russian roulette with their own self-over-indulgence of things they know are bad for them - well, if they have the money, we'll fight to save them while they fight to keep drowning.
I have nightmares of shame over it all.
So, here, in it's entirety, is the original diary entitled
"So Obama wants kids to stop smoking. I think I can help"
I found a way to link to deleted diaries if you know who wrote it; link to the tip jar, then click "View Story".
It was the only diary I had written in three years that made the rec list; then I deleted it. I'm waiting to see if my old adversaries emerge here today. I will take the advice that so many others have given me, and just let it go. So this diary will stand on it's own today, with no further comment from me.
It was a true story. May it not be the one that will describe your life; either as a smoker or the son of one.
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Even for snafubar, this diary is absurdly long, and as my own editor, I’ve gone on strike. You’ve been warned.
I’m just going to unzip this, so go locate your mop and bucket and enough Spic-n-Span to clean the average 3 bedroom house before you start, because I want to make you sick.
You want to know why I’m so angry? You want to know why I just don’t give a fuck anymore? You want to know why I think everyone is lying to me and expecting me to be lying to them?
I’ll tell you why. Because from 1996 until 2004, I watched a man die. He was not the first – four of the men I admired in my youth never made it to 70; all smokers and drinkers. The fifth one – the last one - He was my father. He was four months shy of his 70th birthday, and he went through eight years of the most horrific misery I’ve ever watched a man endure. And I watched him embrace the cause of his misery tighter each day, until the day when it finally got the better of him, and he used it to kill himself.
______________
In 1935, My dad was a man who was born into a strong, but not wealthy family. There were stories of very austere periods of eating nothing but cabbage and potatoes from the garden in the back yard for long stretches. He survived a bout of polio – before Jonas Salk’s vaccine made it possible for the rest of us not to worry about it. He started smoking when he was 12. He had his teeth pulled and replaced with dentures when he was 17 years old.
Yet in 1952, he graduated co-valedictorian of his high school class, with a fellow student who would have failed Calculus had it not been for my father’s help. He was a proud man who had the good humor to admit that when, at a young age his father recognized his mechanical aptitude and said "you will be an engineer", thought he was going to drive a train.
His mom worked in a sweatshop so that he could go to college. And I can show you the letter from the head nun from a now "consolidated" (read: "closed") Catholic church, announcing that the family had just won their first car in a raffle: a 1942 Plymouth Sedan. It was $750, and just like Oprah, they had to come up with the taxes. The ticket was purchased by my dad when he was seven years old, paid for with a quarter he found under a cigarette machine while cleaning up the bar run by his father.
After college, my father was hired by IBM and was promoted to senior engineer at such a young age that they kept it a secret for two years so as not to create animosity amongst the older ranks. He earned 16 patents during the 32 years he worked for IBM, and as an employee of the corporation, he forfeited royalties to the company, although he did get compensation awards and a seat at the banquet at the Waldorf Astoria.
One patent earned him a $1,500 award in 1974; in 1999 IBM held an anniversary celebration in honor of all who worked on a machine that, in an age where the average life-cycle of a design is 18 months, holds the record to this day as having been in production longer than any other machine in the history of International Business Machines Corp: 35 years and counting. It’s still in use today by every Federal Reserve Bank in the US – it sorts your checks so that they can be returned to the bank that issued them.
My father is not the only man to have worked on that machine, not by a long shot. But his principal contribution that earned him the award in 1974, as of 1999 had saved the IBM Corporation and the banks that paid IBM to lease this machine over 2.4 Billion dollars. Not a bad investment for an award check $1,500 and a weekend in New York City.
Well, in 1974, that was half the cost of a car. hey - it would have bought two of the Plymouths.
He retired at age 53, with full pension and IBM’s once storied health care. This story is about how that health care came in rather handy, as his addiction to cigarettes and alcohol has turned his son’s life into a series of memories – living nightmares – that I can’t forget.
It has been said that those who both smoke and drink more than double their risk of cancer. You should listen to whoever says that, because my father had most of his mouth, tongue, and throat carved out, after the radiation treatments, and this continuing series will be about what his life - and mine - was like after the surgeries.
(you may want to jot this down: Whatever cancer you get, the one you don't want is throat cancer. Just trust me on this)
And the memories that haunt me the most were not the sound of the suction pump that he used to vacuum the slime out of his mouth once his salivary glands were dead and dry and his tongue had fallen out. That pump sounded like a shop-vac trying to slurp up a bucket full rocks buried in mud.
This story is not about the contents of the jar that captured what he vacuumed out of his mouth, which sat next to the kitchen sink for eight years.
Nor are they about the concussion of the thud I heard those many times he landed on the floor in the middle of the night after a drunken binge that made me sure that a car had struck the house. The memories that haunted me most were not the images of my drunken father, eyes closed, and swaying back and forth like a person with palsy so severe they would break their limbs.
Instead, what haunts me most was the indifference amongst all the other people who also knew this story. To them, I was the boy who cried wolf, even though I was living with the wolf. The wolf wasn't going to eat me; he was eating himself and I was going nuts having to watch. If I had been a 16 year old daughter and told the stories of what I witnessed and lived through, they probably would have arrested my father. But as a then 36 year old man, one of the memories that haunts me was going to the hospital in the middle of the night to describe the misery I was watching. I was hoping they would come help me with my father, but instead, that group of greedy and heartless sadists locked me up for four days because they thought I needed more help than my father did.
When I got back home after being released "against doctor’s orders", Dad was still drunk and passed out in his underwear on the kitchen floor. Right where I had left him four days earlier.
And that story happened more than once. Way more than once.
This is a story about a man who routinely had a blood alcohol level that had to be somewhere in the 0.5 neighborhood. No, that is not a typo: not 0.05 or 0.08 which is the legal limit to get you arrested for DUI in most states. My father’s BAC was over six times that, and in later installments I’ll tell you how I know that. That kind of blood-alcohol content claimed Jimi Hendrix and Bon Scott, is most always lethal, and in my opinion it’s how my father eventually committed suicide. The death certificate says, "Natural causes" and there was no autopsy. I am grateful that one was not required. But before I’m done here, you will believe as I do that my father took his own life.
And after you hear the rest of this story, you will wonder - like I do - how he lasted that long.
When Saddam Hussein cut out the tongues of his political enemies, he was called a war criminal and a barbarian – as he rightly was. In my father’s case, Dad had to make the co-payments to the surgeon. He had two operations, and on the day that his 94 year old mother was buried, he was in the hospital having his second surgery to remove a second tumor that appeared after he had started smoking again soon after the first surgery four years earlier. Eventually that led to the day when what was left of his tongue simply fell out on to his lap while he was talking from lack of blood flow. I thought it was a piece of animal fat.
He still kept smoking.
This is a story about a man who smoked four packs of cigarettes in a day when he sometimes was only awake for a few hours in 24. This is a man who kept track of how many cartons of cigarettes he bought and on what dates, and how much they cost, even after he stopped keeping track of his enteral feedings, medication, and his journal.
This is about a man who was so careful and pedantic that he bought a 12" diameter cigar ashtray and four brass "extinguishers" so that his ashes would always fall safely in the ashtray and burn themselves out. But at the same time, he passed out so many times with a lit cigarette in his hand that I still get chills trying to figure out how this house did not burn to the ground. I can count almost 20 burn scars in the carpet, on the mattress, on the hardwood floors, and in his leather recliner that are a public-service warning just waiting to be filmed for every fire department that wants homeowners not to smoke or see the value in smoke detectors.
This is a story about a man who was determined to end his addiction to morphine even when his doctor was willing to give him as much as he asked for - and even encouraged him to use it - but he instead preferred to pour straight Gin or Vodka directly into his stomach through his feeding tube in quantities so absurd that he would pass out before he could make it from the kitchen back to his chair in the living room.
This is a story about a man who started smoking when he was 12 years old, who by the time he died loved tobacco more than his life or his son. This is the story of how his son wound up eating his own brain from the inside out because the rest of the world thinks it’s no big deal.
So Obama wants kids to stop smoking? Let me finish telling you stories about how a brilliant man who had achieved much in his life threw it all away, and seemed to be proud of it. He smoked so much that if you spray the walls of this house with Formula 409, they look like they are crying maple syrup or motor oil. Stephen King wrote horror stories about walls that cried blood, but I can testify that outside the bathroom door where the steam from the shower causes dark brown rivulets of tobacco tar to dribble seven feet down to the floor, it can inspire so much more dread and misery if you know what else that sticky brown slime will eventually do to someone you love.
Let me tell you that when I smell cigarette smoke, I am filled with so much rage and so much adrenaline that I have visions in my head that I dare not repeat to anyone lest I again be confined against my will. If a Viet Nam or Gulf War or Iraq War vet comes back and tells you of a certain smell that brings back nightmares that we classify as PTSD, we have sympathy for him and ask what we can do to ease the pain.
If a young girl survives a house fire that killed her family and tells you that the smell of wood smoke gives her nightmares to the point she can’t even enjoy marshmallows at a campfire, you put your arm around her and you try to console her any way you can.
If a young boy tells you that the smell of gunpowder causes him to pee in his pants because the first time he smelled that odor it was when he older brother picked up their father’s gun and shot himself by accident, you cry in sympathy for the senseless tragedy.
But if I tell you that the smell of cigarette smoke makes me see visions of swinging a sixteen-pound sledgehammer with every ounce of strength I can muster right through the head of the fucking asshole who is smoking – and that I can smell smoke from the car in front of me from a block behind it even with the windows up – you tell me I need therapy and to calm down and get over it.
(2010 post script: some say that is a "threat of violence". Get over yourself. Until I act on it, it's a thought in my head. And since so many don't care about that thought as long as I don't speak it out loud, I'm confused as to what you want from me. I can't tell you what I feel, but you can still keep doing what inspires the feelings. Frankly, if I were making someone irritated, i'd want to know about it so that I might stop being something others are focused on. You have your plan, I have mine)
When 2,978 people were killed by terrorists on September 11, 2001 the country said "Never Forget". But a few hundred thousand people are going to die of their own pathetic overindulgences of all manner of addictive substances, and since my father was just another one of them, I am told, "Move on. Get over it."
I must have gotten those two confused.
And that is why my handle is snafubar – situation normal, all fucked up, beyond all recognition. I’m tired of being told to "live with it", "get over it", and "stop being so uptight" when I see people engaged in the same stupid, pointless behavior that can only lead to one place I wish no one had ever gone in the first place.
I’m tired of being told that "it’s human nature", because if anyone actually carries that idea far enough, we should all still be wearing animal skins and hunting with spears, and be afraid of the dark when the fire goes out. We got to where we are by being better than our basest instincts. Why we are so goddamned comfortable falling back on them in so many ways is what makes me an angry man.
And so, when I see someone drag on a cigarette in 2009 and wear an expression on their face like they’re getting laid right in front of me and the world, I see a sad, pathetic, and selfish person who not only doesn’t care about me or my health, but wants me not to care about theirs either. Or they want me to respect and admire the fact they dont' care about their own health or anyone else's. Let me tell you now, and I hope your spine chills before you finish this sentence, although I confess that I have a wicked temper – I would not wish on the person I hate more than any other on Earth that they endure what I watched my father go through.
Wait until I tell you about what was in the jar attached to the suction pump. But not now.
I mean that. I have a personal definition of "barbaric" now that is much different than it was before 1996.
So if you smoke, stop already. Enough with this bullshit about your rights and your pleasure. Sure, you're addicted. But learn to masturbate or twirl your hair - anything is better than poisoning yourself in the company of everyone else who can't escape your toxic cloud. Enough with this macho pride, or your arrogant delusions that you have the freedom to do all things, even when they are indefensibly rude and undeniably lethal. If you really feel that way, if you really feel like the Nicotine is so powerful that you just can't live without all the wretched consequences that come with it, then at least have the courage and integrity to admit you're not up to it, then find the confidence to surrender your membership in the human race and climb back down at least one rung on the evolutionary ladder, and head back to the chimpanzees. At least they still look cute when they smoke.
Maybe that's because we expect them to be stupid. (!)
But as a human, no matter how long you’ve practiced in the mirror to hold your hand in some elegant or macho posture, no matter how many years of experimentation or the presence of the gene that allows you to curl your tongue and make the smoke dance in cool and chaotic patterns when you exhale, to many of us you still look like a pathetic idiot and a moron. An arrogant one at that, who has no shame nor thought of apology when spitting out the dregs of your addiction so the rest of us are forced to ingest it but don't get to enjoy your buzz. We don't get your high, but we get to smell like an oil pan full of rotten eggs just so you can.
Thanks.
There are many women who I find so attractive that my lust awakens and almost overwhelms me. Lucky for me, most of them repulse me so intensely that I even try to forget the image altogether when they put that stupid white stick with the glowing embers in their mouth. Freude said that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, but sometimes a cigarette is really just an oral fixation that involves a lethal weapon.
The comedian Gallagher once said, "Smoking would be OK if you held it in." And just to show what it would be like if people who drink beer exhaled like people who smoke, he demonstrated the technique. (Think about the fire-breathers who spit a mouthful of gasoline in a fine mist, only the beer won't catch on fire) That’s how I see smokers.
And having just indirectly insulted the President of the United States, a man who not only did I vote for, but for the first time in my 41 years donated money to support and volunteered to promote his campaign, I realize the brazen arrogance of what I have written.
But I’m going to sleep well tonight as I know that it’s nowhere near as brazen and arrogant as when a smoker exhales his thoughtless addiction in my face and tells me that it’s a "right". Well now, let’s think about this. You know...it makes me feel good when I evacuate my bowels, especially when I’m constipated after eating starchy and spicy food. But If I took a giant shit on your lap and refused to even excuse myself because "I have a right to make myself feel good because this is a free country", I’d like to see if I could get away with that move even once without (ironically) getting the shit kicked out of me.
These are the more gruesome and horrific sounds, smells, and images that I can’t get out of my head because I watched a brilliant and proud and successful man become a selfish, pathetic, humiliated, and shameful shell of himself - but hey! he still had his four packs every day, right? I mean, I know we all have to make choices about what's important in life. And although he knew he was shameful and pathetic to look at, and at times couldn’t face it anymore; what completely wrecked me as a person, was that a lot of other people who knew the story shrugged their shoulders, rolled their eyes, or turned away completely and said, "shit happens". I’m eating myself from the inside out because I don’t ever want to "get used to it".
Some misery doesn’t have to happen, and the unfathomable arrogance that humans still have to call themselves the superior species while demonstrating such unconscionable stupidity like cigarette smoking – something that makes the chimpanzees who fling their shit at each other look far more civilized by comparison - has gotten the better of me.
There are a lot of addictions, morphine and meth surely have a stronger pull than tobacco or alcohol. But we don't yawn and roll over and go back to sleep with the heavy stuff like we do with tobacco and alcohol.
Universal Health Care is on the political stage right now, and I have already written diaries about this double standard we have about death. So when the CDC says that less than one in five Americans smoke but I can spot 7 out of 9 smokers in the cars around me at the average intersection, I have to ask you to explain the warp in the statistics. (hint: The answer is they count the kids under the age of 12 and the people who smoked their whole lives who are now so sick and infirmed that they finally quit as "Americans" in the denominator.)
In short, I’m unapologetically disgusted by any country who was willing to start a war because 2,978 citizens were killed by terrorists, and yet we lose a few hundred thousand of our own citizens to their own habitual overindulgences to very profitable addictions (both on the product themselves and the industries that are needed to deal with the consequences) that they know are lethal and simply don't care. So this country cares not as much for how to keep more Americans alive as it does simply feeling comfortable that the appropriate people were blamed for their death. Death by one’s own hand is called suicide if you do it quickly and leave a note; if you just keep digging your grave over the course of 60 years through your own pride and defense of your freedom to enjoy yourself, it’s called "addiction". And addictions are good economics – there are no better reliable consumers than an addict.
You don’t think all the illegal drug dealers would risk so much if the buyers weren’t as predictable as the phases of the moon, do you? That’s the power of addiction. Only for tobacco and alcohol, we still have a sizeable chunk of our economy dependent on people hobbled by their own needs and the encouraged and acceptable inability to manage them. Maybe gamblers are taken advantage of more than smokers and drinkers, but that's a tough scale to calibrate.
Hey – we’ll still sell you life insurance, just at a higher rate, and rather than quit and lower your rate, you’ll spend more on the insurance, more on the addiction itself, and then have to make up the difference by buying cheaper crap for all your other needs. Good thing we've got China for cheap trinkets so we can waste any savings on your next surgery.
I always feel like punching someone who says they can’t afford to see a dentist every six months for periodic checkups while they just spent four times that in the course of a year to turn their fingertips yellow from the smoke going over their teeth. It’s not that they can’t afford it, they simply made a deliberate choice for periodic instantaneous comfort over long-term security and health. That choice is about cravings; it has nothing to do with economics.
If you ask people to explain why they smoke, the people who are in good health now will continue to smoke all they want. Sometimes they’ll say, "I’ll quit when I start to feel sick". And then when they start to get sick with lung cancer, emphysema, heart disease or mouth/throat cancer, they say "Well, I’m already sick now, there’s no sense in giving up something that gives me so much enjoyment once it’s too late to stop the damage."
People say they enjoy the sensation they get when they smoke. I know a man who experienced so much "enjoyment" that even after they cut out his tongue and he could not even swallow the mucus that every smoker’s has as a natural reflex of their immune system, that when the mucus went into his windpipe and not his esophagus he was literally drowning in his own "enjoyment". The gurgling sound of a man drowning while sitting in his recliner in his living room (while nowhere near a body of water) is hard to forget. This I can say with confidence.
So Barack Obama wants kids to stop smoking.
So do I.
So.
Do.
I.
When I go into a restaurant and they ask me "smoking or non-smoking", (again, I think of Gallagher, who said, "Why am I judged by what I do not do. I don't piss my pants, they don't ask me that...") I say, "if you just get the rest of them to quit, you won’t have to ask me anymore". Sometimes they smile, sometimes not. You can tell from the smell of the clothes on the ones who aren’t smiling why it’s not a joke to them.
So if you really want to understand why I’m frothing at the mouth and spewing invective and profanity that would offend many people beyond just my mom, ask me explicitly to finish this wretched series of horror stories, and I’ll do it. But I’m going to write these stories only at your invitation and behest, because I want you to know I intend to make you sick andI want you to read it for just that purpose. I want you to be so sick to your stomach that you beg me to stop because it’s so undeniably gross and tragic.
And then I’ll slap you in the face with your own irony; I’ll stop telling you rotten stories when you stop giving me reasons to expect that some other pathetic bastard is going to have to watch someone he loves and admires go through a similar tragedy.
Shakespeare did not write tragedies to give us a goal to achieve. Neither will I.
So, should I start with the list of extra equipment you’re going to need to smoke? It’s more than just a pack of cigarettes, a lighter, and maybe an ashtray. Trust me on this. The suction pump, the feeding bags, the feeding tubes.
Your call.
This was a diary to congratulate President Obama on his tobacco move today.
Maybe, just maybe, he'll quit too.
Remember - my dad didn't want to be addicted to morphine, because there was a stigma to that. He had no problem with Tobacco because we still don't heckle, ridicule, disparage, and refuse to tolerate the smokers to that degree yet.
Yet.
Now that's something I can hope for.
Mr. President, I hope you quit as well. For Michelle, Malia, Sascha, and yourself. It's going to look weird if our history books say you were strong enough to revive our economy, you were strong enough to take on and meet the world'd diplomatic crises, but in the end, it was the stupid white sticks that brought down the best symbol of hope in a lifetime.
I believe you can quit, as much as I believe we can overcome our challenges. How about it?
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Post script: The government is not to blame for showing you pictures of what some people live through after a lifetime of smoking, any more than the newspaper is to blame for putting the picture of the mangled car on the front page when somenone dies from drinking and driving.
I am not to blame for writing this story, unless you think that people who endure horrific experiences are supposed to be self-censoring so that others can avert their gaze and pretend it didn't happen.
Either way, to the Republicans and Conservatives and Libertarians who want the nanny state to stay out of their lives: pretend you really are the animal at the top of the food chain, the one with the big brain and the opposable thumbs that is supposed to be superior to the "lesser" animals, and declare to us that you're stronger than your reptillian instincts. Yes, you have the freedom to smoke, drink, to tell me to fuck off and die, or to even set your hair on fire so that we'll all be unable to look away.
But is that the most noble use of that freedom we insist that generations of our ancestors defended for us to celebrate?
It's an open question.
My life experience has led me to say, "no".