Why I’m Carrying All This Pudding
Dear Internet,
I’ve always been fascinated with the way people spend their mornings. If we look at a day to as a microcosm of a life, then every day we get to start our lives over again. Only this time, instead of our parents or elders raising us, we get to the opportunity to raise ourselves, exactly the way we want to. We get to welcome the morning version of ourselves into the world and communicate our priorities to it. “What is the specific combination of information, exertion, nutrition, chemicals, and/or spiritual practice that we’ll need to get through the day?” Coffee? Tea? Water? Medication? Meditation? Music? News? Device/no device? Stretching? Running, yoga, weed, cocaine? Sex, reading, breakfast?
I’ve heard somewhere that motivational speaker and human totem pole Anthony Robbins starts every day with a plunge into ice-cold water — that wherever he is in the world, he maintains access to intensely cold water so that he can begin his day exactly how he’s decided is best. I’ll assume that’s because he wants to raise a self that is intensely strong, fearless, and has tiny, shriveled genitals. God bless you, Tony Robbins. I wish you the coldest.
My morning ritual is not quite as intense. I usually stumble into the kitchen, put on the coffee, wash last night’s dishes, listen to Morning Edition, make the bed, and then cross the street to sit on a bench and disavow the idea that any of this matters.
Another way to say that is I sit on a bench, drink my morning coffee, read a book, and smoke my morning cigarette.
I’m embarrassed when I do it, I’m embarrassed when I talk about it, and I’m embarrassed to write about it right here. Which is most of the reason why I’m doing it. At the risk of taking advantage of your attention, internet- I’m trying to contextualize myself into behaving better. I think you’re probably used to that by now. And I’m no better. I would never post pictures of my workouts, but this is a version of that, in word form. Watch me quit smoking, internet. That might be the premise.
As of this writing, I’ve been smoking for 25 years. 25 years, internet. That’s as old as this Selena Gomez reference I was tempted to make if I wasn’t too embarrassed to make a Selena Gomez reference. So over the past 25 years, as young Selena blossomed and grew, I’ve certainly quit, sometimes for long stretches even, but it seems to be, when all is said and done, that I’m a smoker. I’ve been a smoker. It’s going in the bio. Me and George Burns and Freud and Sean Penn and a bunch of other people I just looked up- Michael Fassbender! That helps.
But smokers are a rarity in my life these days. All of the smokers I used to have around only smoke when they’re drinking, otherwise they’ve quit years ago. And then there’s Colin. Colin is my smoking buddy here at the building, and he’s an old-fashioned smoker. This idiot loves smoking. He smokes all day, shows me his cool lighters, has a big dumb smile on his face when he smokes, and is obviously missing the point of the whole thing. 75% of the times I go out to have a smoke at night, Colin is already out there; like a fat, tattooed gargoyle who wants to talk to me about wrestling. We started chatting three years ago when I first moved into the building, and now I don’t have the heart to avoid him, despite the fact that for some reason, he’s only capable of telling me about either what WWE match is coming up or which tv shows he and his wife are watching. And I mean only. I used to engage him about a variety of things: work, the city, his marriage, a single thing that’s going on with me, but now it’s strictly tv or wrestling.
We have an understanding at this point — as soon as ‘how’s it going?’ is out of the way, he just rattles off the names of shows like he’s fucking rain man or something. The other day, I was on my way into the building, didn’t stop to smoke, said hi, and as I was heading into the lobby, he yelled out “Blood Drive!” “What’s that?” I turned back. “Blood Drive on Syfy!” he said, “Check it out!” “Okay, thanks, Colin.” My relationship with Colin might be the single biggest regret I have about smoking.
Now before we get too deep, just to clarify, I’m a pretty light smoker: I don’t smoke during the day, I don’t bring cigarettes with me when I leave the building, and the most I’ll smoke, unless I’m out drinking, is 3 cigarettes in a day. Nonetheless, the results are in. I smoke. So it’s time to talk about it.
At a party at Ken Yuasa’s house during 7th grade, I had the clever idea that I would snap the strap of Jen Sims’ bra. I had learned somewhere that that was something you could do — it was playful, irreverent, a subtle acknowledgement of our changing bodies, but with the upending of social norms that was part of my brand in the 7th grade.
It didn’t go well.
She was scared, pissed off, and Chris Epstein, who she was dating at the time, marched me out of the party and onto the street. I ended up taking a nice walk home before it was even time for cake. But as I marched down Burroughs St. mid-afternoon on a Saturday in 1991, I remember thinking, “I wish I smoked- this would be the perfect moment for a cigarette.” Smoking seemed like the ideal way to register my dissent, my disgust with all of the pettiness of life in junior high. A way to say, “Not only do I not care about you and your bullshit social hierarchies, but this whole town, the country, the whole world I could do without. I don’t even need life. Not even life.”
Heavy shit. And I hadn’t even started listening to The Smiths yet.
When I was a senior in high school, and I’d been smoking for three years already, I wrote a one-act play wherein seven characters are trapped in a sort of purgatorial room together, each of them having their own idiosyncratic method for passing the time. The character that I played, “Bonkers,” began the play with a paper bag over his head, and eventually it was revealed that he had lost his mind (you know, in a cute, poetically adventurous way that relieved me of the responsibility of writing coherent dialogue) and eventually he was given the opportunity to explain why.
Bonkers spoke of a gift, a talent that he had that was so profound, so earth-shattering, that he couldn’t possibly reveal it to the world, and so had descended into madness rather than upsetting everyone around him. But now — it was time to reveal the gift, and consequences be damned. The others waited…there was a dramatic pause…and finally Bonkers belched, unimpressively. In the play, everyone laughed at his self-importance, the knots that he’d tied himself into based on this fallacy. Eventually, he returned to his life under the paper bag. The gift had been a fake, but the hiding from it had become real.
Bonkers represented me, of course, the paper bag was smoking cigarettes, and the gift…well, that still remains to be seen.
Over the years, the image of that gift has haunted me. What if there’s something I’m not doing…some talent I’m not in touch with that would be revealed if I just gave up those 2–3 cigarettes a day? What if underneath those smokes, lies a great mime or an R & B singer? What if I’m really a breakdancer? A tightrope walker?
But instead of finding out, I usually return to the bench to have my evening smoke. Because the more frightening thought is, “what if there’s nothingthere?” What if, like Bonkers, I’m just a regular guy, just a normal dude who’s been poisoning myself for Selena Gomez’s entire life for no reason.
Whenever the subject of quitting does arrive on my proverbial docket, it’s immediately countered by a mixtape of justifications provided to me over the years — scraps of decontextualized, loosely relevant comments rush in like the secret service in the Zapruder film.
A recent favorite, offered by an old friend over dinner (who doesn’t smoke but maintains a nightly red wine habit) is, “If it wasn’t cigarettes, you’d just find some other crutch.”
“Yes!” I concur to myself, reaching for my pack while conjuring up a slideshow of me tucking into cup after cup of chocolate pudding — chocolate pudding on park benches, chocolate pudding outside nightclubs, chocolate pudding after a long plane ride- which, of course, would never do, as it would not only lead to a twenty or thirty pound weight gain, but the constant rhetorical challenge of having to explain why a 39- year-old man travels with a satchel full of pudding cups.
“No thanks,” I resolve, taking a drag, satisfied with my circular logic, “I’ll stick with smoking.” Somehow I’ve managed to position smoking as the lesser of two evils.
The greater being pudding.
Maybe I am a great gymnast after all.
The point, internet, is that I’m still doing it. And I’d like to believe that I do it knowingly. I’ve obviously heard all of the health arguments, seen the intense advertisements with the amputated finger woman, have a pretty consistent vision of my lungs, tan and leathery like a bomber jacket, and yet I continue.
One of the things that I realized when preparing to write this piece, is that most of what I like about smoking is that it resembles reading. It’s an act of literacy. Not because it’s easy to picture Samuel Beckett or Jean Cocteau or any of these guys with a jaunty cigarette in hand, but because its a little break from the whirling phantasm of living in first person. Of responding to the appetites, the neuroses, the emotional swoops and stumbles that come with being a person. For a moment, even if its just twice a day, while I’m sitting on that bench, I’m not surrounded by life, but I’m watching it from the outside- reading it. I’ve often had the thought that smoking is just the punctuation that turns a day from an endless paragraph into a piece of poetry.
Here are my thoughts without smoking-
wakeuprunaroundsweatfeelweirdaboutmybodygotoworkhaveawkwardconversationeatacookiewatchayoutubevideohaveacrushonagirlfeelshittyaboutmyjobcomehomenotknowwhattodoeatfunnydinnerfeelbadtrytosleepwakeupacoupletimeseatmyroommatesnutbuttertryandgobacktosleepdumbdreamsstartover
And here are my thoughts with:
“(lighting up)
…..you know what’s dumb?…..
…..buying stuff……
(first puffs)
…..you know what else is dumb?…..
.….owning stuff…..
(secondary puffs)
…..you know what else is dumb?…..
..…wanting stuff…..
(tertiary puffs)
…..maybe I should read The Great Gatsby….
(intermediate puffs)
…..maybe I should watch North by Northwest…..
(descending puffs)
…..I wonder when I’m gonna go through my Bach phase…..”
(end of smoke)
See what I mean? No contest.
But it’s quite possible there are other ways that can be achieved. Maybe that’s obvious. Meditation. Writing. Exercise. But those all take so long. One cigarette, and you’re all set, all zipped up and unemotional about everything within five minutes! It’s that efficiency that gets me. And the only price? My health? It pales in comparison to that ability to step outside of my life.
So I don’t know what the answer is. I’ve thought about just smoking until the end. The quitting conversation gets pretty boring after years of not doing it. At a certain point, you just stop having it.
But I’m obviously still thinking about it.
And I did have this one idea.
Instead of smoking more, internet, if literacy is really what I’m after…please allow me to write a new version of that 7th grade story. Here goes:
I still snap the bra. I still get marched out by Chris Epstein. But this time I take a deep breath. I turn around on Burroughs Street. And I head back to Ken Yuasa’s, and I say,
“Hey Jen Sims. I’m sorry I snapped your bra strap. I thought it’d be funny, but I guess it wasn’t. I apologize. I’m just learning how to be a guy. Can you forgive me? Because I think it’ll help when I’m 39. I’m tired of smoking cigarettes, I’m definitely tired of hearing about wrestling, and I’ve got some other shit I want to try. Yea? Awesome. Thanks, Jen Sims. I appreciate it. Let’s eat some fucking cake.”
See you next week. Thanks.
R
