If I could, I would smoke for the rest of my life.
Not because I enjoy it; and not because it makes me cool, and certainly not because my friends are doing it. I simply started a long, long, time ago and now it is as much a part of who I am as my nose or my eyes or my voice or my cough.
There’s no getting away from it. Once you smoke, the stink stays on you.
So I quit; but not because I really wanted to. I quit because I am afraid of being a loser, and smokers are, in fact, the biggest group of losers around.The science is clear: smokers die young. And unless you are a Bible Thumping Moron or a Muslim Loon, no one really wants to die at 55 with two black lungs and a wheeze. The only reason people smoke is for the addiction, and the addiction will kill you just as sure as getting stoned on crack will put you in a box. It just takes longer.
So I quit. Cold turkey. For months.
And then I started again. And then I quit again. And then I started again. I stopped cigs, and went to cigars. Then back again to cigs. I think I even tried a pipe at one point, trying to convince myself that anything is better than a cig. It’s not, I know that, but my brain keeps telling me that it is and anyway, you can try to quit again tomorrow.
Ugh. It’s snowing outside but once I finish this sentence I will go out, have a smallish cigar, then head off the bed. Why? Because all I really know anymore is that if I could, I would smoke for the rest of my life.
When a multi-millionaire superstar shows what he really plays for - to win, as a team - why, anything is possible. In an era of pouts and steroids, this is why sports still matter: because anything is possible - just keep moving toward your goals!
When they get around to it, they’ll hang poor old Sammy high on the tallest tree left standing in Baghdad. The people will see the soles of his shoes, and he’ll sway like a bag of laundry in the hot desert breeze until they take him down – which could be hours later, after the soldiers snap their pictures and the enraged Shiite mothers are finished beating the carcass with brooms. Perhaps they’ll burn him, like they did those security guards, leaving the mutilated body for jarheads to parcel up and mail off to wherever we send the bodies of despots who go up against us.
It’ll make great TV. That much is sure. So the sooner they do it, the better. Hurricane season was a flop; we thought God was gonna finish off New Orleans, and the nightly news about deviant conservative preachers and politicians is getting tired. Male prostitutes, meth and Page Boy Love is good for a day or so, but it reminds us about how stupid we were; we can’t exactly point the finger and laugh when we put them in the spotlight. There’s the nightly body count from Iraq, but there are only so many 22-year-old bodies we can cry over until it becomes just another part of the long, sad news of how we’ve screwed our own nation’s future.
It’s time for a hangin’. And until we get our hands on that queer little Korean dude, Sammy will have to do, so hang him high, fellas, and leave the body up there for a good long time. The last tree standing in Baghdad is rooted on the bodies of thousands of young American bodies, after all, so hang him high, way up on the top branch so the world can see just why it is that we sacrificed so much in a land full of people who never wanted us there, and now won’t ever let us leave.
The ape was clearly having a good time. Putting on a show, shouting and flailing his long arms, climbing up the branches of the Big Tree in his glass-encased little paradise. He was the joker, it was clear; the King being the fat one with his back to the people, sitting on the ground and eating leaves. The people, safely crammed into an auditorium on the other side of the glass, were pressed up against the window, taking movies and gawking at the show. It was their highlight of the day, to be sure. Most of the time, the animals at the zoo were content to lie around. At most, they’d flick away flies, get up, stretch and plop back down again. They seemed to know that it didn’t really matter what they did, they were stuck in their compounds anyway, and doing something like, say, walking around or making noise, why that would only attract the weirdos – crowds of ‘em — all popping pictures and squealing like the chimp who was putting on the show up and down the Big Tree. Most of the veteran animals really had no time for that sort of nonsense. They got their three hots and their cot whether they scared the little kiddies or stayed planted on their rumps all day.
The chimp was clearly too young to understand this. And the people were delighted, after a long day spent trudging up hills and standing in front of tiger dens and panda exhibits, only to glimpse the occasional emancipated tiger lift up his head and yawn. Predators are the worst for doing nothing at all, because they don’t have to and because, well, the meanest group of any species is inherently lazy and arrogant. They’re the ones with the big teeth and the raw attitude. That in itself will get you farther in life than a nice personality and a good show routine, something the Democrats have yet to figure out. Republicans know all about Big Teeth and bad dispositions, which is why they win most elections, then lie down and dare the little Dems to do something about it. They don’t, of course, because of those teeth, mainly, and because little chimps are apt to run away and hide when talk gets down to raw meat and white bones. Yea, this time around may be different, for the chimps can sense that the jackals are bleeding and the crowds are mad because, after all these years, they’ve been waiting for the damn dogs to do something – anything – to show how they’re still Meanest of the Jungle. It gets to the point where they’d rather go to the chimp exhibit and watch the funny ape making faces in the glass, until, of course, he does what he always ends up doing – drinking his own pee or flinging his own poo.
When that happens, the people shut off the cameras and head back out to the jackal compound, waiting, hopefully, for that damn mangy dog to get off his ass.
The Freak got his fifteen minutes. And we got to talk about JonBenet Ramsey for a couple of days, and drench ourselves in the dirty rain. He didn’t do it. But no one really cares about that. Ironically enough, The Freak will never go back to his little Asian love shack. Instead, he’ll get the anonymous and justified hell of being jailed as a child pornographer in Sonoma County, California.
Have a glass of wine, Freak. And give yourself a toast. Because with all your posturing and preening, all your weird boy antics, you revealed something far, far worse about us and our unquenchable thirst for that dirty, dirty, rain.