Survivor: Death Edition

There was an interesting story about aging and dying in The New Yorker this week. Michael Kinsley talks about boomer fascination with living the longest, and living the best, and about his own changed perceptions of aging and dying since he was diagnosed with Parkinson's.

Actually my favorite part of the story was the anecdote at the very beginning, which I felt captured something very common that hardly ever gets properly described. Kinsley is at the pool, and there's an older guy swimming, and the older guy is boasting about being 90, and then the older guy says, "I used to be a judge."

Kinsley describes how it slowly dawns on both of them that saying this has exactly the opposite effect of the effect it's intended to have. It's intended to say, "I'm a player." But having to explain it, obviously, you're not. It's intended to say, "I'm with it." But given the first blunder, obviously, well, you're not.

Kinsley describes it much better than I can. I found myself wondering what Kinsley said to the guy next. Because sometimes in that sort of situation you feel all sorry for the person and you try to change the tone of the interaction back into one in which they can make their statement mean what they meant it to mean. Other times in that sort of situation you feel the person's being a pain anyway, and you sort of quietly let the sorry effects sink in.

Although the article is thoughtful and interesting, it didn't really resonate with me much. I felt like I was reading about the mortality of some other kind of person, not much like me.

He talks about how, no matter what forms you're competitive in, the only competition that matters is how long you live. This, he says, can be inferred from the fact that most people wouldn't a few good years for any material good or wealth.

Hm, maybe. But people trade good years for all sort of other pleasures, like smoking and drinking too much and having unprotected sex and riding motorcycles and climbing mountains.

I'm a freak about death, but to be honest, once we know it's going to be finite and relatively short, I don't find myself obsessing about exactly how many years. I mean, what's the difference? When are you going to die? "Soon," is the right answer, no matter what your age or health status.

Kinsley didn't really seem to share this feeling of "Soon" until he was diagnosed with Parkinson's. There's a vivid and moving account of having the disease, and of the treatments, and of the outlook it gives you on life and death.

He says for the ill person, the future seems finite, something people who aren't sick only feel later. Every new thing feels like the last roll of the dice.

I believe it. But I feel like I've had that feeling forever. Really, since I can remember. I remember being 17 and thinking, well, you'll be young for a few more years anyway so there's a bit of time. I guess if you're not comparing yourself to others, just being human is like having a chronic disease, since we're all on a steady march toward death.

Maybe competition is the thing here. I'm not really very competitive. I just can't get really engaged by competition. What with life being so short and all, I always figure, what's the point? In the long run, as they say, we're all dead.

Quitting Smoking, Part II

It's a pretty appropriate title for the first post of the New Year! By the way, I am kind of ridiculously sentimental about New Year's Eve, and feel like it could be super-meaningful and everything in my life could be different (and better) because it is now a different year. This is something embarrassing that I have never even tried to hide about myself.

So I quit smoking. And somewhere in there, I turned with relief and affection to the pipe tobacco cigar. A move that can be blamed at least in part, on one regular reader of this blog, who had brought an example of the art over to my house way back in early 2006, where it sat quiescent until in a crazed fit of nicotine craving I started going through my drawers, convinced that cigarettes were hidden somewhere in my house. They weren't, so I smoked that.

The pipe tobacco cigars were pretty great. Enjoyable, but not too much so, and I was leveling off. I could go for longer and longer without one. It was a rebound relationship; it was never supposed to be serious.

Then I turned 30 and I still didn't have a job and I was all pissed off at the world and I stepped up my pipe tobacco consumption in a serious way. I was up to two a day, which is pretty disgusting as you will know if you have ever consumed one. It felt, more or less, like I had fallen back into the pit of smoking.

And then I went away for the holidays, and I was going to stop smoking pipe tobacco cigars, mostly because I was going to be around my family who would be anguished and upset by the sight, since they thought I had quit smoking and all.

When I was stuck in Atlanta, I thought about heading for the pipe tobacco cigars, but decided that this would be good. Better. I would get the cravings out of the goddamn way and would not be visibly trembling.

So anyway, it hasn't been that bad. Which is actually a little unnerving. Life without pipe tobacco cigars is actually a lot like life without cigarettes, which was actually more or less like life with cigarettes, except that the smells are stronger and I am less inclined to vividly colored phlegm. The only thing missing is the anticipation and the guilt. Significant losses, yes, but I'm not sure I'm comfortable with how normal it all seems.

We were supposed to smoke cigars on New Year's Eve, and I couldn't get mine properly lit and I tried for a bit and drooled all over it which was gross and then I think I inhaled some smoke because I felt a little sick to my stomach, so the cigar went out and I put it down, and that was sad, because I had been really excited about smoking something again.

Inanimate Objects Have Feelings Too

I used to use Safari, and only Safari, and then Noko Marie pointed out that if I used Firefox I could link to things without typing in the links by hand, and so I started using Firefox for the blog, and then I just got into the habit of using Firefox, and now I haven't used Safari for months and months, and I feel kind of bad about it. I was just using Safari, moments ago, and it didn't remember any of the websites I wanted to go to, and the whole experience felt blank and sad, like when you lose touch with an old friend and then you get together to catch up, but you don't really have anything in common anymore so the whole experience actually leaves you feeling less close to them, because at least in your head they were still a major part of your life, but now you've been confronted by the harsh reality of the situation.

Once, when I was eight, I decided I wanted to keep a (grocery store bought) orange as a pet. It didn't end well. I don't remember the details. I think there was mold. I had a shoebox for it and everything.

When I was in high school, everybody had names for their cars. Actually, I still know a lot of people who have names for their cars. Or computers or ipods or whatever.

I like stuff; I know I've mentioned that before. I like my stuff in particular. And some of that's because of what I think it says about me, or because I think it's an extension of me, but some of it's that helpless human impulse towards emotional attachment.

When I was first quitting smoking, a friend of mine told me that her husband said that it was like having your best friend die. I would say it's more like having a terrible irrevocable falling out with your best friend. Not just in degree of unpleasantness, but qualitatively. There was this thing, and you had a relationship with it, and now you're turning your back on it, you're walking away. And I know that smoking doesn't miss me, at least I think I do, but it still feels kind of like a betrayal.

Time Off For Good Behavior?

I am, by preference and aesthetic, kind of an unhealthy person. I like junky food, and there's something pleasurable about eating it beyond just the tastiness of all those trans-fats or whatever the hell they're called these days. It's something about swimming against the tide of self-preservation, of sound common sense.

I am thinking about this because I am at a rotten stage of not smoking. I have not had a cigarette in a little over three months. I have developed a fondness for pipe tobacco cigars, which is indisputably unhealthy, but probably less unhealthy than smoking a pack a day. But the stage I am at is the stage where I think, "What the hell's the point of all this?"

I couldn't walk up that one hill that one day. But I was probably sick or something. On another day I could have walked up there just fine. And god knows I could get hit by a car or something tomorrow, and then what would be the good of not having smoked? Here we are, stranded in this incredibly imperfect world; why am I denying myself something I enjoy, when pleasures are so few and far between as is?

This is all so much noise. I do not really want to start smoking again; I don't really want to fall off the wagon. There are nice things about not smoking; there is something nice about not having my body chemistry go haywire every hour if I don't top it off with nicotine.

I just hate that moment when you forget why you're doing something, and the only justification you can offer yourself for why you're doing it is that it is, in some at that moment entirely abstract way, the right thing to do. Not the interesting thing to do, not the amusing thing to do, not the cool or authentic or experimental or tawdry thing to do. No, all you can say to yourself is that it is the way forward, and therefore you are taking it.

Or at least, that's the way it looks right now. Noko Marie compared the inner self to a pet; right now I am the parent screaming at the child in the grocery store "Because I said so," having forgotten, momentarily, why I said so in the first place, anxious for the noise to stop.

Two Minute Mysteries Can Last A Lifetime

If you are going to quit smoking you need things to compulse over.

This is why I now have a book of half-filled Sudoku puzzles. More precisely, I have a book of Sudoku puzzles in which the easy-to-mild Sudoku puzzles are untouched, while the hard Sudoku puzzles are half-filled. Something I could actually do wasn't going to hold my attention; I needed something I couldn't do, and I needed to abandon it once I got bored.

Also: when I was at Borders the other day I saw in their clearance rack the Two-Minute Mysteries Collection by Donald J. Sobol. It is perhaps worth noting that on that trip to Borders I also found a cigarette between the pages of the book I was looking at (Gold Diggers! Through the Ages! -- which looked pretty good). I'm not asking whether the cigarette was a message from a supernatural being.

So, two-minute mysteries. I had many, many Encyclopedia Brown books as a child -- I did not have any two-minute mysteries (featuring Dr. Haledjian). I saw them around though, in the hands of my more sophisticated peers. They feature actual death and dismemberment, as opposed to property damage. The solution is upside down at the ending; they take about a page and half.

When I was a kid, I couldn't solve any of the Encyclopedia Brown mysteries. My current rate is about fifty percent. My young and impressionable mind may just have learned Donald J. Sobol's little tricks (he's particularly fond of the criminal going for, at the direction of the detective, the, say, flower when an innocent man would have gone for the flour).

The mysteries aren't logical in the way of Sudoku. For example, in The Case of The Spilled Brandy, Haledjian catches the criminal because he finds the brandy in a house he's supposedly a stranger to. It's not, I think we can agree, really a logical solution. Instead, the stories have this crossword puzzle aspect to them -- the solution's not perfect, but it's the only thing that you can use under the circumstances.

This sort of thing will leads you to decide that "greases" is an adequate synonym for "facilitates".

Which leads to an oddly appealing combination of crossword puzzle solutions and supposedly real human interactions. They're not really human interactions, of course, and they're not designed to be psychologically piercing. But the human brain, mine at least, given a set of characters, cannot help trying to move them into more plausible attitudes.

And although this is already probably too long (the Secretary was complaining about post length yesterday) there's also the dependence on a supposedly shared body of human knowledge, that, of course, is not shared at all. I don't mean the random facts ("after covering 26 miles, a runner's calves will have increased an inch or more"), but the not-quite facts. I.e. a resident of San Francisco will never, ever call the city Frisco. Still mostly true, but not really true enough to give conviction. Some of that may just be the passage of time; the copyrights in the book start in 1967. Some of it may be the need to limit the world -- two minute mysteries can only be solved in a world designed as a test chamber, where a particular act always produces a particular effect.

It all reminds me of Edmund Wilson's essay about Sherlock Holmes, in which Wilson discusses how the beauty of the Sherlock Holmes set-ups is ultimately diminished by the solutions. I feel the same about the Two Minute Mysteries. While Holmes stories started with the beauty of the exotic and strange and improbable, the set-ups of Two-Minute Mysteries have the beauty of the pseudo-familiar, the would-be-plausible, and, ultimately, the improbable.

Vices

So I'm trying to quit smoking, right. And I'm trying to quit smoking because my lungs finally were showing signs of unhappiness and damage and I couldn't make it up a goddamn hill.

It was all very sad.

It's sad because I love smoking. I love everything about smoking, from the smell to the social disapproval. I love the five minute breaks that take you outside the normal flood of life. I may love that most of all. I love the feeling of doing something self-destructive in a small, self-contained way. Cigarette packaging is a work of art; playing with your lighter is always fun; smoking is great. My life was miserable before I started smoking at 17 -- you can't convince me that's only because being younger than 17 is miserable, although it is.

It's also sad because I hate giving up bad habits. I hate it when other people explain their victories over vice to me; I hate when people describe the internal struggles of giving something up. People who try to give up bad habits and fail sadden me; people who try to give up bad habits and succeed irritate me. We have a model of the "healthy life"; I hate watching people try to achieve it, whether they make it or not.

I hate even more trying to do it.

(For better writing about smoking and giving it up I refer you to Confessions of Zeno by Italo Svevo. And thanks to n. marie, for initially directing me there.)