Living Versus Quality of Life

Not long ago I wrote a column about smokers.  Like much of my writing it was firmly tongue-in-cheek and was, in a round about way, a compliment on the resiliency of the people who still resolutely smoke despite weather and health concerns.  For the most part I was complimented for this particular article.  I concluded that when it came to smokers not a single one of them was likely to quit before they were ready and some may not be ready at all. 

Being someone who has never been drunk and never been high and never tried smoking I am often looked at strangely.  I can share some of this with one of my personal heroes, Penn Jilette.  Penn is one half of the comedy/magician team of Penn & Teller.  While Penn and I would completely and utterly disagree on matters of faith, religion and the human soul I think we could agree on much more.  Penn is a lifelong teetotaler.  That means he has never even had alcohol touch his lips.  He has never even considered doing drugs.  He too, has never been high. 

Penn has a radio show and he recently talked about a dinner he went to with a  friend of his: Lou Reed.  At the dinner were David Bowie and Iggie Pop.  Somehow the topic of Penn never having touched alcohol and never having been high came up.  Apparently this statement was too much for Mr. Bowie and Mr. Pop.  He stated on his show that he was repeatedly asked about it. 

“You mean heroin, right?”  One would ask.
“No, I mean, I have never touched alcohol or drugs of any kind,” he would reply. 

“You mean you’ve done pot, though, right?”  Another rocker would ask. 

“No, I mean, I have never touched alcohol or drugs of any kind,” he would repeat. 

I have run into similar situations just not ones with famous rock stars.  People are baffled at the fact that I have never been drunk.  Not even when you were a teenager?  Nope.  Not when you first turned twenty-one?  Nah.  You never have tried drugs?  Not even pot?  Weren’t you ever just curious?  To answer quite frankly, the answer is no. 

I did my homework.  I was curious so I read about it.  I was in high school and you can’t swing a dead cat in high school and not hit someone who has tried at least one of the major narcotics.  I had a good friend my freshman year that used to tell me about injecting things into her thighs and I now realize she was telling me about doing heroin.  She was miserable.  I had another friend who told me she was worried she was doing so much coke she was wearing holes in her nose. 

This did not sound like fun to me.  Plus, I know myself.  I know I have an addictive personality.  I have little if any will power.  I battle with food every day and often lose.  Why, I figured, would I want to compound that with smoking and drugs?  It just didn’t make any sense. 

What surprised me was a message I got from someone who thought that I was not living life because I chose not to smoke.  This person stated that she had known many people in her family who had died of cancer and she had learned, therefore, not to follow rules and not care and to live life as much as possible.  This meant she, and I quote, “I smoke. I drink. I curse.  I laugh. I dance.  The monster may come.  But I lived.”  I was puzzled by this.  

How very selfish, I thought. 

See, to me hastening your death by engaging in addictive behavior is not “living life.”  If you think you are free because you smoke or do anything addictive you are just kidding yourself.  You are not free, you are subject to the addiction. 

Plus, I have never bought the whole “well he/she died doing what he/she loved to do.”  James Dean loved to race cars really fast.  I am willing to bet, however, there is not a member of Dean’s family or one of his friends who would not have traded all of those great moments he had while racing for a chance to speak to him again right now.  River
Phoenix loved to do his drugs.  During the 911 call placed by his brother the night he overdosed on a sidewalk his brother did not tell the operator, “well, hey, if he dies at leas the was doing what he loved.”   

You can love life without taking things that harm you.  Deliberately taking things that harm you just takes you out of the lives of the people who love you faster.  That’s remarkably selfish of you.  I don’t care how great smoking may feel for you the fact is it’s addictive, it makes your hair and clothes smell bad, your teeth yellow, your breath smell bad, your fingers yellow and it makes you hack and cough.  Then, you get the joy of slowly dying of cancer or emphysema.  I don’t know anyone who finds a haggard woman or man carrying and oxygen tank sexy. 

I would think you would take control of your life and refuse to become addicted.  You would strive to have as few chains around your life as possible.  You would want to taste and smell everything.  Smoking destroys both of those senses.  I know, I asked my dad who is in his sixties and smoked since he was thirteen.  A year after he quit the first thing he said was how great things tasted again.  To me not having the weight of smoking or addiction would be the way to live life.   

Jumping off of a building may be the greatest rush in the world right up until the point the ground gets in the way.  If you play Russian Roulette with a six-barreled revolver you have a 5 – 1 shot in your favor of NOT shooting yourself.  The odds are in your favor.  Still, I don’t recommend doing it.  Those who have played it and survived may have the greatest outlook on life over anyone else.  I still am willing to bet it’s not worth the risk. 

I asked some smokers I know.  All of them agreed smoking was not a good thing and they wished they could quit.  Not a single one felt it enhanced their lives.  Every one said it sucked and was too expensive.  Think of how much time you spend looking forward to the next smoke, standing around outside smoking, trying to get cigarettes, bumming cigarettes off of people and driving to get more cigarettes.  Now think of all of the other things you could do with that time and money.  I bet a lot of things that would more seriously qualify as “living.” 

So, I say dance, curse, sing, drink in moderation and enjoy life.  I do all of those things.  Just do it without hacking and coughing and smelling like a bar.  Do it without adding stones around your neck.  Eventually the weight just drags you down.  I would rather be ninety years old with ninety years of living than thirty and wishing I had more time while taking one more drag of one last cigarette.   

Bryan W. Alaspa’s novel Dust is available in print and eBook format on his website www.bryanalaspa.com and www.amazon.com.  

The Determined Ones

They are the most tenacious people on earth, is what they are.  These are the people who, despite public opinion, despite laws and rules, despite health concerns and despite weather still continue to do the particular activity that they seem to enjoy more than any other.  They do it flagrantly at times.  They seem to enjoy it.  Many are helpless to stop it.  Most of them couldn’t or can’t stop it if they wanted to.  Of course, I am speaking about smokers. 

Nearly every city in the
United States has passed some kind of law that outlaws smoking in public.  If you want to have just a tiny inkling of what segregation must have been like just hang out with smokers.  In
Chicago they are pretty much relegated to areas outside but in some places you can still find smoking sections in restaurants.  You know that one booth way in the corner that has yellowish stains all over the upholstery.  There are about sixty smoker all desperately crowded around this table puffing away as though their life depends on it. 

Smokers have to be the most resilient people in the world.  I have no idea what does this to them.  I know that continued long exposure to smoking causes the skin to get tough and leathery.  I had always thought this was primarily around the face and the fingers.  I am starting to think that this is something that is happening all over their bodies.  It is the only that explains smokers in winter. 

At one time, if you believe old movies and television shows, people smoked everywhere.  Apparently at one time in the delivery room of the hospital you could count on the doctors, nurses and even the mother to all be puffing away on Marlboros while the mother was pushing away.  Push, puff, push, puff.  The baby, of course, would be born, spanked, being crying and then have a cigarette placed in its mouth so it would then shut up.  I am pretty sure this was standard operating procedure from the early 1900s through the 1970s.  I know people who have photographs of their parents, including their very pregnant mothers, from those early days each person with a cigarette firmly clamped between their lips. 

Now of course, they are outlawed everywhere.  You can still find smoking cubicles in the airports but pretty much everywhere else the smokers have to go outside.  It’s almost endearing how they now get together in groups and head outside into the weather and stand in clusters around office buildings puffing away.  There could be a funnel cloud headed right for them and they would just grab on to some kind of pole and continue puffing as the wind caused their legs to fly up behind them and they became parallel to the ground.  It is freezing again here in
Chicago and they still stand outside, most of them without coats, shivering and smoking.  I would feel sorry for them if they weren’t, in fact, smoking. 

It seems to be mostly the
United States that has become obsessed with getting people to stop smoking.  I confess to spending way too much time online.  I even spend time on websites that involve the use of webcams.  Nearly every person online in the UK, Australia and various countries in
Asia are all smoking away like there isn’t a care in the world about what they are inhaling.  In college I roomed for part of a semester with an Asian guy and he smoked constantly.  Apparently those packs in other countries don’t have to have those Surgeon General warnings.  Of course, the Surgeon General is a
U.S. office so I guess those packs wouldn’t have to have his or her particular warning on them now that I think about it.
Still, you would think word would have spread to those other countries by now.  For some reason smoking has never appealed to me.  Maybe it was the fact my father smoked most of my life and has suffered through two heart attacks.  Maybe it’s the fact that smoke from cigarettes smells so horrible I could not imagine inhaling that stuff directly into my mouth and lungs.  Maybe it was all of the scary ads that I used to see that showed infected lungs.  I also remember seeing an ad in the 70s that showed a guy pointing a gun at his head with a cigarette in the barrel and his brains splattered all over the wall behind him.  The implication was that, of course, smoking was the equivalent of putting a gun in your mouth. 

I have never smoked.  I have never gotten drunk.  I have never gotten high.  I once smoked a cigar in a restaurant that promoted smoking cigars and I didn’t particularly enjoy it.  So to me the whole idea of smoking was just never appealing.  I don’t find women particularly sexy when they are smoking.  Nothing can be more of a turn off for me than seeing a gorgeous woman and then seeing her light up.  Mostly because I can see that woman in about twenty years looking all wrinkled and yellowed with nasty yellow teeth.  It isn’t sexy.  It isn’t cool.  Maybe I am a bore but I always just looked at it as a practical matter.  I have problems with food and I have struggled with my weight all of my life.  That’s bad enough on my heart and health so, I always figured, why add alcohol, drugs or smoking to the mix.  Whenever I see someone who is overweight adding smoking to the mix I just feel very sad for that person.  That is a person who really does not love themselves. 

Still, no matter the laws passed or the weather or how far away from civilization we make them go the smokers still remain.  If a corporation were to build a smoking cubicle on the 108^th floor of their building, just above the television and radio antennas, and hang it over the side of the building so that the only way to reach it were to crawl out on a thin beam, that cubicle would still be filled with smokers.  You would look up at this glass cube and see it  crammed with people of all shapes, sizes and sexes huddled in there smoking and puffing away as if it were the rest of us with the problem and not them. 

There is an incredible industry these days to get people to stop smoking.  There is so much of an industry that a cynical person might think that this is the industry that is actually supporting the tobacco lobby.  Think about it.  If there were no more smokers then the industry that makes all of those nicotine patches and gums and pills and hypno-therapy solutions would go out of business.  Make you wonder if that gum really just feeds the addiction instead of eliminating it.   

In the end only those who really want to stop are the ones who are going to stop.  It’s a clichéd saying but it’s true.  My dad finally did but it only took nearly killing him to get him to do it.  Plus, if freezing temperatures, laws, heat, rain and wind won’t stop these people or the incredible price for cigarettes then nothing will. 

Bryan W. Alaspa’s novel Dust is available in print and eBook format at his website www.bryanalaspa.com and www.amazon.com.