The smoking issue.

I won’t be surprised when lung cancer claims me at 23.  I went for a jog last night.  Almost died.  Three blocks in I brought up gum thick and vinyl, stained brown like the juices that accumulate in my pipe filter.

Fitzgerald and I devise dangerous games to play with cigarettes, sitting in his room with the Bande-a-part dance scene dvd intro cycling for hours cuz we’re too damned to find the remote.  The search consisted of me sitting there, moving something – a book beside me on the couch, a pile of ash, the crushed cushion I was half sitting on – while Fitzgerald stood in one place in the middle of his room being stressed out about it.  “Now I really just want to watch this movie.  Where’s the remote?  No where!”

-Sit down.  I’m content to

“watch the intro.  Me too.  Who does this?  Seriously.”

-People at my mother’s work, being upper to upper-upper class as they are have real trouble understanding the fullness of impoverished lives.  She’s like a broke prophet or a snake oil salesman.

“Man?”

-Woman.  Person.

I strike a match and light a smoke, pull in a long, rich drag, and then toss the lit cigarette at him.  Fitzgerald catches it, ember to palm, and pops it in his mouth without making any fuss about the blister.

-She says: the starving diabetic daughter of the drug-addict upstairs comes knocking on the door at 1AM to use the phone so she can go to the hospital, and how she says her mom’s fighting someone upstairs, and the folk at work are all “Yeah, Marina’s telling her stories again” like they’re pulled from the pages of a cheap novel.  You see this kinda thing at low-dollar ground zero, alive and ripe with the people we know.

“Nah best call back ina halfhour  there’s a Jesus-tonne of cruisers outfront…”

Thick with rust and salt from the Newfoundland breeze.

-I tell her that and she tells me that her dad was the captain of a bowling team, and every week, same night, same time, he’d go out.  So one day a group of thugs that must not of liked his business come crashing in with long, sharp knives and hold my mom, aunt and uncle – all between the ages of 5 and 12 – hostage until he comes home.  The big black heroin addict that lived in the bottom floor of the rooming house my grandfather ran gets wind of this and grabs his shotgun, comes running in shouting, chases them all out of the apartment.  Of course, they left – rock beats scissors – and all riled up he spends half the night shooting out the street lights down Rene Lavesque, back then Dorchester Street.

“Jesus fuck.”

Fitzgerald rolls about his bed in a fit of laughter.  Blowing smoke out through his nose, and choking on his own carbon dioxide.  These moments happen so often, and they can’t be dulled out and have to burn to completion.  He giggles down, and the room falls silent hanging with white webs of smoke, the still smell of his lungs.

-There was another guy, Loftis Love, that lived in the same rooming house for a while.  When my mother recalls him she laughs, but pauses to interject “He really wasn’t a nice man on any level.”  Apparently he looked just like Hitler, and in the early 1960’s was about the same age as Hitler would be.  All throughout his room he had framed pictures of himself taken as the Fuhrer.  For the longest time, my mom was convinced that Hitler had been boarding in the same house as them.  Every so often he’d burst into the room and shout a deep, German “SEIG HEIL” and scare the living shit outta my mother and her siblings. Mr. Love rode a big Harley Davidson, big fat hot, which he kept tied up to a signal contraption consisting of pots and pans that’d warn him if anyone ever touched his bike.  Naturally, every day my mother would find a way to trigger the system, and Hitler’d come out on his balcony in a bathrobe throwing empty beer bottles down in the general direction of the bike.

Either way, he was involved in child pornography and propositioned my aunt.  My grandfather overheard her telling one of her school friends about the scenario, and no sooner had he heard it than he was up there, beating the shit out of his Fuhrer.  Broke a couple of his ribs and threw him down a flight of stairs, shouting that he’d never step foot in the building again.

“Joe, switch!”

Fitzgerald and I toss our lit cigarettes simultaneously like circuis acrobats doing a dangerous trapeze stunt, catching them with our bare hands and continuing the inhalations (though by this point Fitzgerald’s room atmosphere has been declared a certified carcinogen.)

“How long do you think it’ll be before we burn this place down?  We’re going to keep doing this until it kills us.  You know that, right?  We are going to die from fire.  We have to keep doing this.”

-Don’t worry.  I’ve got firefighting experience.

Fitzgerald snorts.

“You’ve got firefighting experience?  You know one day, I’m going to just interrupt one of your tirades by putting out a cigarette in my eyeball.  I promise.”

-I’m going to hold you to that.

“Oh, I know.”

-Good.  So you know that I’ll be waiting, and I fully expect this to happen.

“I’ll keep edging the ash closer until the day comes.  You’ll see.”

-You won’t.

“Not with any depth perception.”

-I was staying with Evan and Meg down south, just shortly after they got married, and we were roaring drunk.  Evan, in his stupor, picks up a bottle of perfume and a torch and lights half of the room on fire.  Here I am freaking out, and he’s laughing too hard to do anything about it.  On the floor in hysterics, and I’ll stomp on burning books and beating shit down with my shirt.

“He wasn’t laughing.  He was just practicing stop, drop, and roll.”

-After that mess, he curls up on the bed and starts crying.  “Why did you marry me?  I’m such an awful person!” and he goes drunkenly to sleep with Meg stroking his precious hair.  She sat up after he was out cold, grabbed another six-pack from the fridge and we stayed up until 5AM listening to Leonard Cohen and talking about how much of a dirty hipster I am.

While drowning the cigarette in the ashtray, precariously perched on the edge of Fitzgerald’s bed, I knocked it to a side where it fell victim to the vindictive forces of gravity.  Ashes covered his floor like Constantine’s vision of the apocalypse.

“What am I going to do about that?”

-Broom?

“GAY.”

-Weave a throw-rug?

“And beneath that lies the great spill of 2009, in which Royal Joe Sharp sent 300 to their deaths.”

-God bless them all.

I light two cigarettes and toss one at Fitzgerald.

-Sartre argues that all things become their pre-determined essence.  I think I like cigarettes so much because they embody this so eloquently, a thing unravelling of its initial form into pure essence.  When talking about it, Sartre means that a kitten will become a cat and do whatever it is that cats do in their essence, but since humans are continually bound by their awful chains of freedom what it is that they do is not as deterministic as that of a cat or a cigarette.  Thus, man has no essence.  Heidegger disagrees with Sartre, arguing that humanity’s essence pre-supposes its freedom, and that its essence is to contemplate its relationship to Being.

-There’s notably this drive in the mass intellect to reclaim archaic ideas of Animism and spirituality, ideas that place importance on the movement of spirit through all things, and the absolute sacredness and interconnected of things on Earth.  We, dashing young radicals, yearn to embrace this sort of romantic revival of the spirit, yet we do this.  On our heroic quest to save the world, we spend our nights choking on cigarettes in a small room.

“Relating to that I heard on someone’s TV today a  man who was talking about the global eco-crisis. He said that we’re victims of a kind of momentum – rape of the earth etc. – that the most detrimental words uttered or written on Earth were that Men are the Masters of Nature, rather than part of the harmonious whole. But because we’re at the top of this abstract heirarchy, there’s no immovable object to stem the tide of our unstoppable force.”

-This is the spirit of our age, which is all very strange.  The Zeitgeist.  I think it was Heidegger that was largely responsible for the popularization of this term.

“Well, it’s German.  Ghost… Time.”

-He argued that all people, no matter what their social status or awareness of it, were doing the bidding of the spirit of their age.

“Well, it’s an absolute.  The zeitgeist isn’t absolute – it’s not a closed system, which we can just step away from and say that that it’s a thing over there and that we’re not a part of it.  It’s an absolute in the sense that it is what is, the ever-changing, maliable social, political, economic, and spiritual atmosphere which we exist in and label the zeitgeist, the spirit of the times.”

-Some may be able to recognize and manipulate it, but so far as what it is…

“Well, it’s our essence.  While it’s maliable and changes, no matter what we do with our essence, however we move our essence throughout the world, we cannot escape it, even with absolute freedom as Sartre argues.  It’s inextricably connected to us.  It flows and conforms to the collection of our will, of our individual essences.  In that sense, it conforms to us, although we conform to it.  While the Czech Communist Party may have been able to remove Clementis from the history books, they can airbrush him from photographs, they could not – as Kundera points out – remove the hat which he placed on his leaders’ head before the photograph was taken as a gesture of good will.  That’s just a poetic appropriation of the hat symbol, but the point isn’t the hat, but the point is Clementis’ impact on the Communist Party, whether they attempt to hide it or not.”

-In essence, two men smoking in a room, expecting to die of cancer at age 23.

“Draw!”

Fitzgerald shouted as the embers crawled toward their end, flicking the smouldering husks toward each other. My own careened past his face, and his found home below my chin.  A tiny burn, and quick movements to stamp out the butts before we lit his room on fire.