Just A Note Of Preemptive Hypocrisy On Tobacco And Abortion

CVS stopped selling tobacco in its stores – one presumes because it’s a) not as much of a money-maker as it used to be, and b) it’s a pain in the ass to regulate and store, and c) they’ll get brownie points with non-smokers for making a big whoo-hoo about not selling it.
(Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s a good move – but I note that the risk of fatty foods and various kinds of deaths is even more linked than tobacco, and yet I don’t see them giving up the Hostess cakes.)
But one assumes this means that within a few years, other stores will follow suit, until in some locations cigarettes will become much more of a pain in the ass to get, even though it’s perfectly legal.  I actually sympathize.  I’m no fan of smoking, but if you want to torment your lungs in the privacy of your own home, I say you should be able to do it.  This means folks may have to walk further to get their cigs – and Lord knows cigarette smokers may find that walk a little more troublesome than the rest of us.
Yet there’s a certain intersection of people I’d like to tell proactively to shut up.
If you have done everything in your power to make the operation of perfectly-legal abortion clinics so troublesome that there’s now practically nowhere in your state that it can be done, thanks to your efforts, then you don’t get to complain if and when it becomes a pain in the ass to find tobacco.  It’s the same principle at work: if enough people protest, the people who run the places will stop making it available, even if it remains technically legal.
This is often an unpleasant process for those who want the things that others don’t.  But it’s a fact of life: you don’t have to outlaw something to make it hard to get, you just have to make it really unpopular.  In this case, cigarette usage is on the decline in America, and one suspects that rather than reducing their stock-in-trade and making the tortuous explanation of why we carry Marlboro but not Pall Mall any more, CVS decided there was more good PR to be mined by ditching it.
Good for them.

What I Learned On The Ventilator.

I am not a whole person.
I’m basically a shawl of half-stitched insecurities, wrapped around someone stronger.  I have been lucky enough to find Gini, who gives people the illusion that I am a competent person; when I break down in despair, she argues me back into hope.  When I stray, she kicks my ass to remind me of the standards I set for myself.  When I fail, she still loves me.  We are, in many ways, a single organism, each compensating for the others’ weaknesses, a symbiont held together by nothing more than pure love.
Then I had my heart attack.  And that took her away from me.

My world has been reduced to a thin, warm puff of air, a moist whiff of oxygen deposited into the bottom of my lungs.
It’s not enough.  My lungs close spasmodically around each shipment as it arrives, pulling it apart, trying desperately to extract all the energy from this precious, life-giving nothingness.  But within a second, my body realizes this is all the oxygen this plastic tube shoved down my throat has deigned to offer, and it’s not enough, and so my body starts shuttering down this biological factory.  There’s that panic of feeling cell death, followed by the dizziness of realizing that I’m blacking out, and the realization that this confused panic might be the last thought I ever have, and it’s not significant at all, it’s just me flailing, wishing for more, and there’s nothing I can do but shut up and fucking die.
I do not remember my name.  I do not remember where I am.  I am just a biological organism, plagued by ghosts of the sensation that I used to be more….
…and then another shipment arrives.  A wheeze of stale breath.  And I wake up just enough to hope that maybe this breath will be the big one, the one that sustains me, and my lungs fight over this zephyr of air like starving cats fighting over a food bowl, and no.  No.
It’s not enough.
This is every breath I take, for hours.  Waking, to be told how I’ll die.  Thrashing, recognizing that panic isn’t something you can meditate through, meditation requires enough active brain cells to assemble thoughts, and there is no complex cogitation when death is this close.  The plastic tube rubs up against my uvula, makes me want to vomit; I am a wet machine shutting down, and the alarms are going off, and the alarms will never stop going off.
Breathing until now had always been an active activity – I pulled in air in gouts, breathed it out whenever I damn well saw fit.  Even on the rare occasions that air wasn’t available to me, I thrashed like a fish on the end of a line, fighting for precious oxygen, my diaphragm flexing in and out.  All those fine muscles in my chest have been shut down like businesses in poverty-struck neighborhoods, shuttered due to lack of funds.  Opening my eyes would be like lifting a pickup truck over my head.  I’m not even aware I have eyes, they’re so fucking useless to me in this moment, because all that matters are these lungs.  These lungs.  Please.  Get that puff of air.
Finally, there is convulsive movement: my stomach.  The tube’s finally triggered my vomit reflex, and I feel myself doubling over – no, no, that’s too much energy, I can’t lift myself up, but this isn’t under my control, my body’s decided against my will that puking is the life-saving decision.
Thin acidic fluid fills the tube, sloshes back down, cuts off the flow of oxygen.
I’m choking to death.  I have no arms, they’re dead now.  No legs.  No motive power.  All I can do is make little old-man gurgle noises of distress as the last of that air dissolves and I discover what a real death is.  My body gives up and stops fighting as something grabs the back of my head and shoves a tube in…

Gini was there.
Not two feet away from me, Gini was there.  She tells me her hand was on mine.
She might have been on Alpha Centauri, for all I knew.  This was the worst moment of my life, and I am experiencing it alone.

I’d always been really “Whatevs” about death, because death isn’t gonna be bad.  Basically, if I’m right about what I believe, then I’ll be escorted to some unknowable form of a next-level existence, which if I’m being irrational enough to believe in religion then why the fuck not believe that it’s a good and merciful place, in which case dying isn’t really an end but merely a door that we step through.
Or it’s nothing.  In which case, I’m not around to care.  Also not a big deal.  I’ve been not-around before – copiously so, at least before that precious year of 1969 – and have experienced no trauma from nonexistence.
So death’s always been kind of a win/win for me.  I’ve had a few bad moments – notably, the last time I got stoned over a decade ago, I obsessed over the idea that this was all the life I had to live and spent the next two hours facing the void in the eye, which was unpleasant – but in most cases, I’m like hey, when that day comes, it’s the end-cakes, baby.
If anything, death’s a great spur for a slacker like me.  I’ll sit down and feel that cold shiver of the unknowable touch my shoulder and be like, Welp, better get some writing done, because maybe I’ll be dead in a decade!  Death’s kind of an old buddy in that sense, knocking on the door and asking whether I’d like to shuffle off to the void having accomplished nothing more today than having watched reruns of Hotel Impossible.
And death means that when I snuggle down with Gini at night, I damn well appreciate her.  This is transitory.  Death means the universe is forever crumbling and reshaping itself from parts, and that includes everything from love to yogurt.  I tell myself that Gini and I are meant to be 2getha 4eva, but all it’d take is a good stroke and maybe Gini hates me, or maybe she meets some other guy who’s not quite as caul-strangly as I am, so you know what?  I’d better hug the shit out of her tonight, and stuff my face in her hair, and remember that floral-and-musk scent that is no one else in the world but my precious wife because that whole experience could be gone tomorrow.  All gone.
That’s the way I live, man.  I hate getting colds.  I hate that feeling of having all your nostrils so gooped up with mucus that you can’t remember what it’s like to take a fine, deep breath through your nose.  Except that years ago, I vowed to just sit around when I was healthy and succcccck in that air so I could appreciate this flashing moment of perfect nasal clarity.
Do it now.
Breathe in.
Some day, you’ll have a head cold, and you’ll feel gladder that you treasured this completely fucking mundane moment, because by God the mundane can die with startling rapidity.
Okay.  And you know what?
I can’t treasure this life any more.
Some day I’m gonna be back on the machine.

The reason I started contemplating this is because Robert J. Bennett and Amy Sundberg both wrote these long essays on mortality, and they’re both beautifully written, and because I was a part of the Twitter-conversation I feel an urge to complete it.  It’s like a death-triptych, where you’ve got the two people who wrung this comforting lesson from death, and Ferrett, what did you learn from being spatchcocked, rendered helpless, and learning that you could be separated from your wife in every way that matters?
It’s not good, man.  It’s not good.

What I learned on that ventilator is that there’s worse than death.  Death is a shut door, merciful, final.  What’s not death is endlessly cycling between almost-alive and the cellular panic of termination, so helpless that you cannot communicate your fears in any way, so degraded that you are nothing but fears, all of those bold psychologist techniques stripped away because there’s not enough processing power to activate them.
What’s not death?  That old man pissing himself on the wheelchair at the nursing home, making toothless noises of despair and raising his finger in an attempt to communicate some deep concern of his – a concern that is a mystery, because nobody speaks his degenerate stew of communication.  He’s locked inside a failing body, so useless that anyone can ignore him, and all he is is a mixture of untranslatable needs and wants.
That day is coming.
Old age is coming.
I don’t fear death, but goddamn I fear old age.

And the worst of old age is not having Gini.  She was there.  She was there.  And yet there was no way the two of us could have talked.  I’m sure she said something, but my fears were locked in a box that she could not penetrate, and my desires were walled off from her.
I don’t know.  If you’re a writer, you know how shitty words are.  People who don’t write tend to think that words can heal anything, but they’re stupid.  Words only communicate intents and thoughts, and when you fling them at certain unalienable aspects of the human condition, they break down just like we do.  There’s nothing you can say to someone who’s lost his son that will make him feel better, and so even the best writer finds himself saying the same stupid shit of “I’m sorry” and “Let me know if there’s anything I can do” and “By the way, the endless grief you are feeling can in no way be affected by any platitude or thought I can haul out of my bucket right now, but I’m going to keep making these dumb animal noises because it makes me feel like I’m doing something.”
And I’ve been staring at this post for a solid fucking week now, and I can’t get across to you how it was to be separated from Gini.  She’s my lighthouse.  She’s my star I steer by.  And the skies were so dark I could not see her – so dark I could not remember the existence of her.
That ventilator made me forget the best thing in my life, and somewhere in my future there may well be another day so dark I forget her.
And if I can forget the best thing that ever happened to me, the woman who made everything else happen, then what the fuck are we here for?

About three times a week, I plan Gini’s funeral.
I don’t mean to.  It’s an aftereffect of the trauma, and I think in some way it means I’m trying to process.  But she’s out, like she is now, with a client, and I imagine getting the call that she’s dead, and I map out all the things I’d have to do afterwards.  Sometimes I kill myself.  Sometimes I soldier bravely on.  The dog helps, because now I have to take care of a dog.  But I spend five minutes lost in this gruesome fantasy, and it’s somehow comforting.
And only now, as I write this gout of words down, do I realize why:
I remember her.
In those death-futures, I remember her.
And I remember shamefully confessing to Gini that I had these weird-ass fantasies, and she told me that she did too about me, all the time, had done ever since the surgery, and we hugged and somehow we both feel better about that.
We’re twisted by death now.  And it’s not a comfort.  The old death was a kind of happy spur, but this new death – let’s call it Death of Experience – shows up and says, “Hey, all those words you’re writing?  One day you won’t even be able to talk!  You’ll be a helpless beast fishhooked to a ventilator, and all of these so-called accomplishments you’ve piled up will not be a factor.  No one in the nursing home will know.  Hell, you won’t even know.  So why bother?”
And note, dear reader, how this is the only portion of my internal monologue in this essay that gets quotation marks, because it’s the only one speaking loudly enough that it makes me pause in mid-step.
I don’t know why I do bother.
I don’t know why I do anything, these days.
And I wish I had a nice, comforting rhythm to end this essay on, like Robert did by awww, look at his kid-love or Amy did by awww, we must make the best of this scarce time, because both those essays are good and true and reflective of the best parts of the human condition.  But I don’t.  I’m doing all the same things I did before, but there’s a part of me that wonders whether I’m just a broken machine, shambling forward out of some dim instinct – and I want to believe this is the proper thing to do, moving forward is healing, but I don’t sense that.  I’m still writing and cuddling and laughing and making jokes about corduroy pillows, God, the corduroy pillows, and they’re good things, but they’re all now backlit by this sense of transition that I’m never not finding unsettling.
About once a week, I think about what it was like being on that ventilator, the absolute helplessness a human being can have, and I freeze.  Gini notes it when it happens, because we’re two halves of the same whole.  She knows what I’m thinking.  She asks, “Flashing back again?”  I nod, and she hugs me, and hugs are good.  Gini is good.
And I think: Gini is not a guarantee.  There is literally nothing in my life that is a guarantee now.  And I think: You were foolish to think that it ever was.
And I think: But it was sure a nice illusion to warm my hands by, wasn’t it?
 

Philip Seymour Hoffman

I didn’t like everything he was in, but he was often the best thing in it.
And I find myself hoping this was just a stupid drug overdose.
I don’t know.  Maybe it’s because of the way I think, but when I heard that they found him dead with a needle in his arm, I wondered whether it was a form of suicide.  Because I could easily see myself as a celebrity, tired of being looked at all the time, just wanting to quietly slip from the universe, and thinking, Tomorrow is the Super Bowl.  Hardly anyone would notice then.
It’s probably not.  Probably it’s just the same dumb stupidity that catches too many drug users, that cycle of acclimation fighting with their body’s requirements for survival, and one day you step off that Michael Jackson way where you need the big drugs for the big high and hello, you’re gone.
I dunno.  Part of this is because I’ve been pondering a blog on mortality for what I’ve come to think of completing a death triptych written by other bloggers, and that’s had me staring hard into the abyss and trying to haul out words.  It hasn’t been going well.  And I think it’s useful, dropping a bucket into that blackened slosh and seeing what coherent thoughts I can congeal out of body-rooted terror, but there have been some nights where I don’t know that I can do this.  There are some emotions that you can’t share, and even if you can share them, there’s little sense in trying to pass on that experience because there’s not a goddamned comfort to be found in those shattered rocks down at the bottom of the cliff.   I’m a closer neighbor to emptiness these days, and it’s a chill no coat can warm.
But Hoffman – he seemed lonely, a lot of the time.  And I hope this was just some dumb accident, not him staring in the needle at 3:00 in the morning, thinking that if he had to make headlines, let him be buried underneath bigger ones.  I hope he meant to live, and accidentally pushed the wrong toxins into a struggling system. I hope he had friends.  I hope someone was there for him.
I hope he was loved.  Not beloved, but loved, because any celebrity can tell you there is a vast and howling difference.

I've Always Learned Through Parodies

Armed with a complete lack of knowledge about football culture, I watched the Puppy Bowl last night.  Which was strangely alienating and comforting at the same time.
They had people kissing their dogs in a heart-shaped camera at random intervals, and talk of paws inteference, and all sorts of vocabulary I wasn’t quite sure about.  Clearly, there were jokes aimed at People Who Knew Football, and some of them were just silly puppy gooning about – and I didn’t know enough to make the distinction.  The Most Valuable Puppy is clearly a nod to the football MVP, but how close is the Puppy-MVP aligned with how a football MVP is chosen?
It’s bewildering if you think too hard – and I realized I was thinking too hard, because as a child, I learned most of what I knew about pop culture through parody.
When I was growing up, I read MAD Magazine, which featured movie parodies of films like Barry Lyndon – called “Borey Lydon.”  Now, on one level MAD Magazine, which was aimed largely at kids, was insane to parody a film that was made for grownups and most kids couldn’t even see.  (Let us not even talk about “A Crockwork Lemon.”)  But on the other hand, I read enough of Borey Lydon to know most of what adult America thought of it – it was too long, it was very pretty, it was very boring.  And I had a rough idea of the plot.
Hell, I still haven’t seen Barry Lyndon, but I can tell you basically what happened.
And so I scoured those magazines, learning the rough plots of films, basically acquiring a knowledge base of cinema not through watching VHS tapes or DVDs – which didn’t exist then – but via the way other people made fun of them.
Likewise, I learned a lot about music from Weird Al.  And a surprising reason that I was able to get through Dune after bouncing off of it twice was reading National Lampoon’s Doon, which helped me grok the overall structure of Dune so that I could plow further into it. (And holy crap, Wikipedia has way too much information on Doon.)
So when I’m watching the Puppy Bowl, yes, on one level it’s just an excuse to put cute puppies jumping merrily on each other.  But on another level, I have been taught that parody is a way of cutting down to the vital parts.  You parody the most notable bits, and so you can reverse-engineer a good parody to determine what the essential elements are, and actually use those elements to educate yourself on what the parodied material actually is.  I’ve learned a lot through comprehensive parody, just as I’m certain there are people who only know elements of The Godfather from watching Simpsons or South Park episodes, and so it becomes a weird form of education.
The Puppy Bowl is not the Super Bowl.  But in choosing which gags to use, the Puppy Bowl can tell me what elements of The Super Bowl the fans consider to be important to the experience – so important that they subconsciously expect a gag there.  And so I learn from something meant to produce a chuckle in the already-educated.  I immerse myself in a culture, and in many ways it’s a much more pleasant experience than sitting among a bunch of die-hard fans who want to focus on the experience and not educate.  You don’t feel bad; you just realize you didn’t get a joke, and mark that missed joke as a potential thing to follow up on.
It’s an introvert’s technique, but it’s served me surprisingly well.  And I think it’s largely overlooked as a way of learning.

The Republican Dog Trainer

“I don’t actually like dogs.  There’s no real need for people to have dogs.  I’d like to starve every dog until it was small enough to drag it into the bathroom and drown it in a bathtub.”
“…what?”
“Not that I would drown the dog, of course!  But the dog’s a drain on you, you realize.  Only holds you back.  Listen, how much kibble do you feed it?”
“Her.”
“Her, sure.  Point is, you could save a lot of cash by slashing the amount you give her.  Do two, three bits of kibble a day, and those annoying dog food bills will just evaporate.”
“Listen, I – I’m not sure I want to put you in charge of my dog – ”
“How can you doubt my qualifications?  I ran a very profitable slaughterhouse, where we took in all kinds of animals and stripped them down to their component parts!  Between this and our mutual acknowledgement that dogs are kind of useless and we’d all be better off without them, who would you want taking care of this animal?”
“…anyone?  I want a dog in the house.  My dog is useful to me.”
“No, it isn’t.  It’s a drain on your resources.  A luxury for lazy people.  And if we have to tolerate this sort of frippery in our lives, then I say we strip it to the bone.  So no more having the dog in the house, or spending money on toys, and frankly, the more we can neglect the thing the sooner it’ll be out of your way.”
“But it’s my seeing-eye dog.”
“Nonsense.  You don’t need a dog.  After all, my vision is perfectly fine!”

How Having Multiple Boyfriends Is Like Having Multiple Kids

I have many friends who have five children. You know how many small children it takes to wear me out? One.
Which is to say that I adore small children – but as an introvert, kids burn my batteries something fierce. I struggle to find avenues of conversation with them, because they’re little and I know talking is good to develop their brains, but it’s the most awkwardest of small talk. It’s often stressful for me trying to figure out what we have in common to talk about – or even in making sense of their answers, which they toss off as though I should know all about Bridget down at the playground.
And then there’s the maintenance aspect. I love putting my Godkids to bed and reading them stories and ensuring they’ve brushed their teeth and choosing their clothes for the next day, I really do… but by the time it’s all over, I’m ready to put myself to bed.
I don’t know how parents live with five of that constant busyness and not be impossibly stressed, all the time. And yet they do. I see evidence of their joy. So it must be possible, but those people have gotta be wired differently than me.
Yet teenagers? Love ’em. I can eat up a diet of angst and surliness all day. You could put me in charge of seven or eight teens, and I could thrive.
But that’s the thing. For some people, “having a kid” is a trivial relationship in terms of burning energy – they love babies, and can have a ton of toddlers hanging about, and those relationships energize them. There’s an upper limit to the number of kids they can profitably manage, of course, but somehow they can have a family of seven and find not just the time, but the personal energy, to make it work.
That’s a basic rule of humanity: some people find certain types of relationships easier to manage than others.
So when people ask, “How can you have a meaningful romantic relationship with two people?” the proper answer is, “Having a romantic relationship is something that comes naturally enough to me that I can manage to have more than one and still have the energy to dedicate to another.”
See, I’m a hopeless romantic, and I spend a disproportionate amount of the day sending sweet and sexy texts and asking about my partners’ days and wishing – quite sincerely! – that I was curled up in their arms. Hell, I’ve had friends tell me that I pay more attention to them than their partners do, and that’s just me checking in on them when I’ve got the time.
And if that took away from my relationship from my wife, I’d probably gear down. But the truth is that for me, because of who I am, I can ladle out vast amounts of affection to other partners and still make Gini feel valued.
I like people. I like intense friendships. And for me, “adding sex” doesn’t denature the quality of a relationship. For many, throwing a sexual element into a relationship transforms it into something so different that they have to act in new and uncomfortable ways to manage it; they’re wired differently than I am. For me, sex is something casual that can be deeply meaningful, but is not inherently so.
So for me, “adding sex” to a friendship creates a relationship that I don’t find all that difficult to manage. For others, that dynamic differs. And that’s great.
Yet for me, what this combination of priorities gets me is meaningful multiple romantic relationships. Are they the same as a monogamous romantic relationship? No, of course not – and if for you, the only way you could be fulfilled is to know that someone’s devoting the entirety of their time and affection to you, then clearly you’re not cut out to be poly.
Yet what we have is enough time and affection to make us happy.
(In the same sense that I, a long-time sufferer of Only Child Syndrome, can’t imagine how a kid could be happy with a mother who split her time.
For me, having multiple lovers comes natural… But I’d really struggle taking care of multiple toddlers, even though I like kids. That’s because we’re all wired differently.)
And wait! This gets even crazier! Although both my wife and I are polyamorous, we have different tolerances for what kinds of relationships we can manage. I am tolerant of angst and emotional processing (see also: that affinity for teenagers), whereas my wife is drama-allergic to the extreme. So I can have multiple florid relationships that are experiencing hitches, whereas Gini can handle multiple relationships as long as nobody expects her to sit down and have A Talk. Trying to troubleshoot multiple relationships at once causes her to short out.
She sees my other relationships as exhausting. Because for her, they would be. We’re both polyamorous, but our styles are entirely different.
And that’s all polyamory is, really: a group of people who are comfortable existing in different relationship styles. I keep hearing from monogamous people, “Man, just having a husband wears me out,” and my inevitable reply is, “And that’s totally okay!” Then I look at their five children, two with diapers that need changing and one with gum in her hair, and go, “Whoo, couldn’t handle that.”
Nobody’s wrong for not wanting lots of kids. Or not wanting lots of friends. Or not wanting lots of lovers. It’s all about what sorts of relationships you have an affinity for, and what sorts of relationships you really enjoy but maybe take a little more strain than you’d like to manage in multiples.
It’s all good. But just realize, if you’re monogamous and questioning how polyamory works, that each of us has our own unique style, a comfort zone where we feel so at ease it feels not only natural to have a relationship of that sort, but that we crave multiple relationships – whether that’s friends, kids, workout partners, lovers, Facebook buddies, or movie pals.
It seems a little crazy to you. That’s because your relationship strengths are widely shared by others, and so culturally we’ve come to accept your way of doing things.
Some of us are wired different. And that’s cool.

As Of Tomorrow, I Do Not Have Gonorrhea

I got tested as part of my annual STD check last week, and if I don’t hear from them by tomorrow then I am “clean.”
I always find that bizarre.
Maybe I’m paranoid – paranoid enough to get tested despite no signs or symptoms – but I always go, What if they forget to call?  I know there’s a lot of notifications to give, and all these Planned Parenthood issues with confidentiality (they go so far, and correctly, to have a secret system where you give them an artificial name so they can leave a message and you can call them back without alerting anyone).  But things go wrong in any bureaucracy, and the whole “Just assume it’s fine unless you hear from us” freaks me the fuck out.
I always call.  Just to be sure.  And they sound so perplexed.
So right now, I’m Schrodinger’s Slut, probably not genitally ablaze with various transmissibles, but uncertain.  At some point tomorrow, I will start another free period where I am, insofar as we can reasonably assume, good to go – an assumption that will degrade throughout the year as I continue to have sexual encounters, until I get tested again.
I dunno.  Testing is inaccurate on so many levels – the blood tests are rife with false positives and false negatives, so there’s no really good way of knowing you have herpes unless they get a culture from some outbreak.  And for those tests, there’s always some period in which you’ve begun to contract the disease, but it’s not present in your system enough to show up, so realistically it’s not a clean bill of health but rather a bill that says, “Well, you’re either completely free of the disease, or we’re early enough that it has yet to take a diagnosable foothold on your system.”
It’s so inaccurate that on some levels I wonder why I have it done.  It’s not like I’m not going to play it safe anyway.  But I feel obliged to get a certificate just so I can be as honest with my partners as I can possibly be, and here I am stating that honesty in the hopes that my number didn’t accidentally drop off a “CALL THESE PEOPLE STAT” list at the no-doubt-overworked and understaffed Planned Parenthood clinic.
I don’t wanna bug them for what’s been a no every time since I started doing this.
I probably will anyway.