Two days ago I thought I had Covid-19, so much so I created distress for myself and others. I had nursed a swollen molar for weeks, if not months; it turned out to be two molars. The infection migrated into the eustachian tube possessed of chronic otitis media from a ruptured eardrum in childhood. The otitis wandered leisurely down my pharyngeal pathways to settle in my thorax aided by stresses from several unrequited loves over a decade of wandering held at bay where I abide by little more than a manic regime of daily bicycle laps around the local estuaries and a forced-march creative discipline that aids me in quixotic delusions, real and imagined, of a joyous existence as I teeter into my dotage. So why not add insult to injury and nurture delusions of grandeur by writing a book using my oh-so-unique travails as grist for the mill; then just to make it interesting, yank the remnants of camaraderie that tobacco leafs have provided, lest I get too comfortable. Well you can see where my noble delusions have gotten me - distracted because I couldn’t muster to the finish line just like daddy always said would happen. It just doesn't matter anymore whether it's from fear of the superior forces that the tabula rasa has arrayed against me - fucked without sex; drunk without excess, or just too pissant to own it. So I did what all puerile addictive personalities do and conjured a malady under which I could crawl and elicit sympathy from anyone foolish enough to care, while me foolish enough to believe they might.
Lo and behold one week ago, after a sleepless night in which I was swamped in snot, replete with a fever that broke a 100° F; I acquiesced to greater wisdom and abandoned my selfish self-centered victimhood and sought medical attention for my “cold,” though not quite as snivelingly myopic as it sounds; i’d just, within days breakfasted at an establishment located at the epicenter of a Covid outbreak in our Covid-free community for the past 10 months. Yet my wheezing congestion coalesced into buckets of pudding-like mucus, and my native self—loathing shook hands with the Typhoid Mary in my homophobic alter-ego, just as Apple decides it’s time for an update; that then sends me into a password recovery loop so as the sun is setting, my fever is rising, my writing tool locks me out in the middle of arranging rides just as I lose my voice to laryngitis and am reduced to squeaking behind a mask, “can I borrow paper?” I’m fortunate to be surrounded by adults who have learned to not take me too seriously, though they still won’t let me have sharp objects in my room. A trip to the Doctor for antibiotics, rather than a journey to the hospital; 8 hours of sleep and a short trip to the local computer store and I’m able to wipe my own tears away in essay form.
Struggling to figure out now how to cut the apron strings of my love/hate relationship with tobacco, while not perceiving it as a command from “Doctor She-Who-Would-Be-Queen-Not” without whose help, I’m not sure I would have made it, though I am a 67 year old maniac who ran the Los Angeles Marathon at 52, 6 months after my last wife left me 5 days after an emergency appendectomy. I didn’t smoke or drink for a decade due to those seminal events and only resumed because, I’m not only a maniac, I’m a fool, an educable fool, but a fool nonetheless . .. 130521 Better than a week later, and just like it was a week into cessation a decade ago - it has been the smartest thing i could have done. I do not possess the divine tobacco discipline to smoke as a shaman - breath at time; nor do i possess the grace to drink like a poet; i’m stuck in some middle ground of mediocrity with enough gumption to keep pulling the tobacco teat out of my mouth, but happy to learn how to nurture a swill rather than swamp my soul in the sea of “oh boy” and try to harvest what good shit i can from the elixirs the mystery of existence has surrounded us in - along with nazis, toxic narcissists and Nancy boys, closeted or otherwise.
I am gay neutral, but prefer licking pussy which makes me a target sucker for all the manly advertising directed toward men who are ambivalent about pussy, (what is the definition of a latent homosexual, anyone who is not a blatant homosexual - Randy Bulla · 1979) Existentially, there is no other avenue but to follow the ambiguous directions of our gender other-halves - “she” got me this far out of my tobacco addiction with little more than a crocked little finger wagging and a promise of “nothing.” If you don’t find that kind of power fascinating, lucky you; i find it sublime and worthy of a sniff. Where as the only juice i ever got from actually smoking, was much like Robert De Niro’s character Travis Bickle aping a tough guy in front of a mirror, “are you talking to me, are You, talking to me?” except it always smells of some seedy theatre with sticky floors, and exposed décolletage covered awkwardly by her stare at the direction of your gaze. I’d love to blame Marlboro / Phillip Morris / Brown & Williamson, but that’s sort of lame like trying to blame mama for my being a lover not a hater; her cruelty and arrogance would be reason enough for the latter, but her wisdom and inscrutability allows for nothing but the former.
My first cigarette was from her hand; it was a backyard lark much like her blowing pot at a Grateful Dead/Bob Dylan concert 40 years later at Anaheim Stadium. Tobacco got serious when i thieved a pack from a 6th grade teacher from his coat behind the backstop during lunchtime baseball. Me and Michael Lambert, god rest his soul, were partners in crime, and me and my big mouth were our undoing. Just like the fiction Travis Bickle engaged in with his gun, i could not sit quietly in our illicit redoubt - “Hey! Scott, I’m smoking over there behind the dirt pile, but I don’t want you to say anything about it to anyone, okay?” · minutes later pop came cruising up the alley with nothing but disappointment on his face to lock me in my room for the afternoon while he spent one of those rare days playing with all the kids in the backyard outside my window - a no more powerful punishment, i’ve ever endured · yet 60 years later i still find rind enough from the fruit of learning to share kindness cloaked in cruelty. I want no other breath of smoke for any other reason than my own internal logic i hope fervently you can relate to.
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drinking - a sonnet ·
both of my grandpas drank copiously
it’s luck the alcoholic gene skipped my
place in line, though expensive, willingly,
not that hangovers are great, i’ll still die
yet, like with the luck of writing i choose
shot after shot, or not, daily or no
word after word, based on whether i lose
or you win the guess about what i know
I can write without tobacco, oh boy
like you could give a shit that i’m happy
I’d like to believe that you feel my joy
But will settle for nicotineless beer pee
if i live long enough to explain that
to you and yours, i’ll always tip my hat.
jts 13/05/2021
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