Soapboxes and Cigarettes

Sometimes I tell you stories with my strong moral opinions attached.  And by sometimes, I mean almost all the time.  I think I’m obsessed with right and wrong, mostly because I’m an optimist constantly let down by the things that people do that go against my principles.

But as we get older, and string together our tiny tragedies like beads on a bracelet we can never take off, I think it becomes clear that seeing things in black and white is not only limiting, it’s impossible.  I’m not going to keep making trite analogies, because we’ve heard them all before.  I’ve been reading and writing a lot of short stories recently, and I’ve realized that the characters that ring true to me are not the Voldemorts or Atticus Finch-s, but the real humans in between.  Like Dumbledore, whose dark side is fleshed out in the seventh book (thankfully, or he would be chocked up to the lovable but unbelievably good Atticus Finch).

A movie that captures this really well is Blue Valentine, with Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams.  The director’s intent was to make it as real as possible; the actors lived together for an entire month to prepare for the filming, and he even wanted to film it over the course of six years to follow the pacing of the movie, but the budget didn’t allow for it.  Anyway, if you’re looking for a good (and Netflix-able) movie, that’s my recommendation.  Sad, though, because it is very realistic.

Regardless, today I’m here to talk to you without any morals and I’ll be leaving my soapbox in the corner.  Now, in actuality, I have no idea what story or information I’m supposed to provide next, and I feel like there’s now a huge build up for nothing.  Prepare to be disappointed, which I hope is not your feeling every time you click on one of my posts.  I’m very insecure.  My life feels really repetitive and uninteresting.

Maybe instead of actually saying something, I’ll just share one of my stories.  You in?  I wrote it yesterday.  Oh, there are bad words, so don’t be mad when you see them, because I warned you.  It's called "Bullshit Filter," so if you don't want to read anymore bad words, stop here.

Now that you’re old and plagued with an incurable sense of retrospection, you can see it all, though not without a strong prescription.  Life is a fucking cigarette.  It really is.  You start out perfect and pristine, surrounded by nineteen of your carbon copy friends, not a care in the world.  Then someone lights a fire under your ass and you’re raring to go like you’re in some goddamn rush to get old.  And old you get—life sucks the fire right out of you and pop! boom! sizzle!  You’re the old butt that no one wants around.

And no one cares because they’re smoking a pack a day, no time to think about you.

When you were young and dumb as a rock you smoked, too.  Now you look down at your weathered, leathery hands, like ten of the filters they told you would defend against disease.  Oh, disease.  What a small price to pay tomorrow for looking like a bad ass today.  Anyway, the filters are a load of shit, but you didn’t get cancer or anything.  You’ll never be called up to serve as the poster dumb ass for an anti-smoking campaign, because you were pretty lucky.  Mr. Bronchitis comes to call more often than you’d like, but you can’t complain.

Your grandson uses you as justification for his chain smoking to his dumb-as-rocks friends—“my grandpa’s 82, smoked all his life, and he’s fit as a dog”—ignore the irony that the phrase is ‘sick as a dog.’  Anyway, the day you saw him, cigarette in hand like a fucking merit badge, you quit cold turkey.  You weren’t going to be his bullshit filter, denial that he’s not taking a big gamble.  That’s why kids aren’t allowed in casinos—you don’t bet it all on one hand just because you saw someone get lucky on the one before.

It was probably time to quit, anyway.  Cigarettes don’t make you look like a bad ass when they’re jutting out rebelliously from beneath an oxygen tube.

So now, you just roll them between your fingers, your wrinkly old man fingers, till all the guts spill out.  Wonder what the metaphor is for that.  All the tobacco shavings and rocket fuel and rat poison or whatever shit is in them these days.  The little brown piles evoke the tea leaves you swirled during the first decade of your life, when your mother wasn’t paying attention to her china set.  She’d entertain the ladies and they all complimented each other’s faded dresses. 

Really, they were dirt poor and the dresses were the same each week.  But we all have our bullshit filters.  They would finish their tea and retire to the parlor after what seemed like a lifetime.  Your clumsy little fingers played in the microscopic sandboxes, undeterred by the fact your mother caught you every time.  Your hands would smell like her until bath time.  These are the smells of your childhood, Ivory soap and your mother’s tea; you can still recall them in your old age.

You muddle through your days.  That’s about all that old, discarded butts can do.  It’s okay, because you’ve got your chronic retrospection to entertain you, the one disease that rolling the filters between your fingers always brings back.  If only you’d been infected a little earlier, maybe you would’ve saved the butts from the important days in your life and you could line them up like miserable trophies.  1951, when you asked your girlfriend to marry you during a smoke outside the office; 1954, the cigarette you were smoking when Mark was born (probably the tenth of that day, and the most important); and on and on. 

Maybe twenty days worth remembering: a complete pack of dissolving trophies, no more.  The number of smokes you went through in a day is all you need to look back on your entire life.  Most of them would be bent from where they were nervously grasped.  The retrospection has showed you that much: stick your neck out, take a risk and fuck everyone who tells you not to—that’s a day worth remembering.  Even if it’s just reaching into that tea cup to swirl around the forgotten leaves, knowing that your mother will scold you—that’s a day worth remembering.  Maybe that’s why life is like a cigarette.  Surgeon general be damned, no one realizes the bullshit filter is bullshit till they’re old.  Youth gets its chance to feel invincible, save the emphysema and regret for the withering old man with the strong prescription eyeglasses, wringing cigarettes at a nursery home coffee table.

The end, have a happy week.

-Rachael