St. Nic

I smoked a bit recently, and more than I would have liked, once I woke up the next morning wishing I were dead. I used to smoke, though, and less than I would have liked at the time, as I would have, were it possible, smoked in class, at yoga, at the symphony, in the shower, and while asleep. Now, by contrast, I smoke perhaps a cigarette or two a month, if the situation presents itself and I feel like it.

I didn't grow up smoking, or even around smokers. The only smokers at boarding school were what seemed to me frighteningly mature European voluptuaries with recklessly free-style hair and a penchant for wool vests, and louche Americans whose older sisters brought them drugs for their birthdays. Later, though, once I was married, I would keep a pack of cigarettes in a sealed plastic bag in the freezer, and once every couple of months take one out and smoke it while cleaning house. Sometimes my husband and I would each have one, walking around the lake or sitting at table after dinner. I didn't know how to inhale, but the act of it was pleasurable, and I liked the smell.

Once my husband turned gay and I moved to Greece, it was a bit different. In Greece, smoking it not merely encouraged, it is nearly enforced. My first memorable Greek smoking experience was being offered a cigarette in a bank by the teller as consolation for a lengthy but inexplicable wait. I gleefully (I'm smoking in a bank! I'm smoking in a bank!) accepted both the cigarette and a light off his Zippo, and felt dangerous and sophisticated and almost truly Hellenic myself. I wished Veronica Lake or Alan Ladd could have been there to see that I now could wait for a train as fashionably as they could.

My brands of choice were Gauloises and Kiretsiler, both very spicy, rich, and aromatic. You can't get Kiretsiler outside Greece, and these days in North America you have to go to Canada to get Gauloises, but those were simpler times, and smokier. I eventually learned to inhale, but I figured it was unlikely I would become addicted, as being attached to, or consumed by, things, was never one of my especial weaknesses. Eventually I did, but it took a long time and I enjoyed both before and after. I never felt much of a 'rush,' but perhaps that was because with not inhaling for so long, the amount of nicotine I was receiving very gradually built up as my smoking expertise developed.

Any arousing aspects seemed more to come from the physicality of smoking, not what was actually being inhaled. I didn't like to feel any kind of intoxication, and would always eschew pain medications after surgeries, so that suited me well. I knew there was nicotine, and nicotine was some kind of mild stimulant, but so was caffeine, and that didn't seem to be a big concern for most of the people who loved coffee, as evidenced by the overall lack of ruined espresso junkies in business suits begging for Change for a Venti Please outside Starbucks.

At the same time, I knew that cigarettes were implicated in heart disease, emphysema, lung cancer, chronic bronchitis, asthma, sinusitis, high blood pressure, COPD, digestive problems, dental problems, circulation problems, arterial sclerosis, multiple sclerosis, and just about everything else except Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, with regard to which there exists an inverse association. But, we are all going to die of something, and while smoking-related deaths are among the more ghastly and prolonged ways of accomplishing this, I would have no ethical or logistical problem with using my last Social Security check to buy a Glock and avoid Stage Four of anything, particularly since I would be, if not of sound body, at least of sound mind at that point, owing to nicotine's anti-Alzheimer's properties.

So that was fine. I was never a talented smoker, not only remaining ignorant of the arcana of smoke-ring blowing and the esoteric 'French Inhale,' but continuing always to look vaguely ill-at-ease in both embouchure and grip. Nonetheless, I persisted in my hobby, partly because there is nothing like a smoke break when you are going to school 'double full time,' doing an internship, and working thirty hours a week. (And maybe the stimulant action didn't hurt, either, but again, I didn't actually notice it.)

Then, I read about smoking and dopamine. Basically, smoking both inhibits dopamine uptake and promotes the release of more dopamine -just like the clearly psychotropic drugs which had always scared me. Certainly I had heard the oft-recited 'smoking is as/more addictive than heroin/cocaine,' but I didn't think of it as getting me high like that. As I viewed it, I had an addiction to a fairly innocuous drug. There was no euphoria, no distortion of reality, no belief, not even once, that I could fly or pick, unassisted, a good muni fund. Frankly, I didn't even feel more energized after a cigarette. The side effects of the method of delivery, smoking, were odious, to be sure, but the drug itself, nicotine, was not a concern.

Dopamine, by contrast, is a big deal. It is a hormone and a neurotransmitter, and involved in learning, pleasure, reward-oriented behaviors, memory, attention, desire -- in brief, cognition and desire/emotion. As that sunk in, it was patent that I was the same as the cocaine or meth junky. I may not be feeling as high as her or him, but my brain is doing exactly the same things in anticipating and receiving the drug. Studies showed smoker's dopamine levels spike from just seeing a lighter, or even a stepped-on cigarette. Far more so if the smoker's nicotine level is low. Then, when the reward is given, the first puff is smoked, there is another, higher wave of dopamine caressing the smoker's brain.

Which repelled me, so I quit. The first day was hard, because of course you think, Oh, I'm doing X; I should light a cigarette. But then the next day you can look back and see that you survived, and quite handily at that, blow-drying your hair or painting your toenails without one, so it's fine. Moreover, you can answer any momentary But I - with a factual Nooo, you don't, because you don't smoke, darling, because you have proven that you don't, because a smoker would have already had five that day before you started that abortive whinge, so shut up and get on with it, already.

I Broke My Hip in a Cialis Commercial

Cialis. It's the extended dance-remix version of Viagra. Take it, and you've got 36 hours to convince someone to have sex with you.

I could care less.

But while I am as sick as anyone else of the constant stream of content-free drug ads featuring frolicking puppies and toddlers, harmonious family dinners, fleece-clad upwardly-mobile thirty-somethings scaling mountainsides and dancing in pollen-infested meadows, and sixty-year-olds demonstrating their newfound taste for Moderate Physical Activity, with no mention of what, other than some general improvement in quality of life, these drugs can be expected to proffer, and while the Cialis ads do speak of what it is they are meant to address ('erectile dysfunction'), they manage to be as noxious as the vague 'you'll just have a better life, but we won't tell you how' ones.

Why? I don't mind the naughty-naughty nudge-nudge-wink-wink 'we're seventy but we're still going to git-it-onnnn' tone. Get it on, septuagenarians, get it on! And if you need a pill or a pulley system or a troupe of Chinese acrobats to get you there, it's not for me to judge. I think the more people there are succeeding in having happy sex lives, the fewer aggressive drivers, bar brawls, and Monster Trucks we will encounter in the world. And, the drug is about sex, after all, so fair play to the advertising firm for finding the space in their thirty seconds to be clear about that.

So clarity or frankness is not what gets under my skin here. It is those accursed bathtubs! These ads all focus on sex within a relationship, the intimacy of it. That the sex, qua vehicle of intimacy, guarantor of intimacy, proof of intimacy, was what was missing in an otherwise good relationship. Take this pill, you'll get that back, and then all the other good stuff that you did have will be even better by virtue of this restored sexual sharing. The ads show the couples doing things together, looking good together, sharing vacations, sharing a life.

And then they close with them up on a hill in separate bathtubs. Matt Beebe of Lilly says that shot was all but accidental originally. But they've stuck with it, and it's stupid. Take the drug, get it on, and then go your separate ways. If there has to be a bathtub - which is, I would argue, not necessarily the case - then have one bathtub, with the happy and contented reconnected seniors in it together.

The bathtub evokes a womb. Security, comfort, safety, warmth. Which is, in the ads, part of what the sex was meant to signify for these couples, as well. The men are portrayed not as popping a pill and heading out to the local bar to troll for strumpets, but, rather, as still attracted to, and wishing to have sex with, their wives, who are presented as attractive and havesexwithable. And then, after the shots of romantically-lit cuddly moments, the tinkling of soft jazz and wine glasses, a voiceover about livers, kidneys, blood pressure and the risk of four-hour erections takes place over a shot of the couple unable to have sex, because they are stuck precariously on a cliff, or stranded in a field, separated by walls of porcelain, something perhaps a four-foot, but not a four-hour, grandissement could solve.

White Knuckles and Sunny Mondays

I am not a good driver. This in no way means I am a bad driver, a far too encompassing and emotionally-laden term to be entirely apposite. In fact, I am a good driver at times, such as when I am going twenty-five miles an hour in a residential area with which I am well familiar. Particularly if there are stop signs, stop lights, or roundabouts at every intersection, no pedestrians or pets, no noticeable inclines, and provided that the sun is at an angle favorable to seeing forward.

But I am not bad. Per se. I am effusively, comprehensively polite, for example: I never go first at four-way stops, even when it is my right. (Largely because I can never figure out what is supposed to be right or left when it's all a circle, but that's beside the point.) I stop for pedestrians and children always. I likewise brake for dogs, cats, wayward ducks and geese, regardless of coloring, origin, or gender. I don't speed -- and not solely because my car lacks a usable fifth gear. I am circumspect; I check the side and rear mirrors constantly and, even though I can't actually see over the passenger side headrest, I do the right thing and at least attempt to check my blindspot prior to changing lanes. Which admittedly is seldom necessary, as I am sufficiently courteous as to remain in the slow-traffic lane whenever possible.

But all that circumspection, caution, and courtesy which would likely, in another driver, amount to boundless competence on the road, pale when matched against my utter and sheer lack of confidence. Sadly, while it may work for other things such as messy homes, body odor, and excess body weight, in this case 'knowing it is the first step to overcoming it' is a ponderously mistaken assertion. In this case, it is precisely KNOWING IT the makes the hands shake, the vision blur, the chain smoking fail to work, and the very balls of the feet and tip of the nose sweat. It is the foreknowledge that this can't possibly end well each and every time I have to get up to freeway speed or navigate a labyrinthine and wily Downtown Business Sector filled with greedy shoppers and angry, harried drivers. Being overwhelmed is not my problem: the problem is my awareness of being overwhelmed, which is insurmountable and irremediable. I have many pleasant, and even marginally utile, attributes. Urban navigation is not one of them.

There are so many places downtown that are appealing that i have just never gone to, since no one else suggested them when we were out and I can't drive myself downtown. I had a friend staying in one or other big hotel in the center last year, and I drove around in so many circles, and got stuck pointing upwards at what seemed to be 90 degree angles so many times, and stuck at lights even on the flat streets, and missing street signs, that I ended up parking about a half mile away, because I could never see the PARKING HERE signs until I was already passed them, or too close to pull in without getting rear-ended or shot....

By the time I got there, I looked as bad as I did last night at the end, except that the bald spots might even have been bigger, the pupils even more dilated and the skin yet more ashen and the voice still less audible or intelligible and the grammar far, far more tenuous, due to the fact that it was (cue funeral march) Sometime in the Afternoon that all this tragedy occurred, so there was about 8562 per cent more traffic than early in the night/late in the evening on a Monday.

How Stupid Are We, Really?

Or is it lazy? Please see Michael Bywater's excellent _Big Babies, or Why Can't We Just Grow Up?_ for a sobering exegesis on media and government infantilization of We the People. For a less-well-written rant, however, I offer up my enduring nausea at a long-running commercial for an osteoporosis medication, starring the presumably brittle-boned Sally Field.

This advertisement haunts me when I see people dawdling in the fruit section of the supermarket, when I zip past cars barely going the speed limit, and each and every time I approach getting more than six hours of sleep. Why? Not because of its insipidity and absurd premise, but because, as Ms. Fields makes clear in her first-person my-story closeup, we are very, very busy people these days, and it wasn't until she had a sit-down with a 'girlfriend' about time-management and its relation to this enfeebling condition that this woman was able to reclaim those seven seconds per day (calculation mine and approximate) she had previously needed to devote not only to ingesting a pill, but to swallowing the liquid necessary to washing it down.

As Field laments, her 'girlfriend,' like so many others, had to 'set aside time' every day (stress hers, not mine) to engage in this laborious - and manifestly wasteful - activity. Now, with this new monthly medication, her lucky friend can use those spare two hundred or so seconds she accrued for other activities, for which, one hopes, she does not have to 'set aside time.' Perhaps drinking a whole glass of liquid. Perhaps bemoaning (briefly) her misspent youth. Perhaps rubbing in a skin cream on one-half of her face, or filing one nail, or ironing one cuff.

How stupid? I don't know. I can't imagine anyone for whom this ad would make sense. Of course anyone would rather take a pill once a month over once a day, and once a day over seven times a day -- but 'set aside time?' The imagination is beggared to imagine that taking a pill cannot reasonably, in most people's thinking, be combined with, for example, spontaneous, or at least natural and necessary, consumption of liquid. One could even be reading, or on the telephone, or contemplating one's misspent youth -- and neither the taking of the pill, nor the swallowing of the liquid, would interrupt any of these.

Unless I am wrong.