Being alone is better. Don’t have to deal with too many sounds. Radio, a conversation on the phone. Intruding. My ears not yet withdrawn into an internal silence. Blink blink blink of the cursor on the screen, finger hovering over alphabet. Nose dripping. Keeping company with outside cold rain. First day of the New Year. 2021. The year of the Cow? Talked with SiTing, real-time, in China. That part’s very amazing: seeing who you’re talking with half way around the world. Hard to believe. Such was impossible not all that long ago. For some reason a memory came as I was squatting in the sheltered doorway, out of the rain, smoking. Can’t smoke in so many homes anymore. Very discriminated against us smokers are. But yes, remembered the old man, my dad, telling me how not only did I make my bed badly, but I shit in it too. And now of course I had to sleep in it. At the time I wasn’t impressed with such a critique of my youthful life. I thought the old man didn’t know what he was talking about. Actually, I still don’t think he was all that correct. But, I do see a corollary in what’s going on in the world. That’s pretty much what we’ve done with, or on, the planet. We’ve shit on our host. On our Mother. But now, a day later, again re-visiting what my dad said about the kaka in my bed, and the being discriminated against as a smoker. Squatting in front of my pony, my pick-up, as far away from the apartments as possible so that my coughing doesn’t bother anyone, doesn’t wake anybody up. Still very early on a Saturday. First weekend of the new year. And the stupidity of smoking is becoming very obvious. Very painful in the mornings, especially with the blatant head trips shaking me like earthquakes, asking, what’s wrong with you, what don’t you get, don’t you see-know how much you dislike this ritual of morning coughing with coffee and one cigarette after another and then one more, why do you do this when you’re so ashamed of for so long not being able to quit even tho you’ve told everybody whom you love and care about and how much you don’t like not doing what you’d said you’d do? You’ve invoked your great-grandmother’s presence to witness your quitting, you’ve prayed to all the Holy Manifestations, you’ve put a pack of smokes on your altar as a way of saying ok, now they’re for You, I’ve enjoyed and abused this substance for almost 75 years, You can have it back, thank You very much please help me stop, knowing that nobody could do it for you, you have to do it your own self, for months closely inspecting the various forms that phlegm took, from the thick yellowish which fascinated you because of how fire-resistant it was, yeah, you bozo, you gave it to Agni, to fire, telling Him that it needed to be burned out of your body so you could breathe more easier, how it changed to a not as thick and whitish, but not stopping, now a gurgling deep in the chest almost runny and harder to cough up… A real pain in the ass but still painfully smoking, what the fuck’s wrong with you? You’d said that this was your way of cutting down on air pollution, a very small cutting down, but if we all did our small individual parts then maybe probably it’d have an effect on the global air pollution, and then we could tackle the plastic garbage, may be that’s how it could work, so what’s up, asshole? And still smoking now and then going outside. Discriminated. Fuckin’ stupid! Especially, wanting to build the Egg Monument for Humanity. What’s up with that, buddy? How you gonna keep working when you’re too dumb to see that soon you’ll just drop dead, not being able to breathe. Wake up! Changing is hard. Praying, while smoking, simply accepting that this is who and what I am and this is how it happens, and in this scenario I’m the proverbial weakling. Shit.
