2008-02-24
There comes a time in every man's life where he stumbles awake with a bit of a hangover, shambles a cigarette out of his pocket and sets his hair on fire trying to light it.
It was time, I then decided, for a stern reappraisal of the situation.
I could be doing something constructive at this moment, instead of trying to beat out my fringe. Maybe the gin was a mistake. Maybe all the beer was a mistake. Maybe the large glass of whiskey mixed with rum was a mistake. You make your way through the kitchen, a horrid marriage of beer cans and the remains of spaghetti bolognese, and the mind recoils in horror. Utter certainty that this is what the next three years of your lif will be exactly like, if not worse, when university rolls around. And what then? A great ivory mansion where trained cheetahs will pick up the spaghetti for me. No, leave this kitchen. It'll be fortunate if you're still alive, probably hunched over a bench on camden town, eating a lunch of cigarettes and pot noodle.
Ah, pot noodle. I'm looking at a shelf full. Somehow I have made my way into a small supermarket. I'm not sure how. The car was a factor, I think. In any case, browse the most horrible aisle you know. The one where all the canned meals are kept. Eye a can of "all day breakfast" and remember how it tasted last time. No, this will not do. Besides, I came here for pot noodle, and as luck would have it, if I buy two, then I get forty percent off. Well, why the hell not?
And now to the present, where I type this and simultaneously work my way through that pot of chow mein. Well, I suppose it's almost happened, my dining habits are atrocious, now all I need is to lose the roof over my head and I'll be living the dream. If forty percent off pot noodles really the biggest score I'm going to have today? It seems more than likely, because it doesn't seem like the smell of burnt hair is going away any time soon. Christ, I'm a wreck. The bottles of cider and the one of rum that's considerably more empty than you thought it would be insist try to insist that life right now seems to be a mad dash to self-destruction. You should stop, and turn yourself around. Do something worthwhile. The cigarettes seem to concur.
I do not. Shake these thoughts away, they are poison. Don't worry over whether something's worthwhile, worry about enjoying yourself. Surely that's the most worthwhile thing anybody can do with their life. Will this lifestyle, if it continues and intensifies, send me to an earlier grave? Probably. But I don't know. I'm probably in a minority here, but I would far rather do what I enjoy now instead of ensuring that I'll be there later.
Drinking, smoking (I do the former in amazing quantity and the latter not so much, so it evens out), and eating this stuff that couldn't possibly be worse for me...what people must not do is place a moral value on it. Or anything, that's the biggest mistake. Another mistake would be to think that I'm saying that I need to do these things to enjoy myself. Course I bloody don't. They're completely unneccessary to enjoying my life, but I do them, because I like them.
But, this is the crucial thing. If you understand that, you have to accept the other side of the coin. Accept that not smoking is not neccessary to leading a fulfilling life. Accept exactly the same about drinking, about abstinence from these things that we think are inherently "bad". We're not talking about health here, we're talking about the moral value that they've been given.
Not smoking does not make you better than someone who does smoke. And of course, smoking does not bake you better than someone who doesn't smoke. It's just difference, and when we start placing moral values on these things, that's when you get into trouble.
Morality's a hard thing to deal with. It's not so black and white: "drinking is bad, yoghurt is good and so is omega 3", it's far subtler than that. And that's because you have to judge for yourself. Myself, I don't approve of the smoking ban, can't smoke in bars, bus shelters, clubs, the list goes on. It's not that I demand that people should be allowed to smoke in these places, I don't approve of the monochrome morality behind it. "Smoking is bad, ergo and henceforth, da da dada da da..."
And what's the ban about? I think we're about to come full circle. Health. Smoking is bad because it damages your health, and by the same token, drinking and henceforth and the rest are in the same category. But that's what I've been trying to tell you, they're not "bad", and abstince from them is not "good", nor "bad", it's the categorisation that ruins everything. It takes away the charm of an individual trying and making up their own mind what they think. That's what needs to be worked for, the individual mindset, not a blanket morality. What needs to happen is smokers need to rediscover the etiquette of smoking politely, and people who don't like smoking to be less hysterical and judgemental. I know this is a bit of a blanket, but I have to at least explain it some way. Besides, I know it'll never happen, and you know that too. People don't really work like that.
It's health, that's what it all comes back to. Thats why people are hysterical, they want to be as healthy as they can, as fit as they can, and live as long as they can. Here we are, it's all come full circle. I don't want to do that, because I realise that living for as long as one can isn't neccessarily "good". Nor is a short life, but nor is a short life "bad".
Lose the labels. Don't do something because you think it's "good", do it because you want to do it. For God's sake, it's your life, do what you really want to do.
Because you want to is the best reason there is.
So there, a stern reappraisal of the situation. Not mine, everyone's. I just hope I don't have to set my hair on fire again to have another epiphany.
-Jon
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