breathe

It’s Monday. It’s a day of respiratory distress. After a weekend of respiratory distress. Pisses me off. Now, i’ve been asthmatic my whole life, and mostly i’m good. I have good drugs, and a bit of a medical plan with school that helps me pay for them. I am grateful. But I also smoked for a really long time, more than 20 years altogether, i think, and have had pneumonia a whole bunch of times, and now my poor little lungs are…trashed. sigh.

One of my favourite lines: “Legs like oak trees!–Lungs like antique paper doilies”. Well. we all got something.

Here’s what helped me to stay off smokes–cigarettes are like little tiny blowjobs–every half-hour or hour or so, you stop what you’re doing, to suck on The Man. And The Man’s jizz is killing you. blech.

also, politicize it in another way–smoking does impede your breathing, and a woman who cannot breathe cannot think and cannot holler. it is like he has his boot on your neck for real. And we PAY him to put it there. we smoke, and we are right where The Man wants us to be. under his boot, suckin’ his cock.

In my youth, when i started smoking, I thought of this as a rebellion. Resistance against asthma and dorkiness. I would decide what to do with my breath, I would decide when to smoke, to trigger the wheeze–or not. I KNOW it doesn’t make sense, but that’s what addicts do, we tell ourselves any number of ridiculous convoluted stories to justify self-mutilation. When really, we want to numb out, to dissociate, to back away and turn around and leave the scene. thinking clearly, working toward our shared freedom, ‘stickin’ it to The Man’, those are all things that lead to fear and hard work and big risks. Addiction is a risk, too, but it takes you out of the glorious struggle and it’s way less work.

Even with all the hustling and scamming and hiding and lying that addiction forces you to do, it’s still easier in so many ways than thinking and conversing and demanding and negotiating and acting in public in solidarity with others. We need each other, and so long as the drugs take priority over any relationship, hobby, passion, interest–etc.–we will always be lonely.

I started this as a rant about my current respiratory distress (which was mostly self-inflicted, dammit), and now i gotta go, but I’m going to develop this into a rant about the harms of harm reduction.

stay tuned.