The Open Matt Project

I think tommorow I'll kill myself - Pt. 2

There is something optimistic about lethally bad habits. I've been a smoker since I was 17, something I picked up in the most cliche situation ever devised. My first day at college, I was offered a cigarette by two extremely hot co-eds. I balked for just enough time to consider the social suicide that would've surely represented at the time, then took it as naturally as I could and proceeded to find a drink. Technically, I had my first cigarette after a particularly long work assignment my father had given me, back when that sort of thing could happen, from a pack of discarded Newports my sister had semi-hidden. It seemed like the sort of thing to do after a long and exhaustive job (thanks to clearly successful advertising) and at the time I remember thinking about just how accurate the ads had been.

My first drink had come long before then. I'm not sure when the first real drink happened, but likely before my teen years. All of them were raided from various parent's liquor cabinets, none of them locked of course, and indulged solely for the rocket-powered fun they invariably offered. Drinking during a time of near absolute absence of responsibility is a once in a lifetime experience, or at least one part of a lifetime experience. The only thing to have changed as I developed my taste for alcohol has been my refinement of tastes for alcohol.

Now past 30, I've had more than enough time to consider the predicted results, consequences, or penalties of these habits. I left running behind me sometime in my mid-twenties. Partying sober has become more dull than a slow work day. My resiliance to hangovers has both waxed and waned so that now it's more a test of my drinking skill and my endurance than it is my biological ability to recouperate. I cough up delightful tidbits whose sole purpose seems to be a vulgar reminder of how long it's been since I last smoked.

Nothing could be more clear to me than how deliberately I am cutting my own life short. Burma shave ads (look it up) had nothing on the ability of these posions to prepare oneself for what was certain to come. As with anticipating those signs, it's unavoidable to consider, however fleetingly, the impending death one is rushing headlong to.

So why continue? There's still plenty of time, right? So much time it may even be a good reason unto itself to continue! As I pointedly choose to stop using the impersonal pronouns, I can state that it is my considered opinion that my smoking and drinking are a conscious effort to end my own life. The facts certainly bear me out, as does their increased usage correspond to points in my life where the love of life (no hideous pun intended) has left me with little but these objects of deadly solice.

Why not something quicker? Why not something immediate? And we come to my opening statement - there is something optimistic about lethally bad habits. With such ready access to faster, or flatly certain, methods of dispatch, why muck about with the slow and clumsy dissolution these habits inflict? They're fun, one might suppose. They remind us of death without imparting it, thus giving us control, however small, over that which is ultimately master of all things. Playing with fire, eating it, or haphazardly disarming inhibitions with a wash of fire-water is an exhilirating way of passing the time. But I don't think that's it. I'm coming to see something else.

I know I'm going to die and I'm burning that time more quickly because at unpredictable increments I have lost my taste for life. I think that it's an expression of my hope for the future that I chose these particularly faulty methods of exit.

Many times in my life I've sat waiting. Waiting for the phone to ring, with her on the other end prepared to say those things I'm hoping with all my heart she'll say. Waiting for the doorbell to ring, or for the doorbell to be answered. Waiting for the time to pass long enough for the pain or despair that keeps us apart to disperse. It's during those all-encompasing moments of pure hope that I am most aware of the futility of it. Perhaps the futility of it all. As that time passes, the hope slowly fades and fades and fades away, until there simply is nothing left.

I mark that time in cigarettes and swirling washes of alcohol.

Posted by Matt at March 6, 2005 05:29 PM