Mayday in May

You think I would have learned by now.

I have been living with myself for a great deal of time, and after many years experience at various parties, shin-digs, get-togethers, hoe-downs, soirees, and blowouts you would posit that I would know my potential limits as well as I know my limited potential.

Of course not; stupidity knows no age limits.

I had been preparing for this Labor Day weekend for the past number of weeks, being social and gregarious, re-establishing long-defunct relationships that had atrophied over the preceding months, insinuating myself amongst new people and harvesting the resultant invitations to celebrations, ramping up my alcohol intake, and conditioning my liver to peak enzymatic performance (until last night, my liver could remove and expel from my bloodstream the toxic equivalent to Chernobyl or the Love Canal disaster in under an hour, leaving me as hale and robust as your average top-level Olympic tri-athlete).

I had even “taken it easy” on the preceding nights, merely dancing until 2am (with a bottle of Scotch in hand the whole night, passing out pulls to whomever asked) to the Waxploitation DJ’s at Red Scoot Inn on Friday night, then carting around a Jetta-full of drunken lesbians to various restaurants and clubs on until 2am on Saturday night.

Unfortunately, all of these preparations and organ-training came to naught because, in my hasty preparation for the evening (including the purchase of a massive cooler full of booze and associated accoutrements), I neglected to eat anything except a peanut-butter sandwich at 11am that morning, before I began the process of testing my liver to 110% of its processing capacity.

After a mere 3 drinks which combined the best of caffeine, fine chocolate liquors, vodka, milk, and ice (and a little bit of some other stuff courtesy of Kenji and Diana, both of whom I am going to strangle with extreme prejudice when I next see them), I was thoroughly blotto.

This is, of course, when our little party showed up to the big party in the park, and I began trying to destroy everyone’s retinas with flash photography. I thought I only had a dozen or so pictures left in the camera, but at some point I must have refilled the bugger with a new roll of 24. I now have in my possession 2 rolls of film that I am afraid to develop for fear of what they might contain. Strangers? People trying to chase me down and remove the camera forcibly from my twitchy, dipsomaniacal hands? Perhaps some of the imaginary creatures I kept seeing out of the corner of my eye during the night? Who knows. Maybe I’ll give the digital pictures to Merrick so he can tweak every sub-pixel and make something interesting out of them.

Suddenly it was over. I was out of film, the concert was ending, and I was trying to wrest from my fully-electrified brain a decent excuse why I couldn’t drive that wouldn’t sound lame. Fortunately, Casey is familiar with the signs of extreme drunkenness in me that others may fail to perceive, and with an, “Alright, give ‘em up” Casey was in possession of my Jetta, and we were all speeding towards his house.

Casey could have robbed a convenience store and I wouldn’t have noticed; I was content to lean my whirling skull against the cool glass of my luxurious back seat (pretty much any place is luxurious if you’re potted, even a cement jail-house floor) and to allow drool to accumulate on my shirt. We arrived at Casey’s house, everyone made their goodbyes (I was told the next day by several people that they had no idea why I hadn’t driven, as I seemed fine). I smiled and waved as they all drove off, and Casey went into his house, expecting me to follow.

I made it as far as the first landing at the top of his stairs before I was doing the Big Spit onto his shrubs like a bulimic prom queen trying to fit into her dress. I could hear him emerge, giggle like the evil little fruit-bag that he is, then hand me a glass of water while I continued to induce reverse-peristalsis over his railing. I must say that I was impressed with the neatness that I displayed; that’s what experience gives you, I guess.

I somehow managed to make it to his couch, where he placed a trash-can with the remnants of some kind of coumin/onion concoction he’d been cooking earlier in the day, causing me another out-of-stomach experience. Basically, by 10:30pm, I was down and out, with all flights cancelled. Unfortunately, I was not given the small mercy of being able to pass out, as the large amounts of caffeine in the drinks I had imbibed combined with the alcohol aches kept me hyper-alert throughout my ordeal. I think my last goodnight words to Casey were, "My teeth are gritty, I'm going to lie down."

I finally peeled myself off of the couch at 7:30am the next morning, threw out the trash, and drove in the mercifully-cloudy dawn to my home. It must have been quite an interesting site to see me trying to make two pairs of sunglasses fit on my head at the same time.

Apologies are owed to:
-Every person whose retinas I crisp-fried with photography.
-Anyone I tripped over, fell on or mashed during the concert.
-Anyone who had the misfortune to be in my “talking perimeter”, which extended that night from myself to a circumference of approximately 100 meters.
-Casey’s dog, who has a soft and irresistible coat.
-Casey’s fern, which has soft and irresistible leaves.
-Casey’s couch, which has soft and irresistible upholstery.

I spent most of that day nursing a Defcon 1 hangover, in which the missiles had already been launched and landed somewhere just behind my throbbing eyeballs.

Still, a significant blame can be leveled at society, which came over to my house on Thursday with a six-pack and encouraged me to embrace a serious drinking habit. Some blame may also be laid at your calloused feet, my friends, and never mind what for; I’ll forgive all of you if you will just buy me a few drinks at your earliest convenience…

The Austin Smoking Ban

A genuinely free society operates on what is called the Harm Principle, wherein you are allowed to do whatever you want to do unless it harms me or infringes upon my freedoms. You are more than welcome to snort coke, shoot heroin, imbibe alcohol or enema (is that a verb? it is now) whatever you feel will send you to the highest peaks of the lowest depths in the least/best amount of time; however, you are also responsible for the consequences, and if it harms me directly (indirectly is a completely different discussion) you are not allowed to do it.

Smoking is a direct cause of many cancers and people smelling like a burning tire-dump in New Jersey, and an indirect (but closely correlated) route to heart disease, emphysema and not getting laid because you're gross, hacking, oyster-chucking coughs are distressing to others. Your smoke harms you (which is no big deal), me (which is a HUGE deal) and others (this deal lies somewhere in between, but I don’t care nearly as much about them as about myself). End of story. I’ve done immunology research on just this very subject and NONE OF IT IS GOOD.

Bringing up regulation of food and fat people is a separate issue; again, it’s something you do to yourself, and if you want to turn into a giant, sweaty fat-ass then more power to your cellulite-laden butt (though it argues against my contributing to a national health policy if you can’t be bothered to care). If you were eating some Lays chips at a bar and the Olestra drifted over and gave me horrible anal-leakage (a known side-effect of Olestra), I’d expect it to be banned as well, but it doesn’t, so it isn’t.

Some of you argue that people have a choice whether to subject themselves to the smoke. Sure, if you don’t mind not hearing live music. The bands don’t play the “Non-Smoking” venues because…wait for it…that’s right, clever boys and girls…THERE AREN’T ANY! That argument swings the other way also; if the smoking ban takes effect; you smokers have a choice not to frequent those venues. You can just sit in your Nova with the tinted windows, crank up the tunes and coat the inside of your car with a fine, yellowish layer of nicotine to your heart’s content; it’ll be just like you’re there except CHEAPER if you buy your liquor beforehand. You’ll end up whacking off in the sleeve of your favorite coat just like normal…

The argument that “people have a choice where they work” is also spurious. When you’re young you want the excitement of working at a club and don’t have a sense of your own mortality, and many people have the choice of either taking a crappy job at a bar/club or not paying the bills; so I guess you might be right in that there IS a choice, even if it is one doused in feces.

Non-smoking being “bad for business”?!? So basically your argument is that, even though the smoking is harmful to everyone, we should let it slide because it would be so economically harmful to the bars/clubs/restaurants involved. I guess all those chemical companies and strip-mining operations that were formerly dumping massive amounts of toxins into our skies and rivers so we could have cheap fuel could use that same argument, eh? Not a good idea, methinks…

I saw a sign in a window saying, “Save live music, vote against the smoking ban.” Everyone seems to be talking about this issue as if every band was just going to quit performing, as their audience is going to stay at home because they can’t smoke. Do you go to a music venue to smoke or listen to music? If you can’t go somewhere without being able to smoke, then that’s a sign of…what’s that word…oh, yeah, ADDICTION.

There are certain issues that cannot be left to “personal choice” because they affect so many people. If we’d left the issue of slavery up to “personal choice” then a lot of rap artists and jazz musicians would be picking cotton in Tennessee right now. Segregation would still be a large part of life in the South. We’d probably still have smallpox, diphtheria and polio lurking around because people “didn’t trust” their immunizations. The ideal of government is to only get involved when the issue affects enough people that it is a boat-anchor to the whole society, and the illness that smoking brings is definitely in that category.

I’ve been in Boston, New York and San Francisco both before and after their respective smoking bans, and things are JUST FINE. People still go to bars, and they may step outside to have a cigarette, but they still go out and spend money on booze, cheap drinks and hookers to behead and leave in their car-trunks to rot and stink. Initially, there will be a bunch of people who refuse to go out because of their principles, and there will probably be a dip in bar-revenue. A hue and cry of protest will arise, similar to that of former slave-owners bitching because their profits were lower after having to HIRE people to work their plantations. I think bars with patios will go over big and make a little more of a killing because of the access to a smoking area with liquor, but I don’t see much of a change after a few months time.

My girlfriend smokes. She’s outside smoking right now because my place is a non-smoking venue. She knows this and still comes around for the cheap booze, the slammin’ tunes, and amazing, urban-renewal style wall-shaking sex (sorry for the TMI…wait, no I’m not, I rule). Funny how, if the entertainment is good enough people still come around. Maybe a smoking ban will result in lower drink prices and better quality attractions as a draw…horrible to think that some benefit besides personal health might come out of this. Those government SONS OF BITCHES.

I go out whether or not there’s smoke, and I assume all of the smokers are the same. I’ll see you all, smokers and non-smokers alike, out at a club sometime and you can stub your butts out on the back of my neck then. I’ll bring Bactine.

Warm, fuzzy regards, you sack of butt-holes,
Scott

P.S. (a quick lesson in science):
Cells are most vulnerable to DNA damage-causing agents (such as Chromium, Cadmium, and other pollutants found in cigarettes) when they are dividing. Alcohol is toxic to cells, so it kills them. To replace them (such as in the throat and nasal passages, since that is where it has most undiluted contact with cells) the cells that aren’t dead divide, giving the smoke easier access to the dividing DNA and increasing the damage that smoking does. A US study revealed that among consumers of both products the risk of these cancers was increased more than 35-fold among those who smoked forty or more cigarettes a day and took more than four alcoholic drinks a day. It has been estimated that tobacco smoking and alcohol drinking account for about three quarters of all oral and pharyngeal cancers. (Blot, WJ. et al. Smoking and drinking in relation to oral and laryngeal cancer. Cancer Research 1988; 48: 3282‑3287). This data is supported by every study I’ve seen, dated and recent. I’ve seen what cancer looks like, from the molecular level on up, and I don’t particularly want to increase my chances of getting it with other people’s behavior. It doesn’t mean I’ll live forever or avoid cancer, but it definitely decreases the chances.