Daft
Skint of wisdom I strained to capture,
push-ups propelled my fitness regime.
I worked my six-pack, women’s rapture,
skint of wisdom. I strained to capture
zest when I suffered a contracture
earning male respect for self-esteem.
Skint of wisdom I strained to capture,
push-ups propelled my fitness regime.
Clouds Racing Overhead
Through binoculars I spot a yacht,
a man, his woman, hair streaming free.
Horizon stretched, these yearning hours hot,
through binoculars I spot a yacht,
Mitty-like, spray on deck now my lot.
Exploring leagues of fathomless sea
through binoculars, I spot a yacht,
a man, his woman, hair streaming free.
Bones Beneath Us
Hoping lights like low-slung stars appear
dappling the harbour, a warm hotel,
late in, we faced massed waves, black walls sheer.
Hoping lights like low-slung stars appear,
we hold our course, shark jokes a veneer.
Wreck charts curled, awash, we share this shell
hoping lights like low-slung stars appear
dappling the harbour, a warm hotel.
Biog: Ian C Smith’s work has been published in Antipodes, BBC Radio 4 Sounds,The Dalhousie Review, Griffith Review, San Pedro River Review , Southword, The Stony Thursday Book, & Two Thirds North. His seventh book is wonder sadness madness joy, Ginninderra (Port Adelaide). He writes in the Gippsland Lakes area of Victoria, and on Flinders Island.
How everything turns away…
~ W.H. Auden, “Musée des Beaux Arts”
to its small purpose, the plowman’s hands holding
reins and plow, the shepherd’s gaze upward
inventing stanzas for the month of June.
The lowlands are pasture, the terraces arable.
Stouter to the myth Breughel has seen
the far-away world of fate close to his world.
The local and contemporary eye
has pictured that as this in terms of home.
Green is the sea under a thawing sky
as unlike Greece as Shakespeare’s Rome and Rome.
A partridge clutches to a waking vine stock.
Columns accent the city far below
with its harbor awaiting the ship that may be expensive
and delicate, gliding on a stiff breeze.
Palirunus Marginatus
Not everything red is a lobster.
But the part of us fed to love
pried from our armor and prominent claws
is easily imagined all buttery succulence.
Instead it refuges further beneath the surface
in a different ocean without grammar,
spiny and recessed. It has shed its defenses
though remains distinctive with hair-tenuous
antennae precisely watchful enough
to sound us from its other side of the world.
With Seaweed
Dreams are dreams only—once woken from.
Everything ran slower in that sluggish
element where your hair floated freely
with the seaweed and love became a salty
buoyancy of smiles and stinging tears.
I was subsumed with the acorn barnacles,
sea vases and the translucent baskets
of Venus’ flowers, learning my sessility
under the hover of dead man’s fingers that clothed you,
a spiny carpet of urchins at the bottom of my feet.
There you were: Belief made you, in entries
of the log books of sailors from flooded
explorations, in your blended topos of history
and myth, topmost human yet by
our day’s thorough fathomings no more than tale
and so there I dreamed, dimly yet surely
aware of my natural shores, little by little
insisting I must breathe as speech
intoned beyond words to the single unbroken
high C beyond me in the pressure of my hearing.
Conch
I kept
turning away
to become
the staircase I climbed
from the bottom up
spiraled by the encompassing
element,
hoist
up my mast
for a Hindu ceremony’s
music of the spheres,
my door given way
to this riddle
of speaking mouthless
from an exterior
I unfolded at one with.
Michael Todd Steffen is the recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship. His poetry has appeared in journals including The Boston Globe, Everse Radio, The Lyric, The Dark Horse, Ibbetson Street, The Concord Saunterer, and Poem. His second book, On Earth As It Is, will be out in early 2022 from Cervena Barva Press.
Doris Day, “The Very Thought of You” from Young Man with a Horn (1950)
The film Young Man with a Horn often showed on TV when I was a kid. I think the first time I saw it, or part of it, my mother was sitting on the couch in the foyer, which rhymes with lawyer (the living room was rarely used, and it didn’t have a TV), watching it (maybe on “The Early Show,” maybe on “The Million Dollar Movie” ) on our RCA console. “What are you watching?” I asked her.
“Young Man with a Horn,” she said. “It’s based on Bix Beiderbecke.”
I hadn’t yet heard of Bix Beiderbecke, so I thought she said, “It’s based on Big Spider Back.”
I knew Doris Day was a singer because my brother Bart had all her albums. But I knew her mainly from those romantic comedies with Rock Hudson and Tony Randall. I don’t know if I had yet heard the schoolyard rumors that Rock Hudson was gay, but I remember thinking that Tony Randall was probably gay, though this may have been a tad before the word “gay” had gained any currency.
I probably started paying more attention to the film when I was a teenager and had started seriously listening to jazz. In it Kirk Douglas plays a “tormented” trumpet player based, yes, on Bix Beiderbecke as fictionalized by Dorothy Baker in her novel of the same name; just as when he played a boxer in Champion the year before, he gets to grit his teeth and growl a bunch. The brilliant actor Juano Hernandez plays trumpeter Art Hazzard, likely based on King Oliver, the young man’s mentor. Hoagy Carmichael, who was part of Bix Beiderbecke’s crowd, plays piano and pal, and Doris Day, who may not yet have achieved full virginity, is the love interest.
Besides Douglas’ scenery-chewing descent into alcoholism, the thing I always remembered most was Doris Day singing “The Very Thought of You.” It was the first time I really listened to her singing, and it was beautiful, so smooth and natural, sexy at a simmer. Behind the scenes, the ghost trumpet for Kirk Douglas was Harry James, whom I remember doing commercials for Kleenex Man-Size Tissues, where he’d put a tissue at on the bell of his horn, blow a high note, and miracle of miracles, the tissue wouldn’t break.
I fell in love with the 1950 version of Doris Day and I fell in love with the song. A great melody, and a great lyric, written in the 1930s by the British bandleader Ray Noble. “The mere idea of you, the longing here for you…”—that’s what I call a lyric. “Mere idea”: Don’t you just love it when two words that were meant for each other meet like that?
Joe Cuba Sextet, “Bang Bang” (1966)
I remember incinerators. Until I was a teenager, we threw all our garbage down the incinerator chute. All our garbage. Food scraps, papers, tin cans, dead turtles, broken radios and alarm clocks. There was no recycling in the sixties, and it was not until around 1970 and the advent of the Clean Air Act, the Resource Recovery Act, and the EPA that compactors replaced incinerators. So every afternoon, or every other afternoon, I can’t remember, all that trash would go up in flames, with ominous black smoke billowing from the chimneys of the apartment buildings, a choking smell in the air, and cinders raining down on us, sometimes charred scraps of paper large enough to still make out some of the type. I associate the burning trash with warm weather, I suppose because that’s when we’d have been outdoors in the late afternoon, playing punch ball or shooting the shit.
I associate Joe Cuba’s record “Bang Bang” with warm weather and burning trash, though I don’t think it was even a summer hit. But it feels like one. In my mind I hear it blaring, tinny and distorted, from a small transistor radio for all the assembled kids to hear, “beep beep, ahh beep beep,” a quintessential sixties city summer song, an open-the-fire-hydrants song, a real New York sound, where even if you didn’t live among Latinos there was always Latin music in the air.
I also remember fireflies on Brooklyn summer nights, and trying to capture them in glass jars.
odyssey of glee and throb leaving behind stones
our Lady of Akita violating the laws of physics
mugwort fulfilling its destiny in a cinder strewn lot
bazooka deaf Uncle Jimmy rolled dead cats under his tongue
offering rhubarb to the woman from another world
tzimtzum in the breakdown lane of the Cosmos
it's like asking if the Comet Moth will live through the winter
all this way to find a snowflake in the hair of the girl made of stone
she soaks whelk shells as I write in Prussian blue
they're all asleep while I'm running water running water running water
after the Chelyabinsk meteor I was back listening to Yes
nearing Mount Unzen I point to where the ropeway should be
this morning I'm dealing with the rapid dialect of sparrows
beginning to understand Ugarte's need for the letters of transit
leaning on a bolt of dyed cloth the Ryukyuan girl checks her messages
Lē‘ahi
Southside Oahu, littered with tuff cones:
Koko Head, labia minor,
Punchbowl, the hill of sacrifice,
Diamond Head, point of the ahi fish, all
grand promontories—extinct volcanic craters.
Rules and restriction translated to challenges,
saucer-shaped Diamond Head called me;
outside the renowned Fire Control Station,
its new and aged military facilities prohibited
all access to taxpaying civilians—daring infiltration.
Sneaking into the naturally fortified crater, eluding
camouflaged guards—real or imagined adversaries—
I stealthily advance; my body clothed in red trunks and tan skin,
blend into tropical surroundings, melt, into plentiful vegetation
encircling the cavity’s inner rim, entering the military mystery maze.
The apparent sound of bullets buzz by,
pierce the dense, dank, jungle undergrowth,
expose themselves as culex quinquefasciatus brown mosquitos
vicariously breeding in stagnate water—feasting
on a liquid banquet from my exposed legs and arms.
Damp, corroded chambers cut in the cavity resemble
Alcatraz cells: steel beds hanging from rusted chains,
ascend 560 feet from the floor past bunkers where
solid concrete walkways shift to a natural tuff
severe switchbacks negotiate the interior crater’s sheer slope.
The rugged trail morphs into steep, stone stairs through a
225-foot tunnel to a fortification that one directed artillery
fire from batteries beyond; reaching its pumice plateau,
approaching a mammoth navigational lighthouse,
I scan the Oahu’s sandy shoreline from Koko Head to Wai’anae.
Historical playground for humpback whales,
oblivious the area doubles as a coastal defense vista.
tropical trade winds brush my face, activating imagination
while the capacious, comforting, cacophony
of Kanaloa’s waves crash like rhythmic pahu far below.
**********************************************
Bing Thieves
Campbell fertility
fruit cannery pioneer
Santa Clara gem
I long for fruitful harvests
silicon wasteland reclaimed
Ripe cherry orchards decorated the valley
like Christmas Tree ornaments, round, red,
eye popping orbs drew visitor’s attention
away from migrant farm worker camps
or miserable wooden boxes—an excuse
for a home—enjoyed by a cheerful few.
And yes, these orchards offered adventure,
growers aimed two barrels, shot rock salt
in our butts as we ran from their groves,
buckets full, bandito mystique undeniable,
dire warnings from our parents
school authorities—all elders ignored.
Best times never knew the worst yet to come
as stainless-steel chains uprooted tree trunks
tar and concrete smothered fertile fields,
and children grew up dodging street traffic
gathering in malls, frequenting cyber cafés—never
swaggering, searching, pilfering full-grown fruit…
**********************************************
Cracks of Light
Our empty hearts once filled
with unflinching alacrity,
agitated overnight we stood
by oil radiators metal accordions;
cast iron dragons as discolored
as seasoned crêpe pans
heated our hands while we
embraced common sense
depression; huddled together
like snowed-in hostages
sharing their communal discomfort
in sweaty submission,
our restless blues cut through
a hauntingly sober silence
like a machete blade slicing
dense jungle undergrowth
incessantly screaming out
for social emancipation
when disunity and whimsy
displace crude manners
dwarfing responsibility:
lockdown solidarity.
**********************************************
Tilt-a-Whirl Madness
Lock yourself down, hold on tight
you met the height challenge
cork shoe lifters shot you up
two inches & ruffled hair made
you appear gigantic, in control,
ready to spin like a stuntperson
make centrifugal force your own
gravitational pull your companion.
Fold brazen arms behind padded
lap bars, secure yourself & strangers
who ride sheet metal thrillers & share
danger’s safehouse; youthful mouths
missing teeth laugh & scream
like delighted children escaping
tides that grasp ankles as they
scamper from surf to dry sand.
Quartz lights flash perpetual chaos
in motion as the platform rotates,
seven swiveling cars test fortitude
resolve, & moxie, daring bold riders
like yourself to sidestep carnival sawdust
spread on the floor, eerie remains
of motion sickness for those out of sync
victimized by Tilt-a Whirl indifference.
**********************************************
Tipping Point Snapshot
Cars roll down the inner-city gullet
vehicle lights flashing as dawn’s early rays
part mist & unveil crosswalk shadows;
old school skyscrapers jut up towards heaven
protect flying rodents—portrait ready pigeons—
that nest below stone-crafted window ledges—
scarlet scavenger eyes fixate on pedestrians below
looking for careless hands fingering croissants,
& street vendors dropping hot dogs & soft pretzels;
drummers begin beating empty 5-gallon cans
under concrete bank porticos; audible rhythms echo
miles up and down Broadway, rebound off structures;
street singers & mimes soon join in the fray
destitute but happy, many homeless yet carefree,
hats & guitar cases welcome unlikely prospects
as the strip begins to buzz & people shuffle
in line for blocks awaiting Starbucks to open,
fuel & task soul-fed inspiration with caffeine;
meanwhile, escorts saunter home, recline
on their own beds—sleep uninterrupted. Restful.
Free of twilight visitations when overweight patrons
pin them with passion’s pretense allowing groans
to rise & fill voids like subway grate updrafts
decelerating wind as noisy as traffic horn banter
Manhattan minstrels, hucksters, & saints
approach tipping points, regain equilibrium,
& embrace yet another good morning’s night.
Oranges were the ubiquitous dessert in Morocco. The sweet juicy fruit was always a delight, dispersing the remnant bitterness left from strong Mideast spices infused into the evening meal. That evening, rather than eat one at the very end of our luscious repast, I decided to take it with me and savor it as I walked through the maze of narrow lanes of the souk in Marrakesh. It was evening and the sun was setting the color of the fruit I bore in my hand. I meandered towards Jemaa el Fna, the main central square of the city.
What awaited me was a fantastic multisensory delight; a core pulp of sights, sounds and odors encircled by the amber rind of a souk. I finished peeling my orange and began to squeeze the last of the fruit’s wedges in my mouth, when the colorful stalls of the souk opened up to a large outdoor space crowded with local denizens and tourists.
It was a circus of sorts, with canvass tented booths arranged about the center, housing stands of food venders hawking a range of comestibles from fruits and olives to conical spires of spices. Other spaces were occupied by open cafes offering a myriad of drink and food. A heavy mist of smoke hung over the tents, rising from a multitude of camel and goat meat turning on spits or sizzling upon steel mesh grates. Tunic clothed men busily fanned wood coals with one hand, while tending to pieces of flesh cooking atop halved metal barrels gerry rigged into BBQ pits. The smell of roasted meat permeated the air, along with wafts of spices used to marinate the various parts of animal carcass.
The buildings encircling the area, held aloft two and three story restaurants with bright neon and incandescent lights, visually blaring their presence, and beckoning all to come. I slowly strolled through it all, not wanting to miss any aspect of the show before me.
Turban topped buskers plied their trade around the outer edges of the large plaza. I passed snake charmers, mesmerizing Cobras with the sway of their flute. Men with playful, teasing monkeys on their shoulders offered to show me the tricks of their trade. Groups of old men in soiled and worn kaftans crouched on the pavement, intently pondering their next move in a game of Manqala. There were musicians whining out siren like Arabic sounds on Kinura, Chatzozerah and Chalil, backed by the droning beat of a Bodhran. Along with the music, Kocek danced about like harem concubines, inviting tourists to join them in celebration.
Throngs of people milled about, sometimes requiring me to edge my way around, or squeeze my way through as they stood transfixed at a particular sight before them. The din of the crowd, the lilting music, and the rising smoke contributed to an aura of other worldliness unlike anything I had ever encountered. Jamaa el Fna was indeed a unique phantasmagoria of activity, all set about to entice, to lure, to mesmerize the wary traveler, and pull them into the dreamworld that is Marrakesh at night.
It took me far longer than I wished to win my personal war against tobacco. It took weeks, then months, then years, with many relapses. Several of my principal weaknesses – a blind stubbornness, a willful pride, an almost mystical subjectivity – were at war with each other as much as with my strengths – a fairly clear-eyed honesty with myself and an obstinate common sense. I almost didn’t succeed. But I did, finally. I kicked cigarettes for good. I am profoundly grateful for that. I might not be here if I hadn’t.
And what has that to do with saving the world? I admit it’s a stretch, but let me see if I can show how it might.
I have been following theories of climate change since I first heard the term “global warming” in the mid-1970s. The science seemed compelling, the logic impeccable. Living alone at the time, I cooked most dinners at home: almost every night I would watch a saucepan as the water in it simmered to a rolling boil; it usually took a while, and I soon understood the old saying, “A watched kettle don’t boil.” The example of a frog going to sleep in a kettle of warm water and then being slowly boiled to death before he even noticed what was happening was something I could imagine vividly.
My concerns about the “environment” (I object to this painfully misleading term, since nature does not “environ” us – it is us, down to the marrow of our bones and the thoughts in our minds; I use the word for convenience, but under protest) seemed to be shared by the country at large. The news media reported regularly on pollution and similar issues. The governments of the world seemed to take “environmental matters” seriously, making vague statements of high-minded intent and even passing cautiously worded – some might say, too cautiously worded – laws. Even corporations began advertising something like a sincere concern for something other than their next quarter’s profit. I began to feel what I had not felt in a very long time for our public institutions: hope, even giddy moments of optimism.
After all (I thought, reasonably enough, surely), despite psychopaths and mass murderers galore, many of them in positions of highest leadership, humanity as a whole is not evil, is not suicidal. If I myself ever became aware I was doing something I knew would kill or seriously injure me and those around me, I would stop what I was doing – or I would at least modify it. As I mentioned at the beginning of this piece, I was once addicted to cigarettes; I knew the dangers and, during that same decade, I had reduced my smoking, over many months, from two packs to six modest cigarettes a day. I had not stopped, true, but it was a beginning.
I had no difficulty understanding or accepting the recent theories of global warming (“recent” only for us, of course; the first such theories went back to the nineteenth century, so the “novelty” of our “discoveries” seemed painfully ridiculous). They were among the reasons I have never owned an automobile. I was also persuaded that the human population was dangerously near the earth’s carrying capacity; this is one reason I never had children.
We all know what has happened since the 1970s. I watched with sickening alarm as the fossil fuel companies, with the connivance of members of state and federal governments, began to sow self-serving doubts about the scientific evidence for global warming, much as tobacco companies had done in the 1960s against the evidence for health conditions – lung cancer, emphysema, heart conditions – being caused or worsened by tobacco use.
I recognized the playbook instantly and with a feeling of bitterness. A teenager in the 1960s, I had learned the same lesson over and over: to take anything the government or corporations state with the greatest possible suspicion. I was sick to my soul with an awareness of how profoundly corrupt American society, at least in appearance, had become: if an economic activity made some group of people very wealthy, even though that activity was actively fatal to many, the American political system made it extraordinarily difficult, and sometimes impossible, to stop them.
I was at the same time horrified and unshocked at the turn of events. America was playing a game it has been playing since the founding: rhetorical hypocrisy, proactive rapacity, pragmatic nihilism, murderous effects. Lay waste, transmute, consume, accumulate; repeat.
At the darkening heart of the world we were entering during those decades of Thatcher, Reagan, and the theorists of the University of Chicago school of economics, I saw the ravaging effects of a capitalism without limits being unleashed across our globe. I had no illusions as to where we were heading, though I kept to my private mantra: “We must come around, we must face reality, we must, we will, act. After all, we aren’t suicidal.”
But many of my fears were becoming realities. We now know we were deliberately blinded; going back to the 1950s, when fossil fuel companies first became aware that, as long as global society was powered principally by oil and coal, “global warming” was a likely consequence and might have catastrophic consequences for human society and other life forms on earth, it has been corporate policy to obscure and deny what they already knew, and to keep the rest of us ignorant and blind. Greed, hubris, and a pathological contempt for the rest of humanity, and of life itself, drove them: the sociopathy of the corporation, the psychopathology of the drive for increasing profits at any price, drove the rest. A typically human blend of complacency, selfishness, and denial – something of which we are all, alas, guilty – would work its poison throughout the human system.
It took a long time before I discovered that there was one weak link – indeed it was the weakest link of all – in the chain that binds human society to the capitalist Juggernaut. What drives the psychopathology of capitalism? The need to feed the beast with ever greater profits. But what drives those profits?
We do: you who read this, and I who write it. The most powerful drivers of capitalism are the twin steeds of avaritiaet gula – greed and gluttony. But the greed would not be successful if gluttony did not reward it.
Or, to use a more modern word for the latter: “consumerism” – or its humbler name: buying – whether of things or experiences – going to a movie, taking a trip, “going shopping.” Whenever we make an economic transaction – of any kind whatsoever – we feed the beast. Whenever we avoid one, we deprive the beast of food, water, air. We contribute to its conquest, perhaps even to its end.
Is it really so simple? Indeed. And like many a simple thing, it may be impossible to change. Because the cruel and bitter truth is that we are addicted to the paradise of consumption – the mirage of an endless satisfaction of every desire – that capitalism has made possible, and as long as we remain subject to it, we are condemning ourselves to a horrible fate. Because we know that the grip of an addiction is ruthless and relentless; once a person is in that grip, it is only a matter of time before they will destroy themselves and any who come near them.
We are that addict. And our addiction is buying. It is an addiction that is encouraged, even demanded, by our entire society, by our governments, by friends, cohorts, colleagues, family. We don’t even call our society, our culture by those names anymore – we call it “the American economy.” We are buyers and sellers, producers and consumers, and not, really, anything else – at least, anything that really matters. We are, as a whole, unable even to imagine any other way of life; even many of our putative solutions to the climate crisis are based on an illusion that our economies will save us; we must consume differently, but we still will, we still must consume. We make uneasy jokes about it: “Shop till you drop!” But that is because we know it is true, and we can’t stop ourselves. We are in its grip. It flatters us, intoxicates us, makes us always desire more. “Don’t you just love Amazon Prime!” It seems to have us by the throat.
And yet – the one thing we also know is that we are never entirely in the grip of anything. And that tiny corner of sanity at the far back of our minds can, at any moment, be accessed and made to prevail; can be used to conquer the beast that seeks to control, enslave, and ultimately destroy us. It is neither easy nor simple nor quick to do this. But human beings are self-directing, self-generating, “self-programming,” though it is in the interests of the powers that be to prove to us otherwise: that we are helpless, strengthless, hopeless, pawns of need, drives, and power. But you and I belong to the species that nature, in her infinite wisdom, or her folly, made free. And that freedom makes us ultimately in control of, and responsible for, our lives. We can conquer even an addiction as deep as this one.
Here is my proposal for a New Year’s resolution for myself and for all of us: to reduce buying in 2022.
Not to end buying. Merely to reduce it.
I have no intention of living like an ascetic, because I know trying to do that will fail. I will rebel against my own good intentions, I will backslide, defiantly. It will even make my bad habits worse.
Did I tell you how I kicked cigarettes? I started small. I was smoking, as I said, two packs a day. For the first month of this experiment in stopping smoking, I actually made myself smoke those two packs a day every single day, even when I didn’t want to,
Then I gradually, over the next year, cut down, one or two cigarettes a month at a time, to one pack a day. Afterward I continued, using the same method of reducing by one cigarette a day each month, till I was down to six cigarettes a day, and at that number I stayed for years.
I hold that everyone should have at least one vice – it keeps you from committing far worse evils. Human beings are not saints, and those who try to become saints often become the worst monsters of all. So I kept smoking, moderately; even my doctor agreed I was not endangering myself too much.
But then, over the years I noticed how the costs of cigarettes, thanks to “sin taxes” (of which my conscience heartily approved) kept creeping up, up, up, until a single pack cost more than twice as much as my daily lunch. This was ridiculous! It was high time to cut back to zero. I concocted a new plan: ease myself off via the vile toxin nicotine itself. I started using various kind of nicotine gum; a cigarette, a piece of gum, a cigarette, a piece of gum, alternating, every day. Another year passed.
Then, one late afternoon, a miracle happened.
I was smoking the fourth or fifth cigarette from a recently purchased pack, and I was struck by an overwhelming sense of disgust at the taste of the tobacco smoke. I crushed the cig, threw it out, and tossed the freshly opened pack into the same trash basket without a qualm. Except for a handful of weakenings over the next few years (I would be struck, out of the blue, by an overwhelming desire for a smoke, purchase a pack, sneak it home, open it (peel off the see-through plastic wrapper, flip open the seductively designed box, unfold the mottled gold sealing paper), pull out the fresh, deliciously smelling cig, then light it up with the serene yellow and blue flame of my old lighter, and voluptuously take a deep inhale – and gag on that same disgust at the awful taste filling mouth, sinuses, throat, lungs, and, with an enormously disappointed shrug, throw both it and pack away into the trash with all the force of bitter disillusionment), since that moment I have not returned to my cigarette addiction since.
Once every few years I still get an urge for a smoke, but I have learned that cigarettes are a waste of time and money; I have learned that smoking a cigar, or the single bowl of a pipe, does the trick, a quarter hour of sybaritic bliss. Then I am free for the next several years.
I have a cigar I bought the other day that I plan to smoke on New Year’s Eve.
The next day, January 1, 2022, I will begin my new resolution: to reduce my buying in 2022. Not painfully, not ascetically. Just a little bit for now. Then, next year, I will reduce it a little more. Again, not too much. I’ll never reduce it entirely till they bury me! And hopefully that won’t be for a long time to come.
And, while thinking of the good work I intend to do in 2022, I’ll be thoroughly enjoying my cigar.
After all, I must have one vice.
Anyway, that’s how I connect quitting cigarettes with saving the world. Because the one way we know the world we live in will end is if we don’t solve the climate crisis.
And both quitting cigarettes and solving the climate crisis are about ending addictions.
