Air: A Review

I mean the air you breathe, i.e. the most primary ecological anxiety faced by modern civilization. The sleeziest job I ever had looted this state of fear. I sold air cleaning units to people in their houses (that's right: like vacuum cleaners, but more vague in function). I followed up on direct-marketing leads and, of course, 90% of the people company-poor and itinerarily-wealthy enough to see me were retired. Which was just as well because they were demographically the most vulnerable to my dark preachings. I had a book of scary numbers reporting that apparently what we thought to be a never-ending supply of the elderly is now shriveling in a randomly patterned and exceedingly unnatural selection process directly related to increasing air volatility. As though any breath of a Torontonian O2 cocktail could be the final respiratory jaw-shot. I had thought myself a demagogue, not needing to worry about hard sales, but controlling the vaccine-recipient-esque line-ups for the product like I was Amnesty fucking International. I assumed all they needed was the thought of their bridge partners, ageless hexagenarians performing daily oxidant holocausts, urine the colour of a forest elf's from the deluge of green foods audibly macerating in their digestive tracts at all times, these people suspending time itself getting the switch pulled during mile two of their daily five mile run. Although healthy and vibrant enough to air-box the grim reaper, no regimen can guard against the most inextricably exposed part of the human body. With more surface area than anything organically imaginable, the lungs are susceptible to even the least concentrated air borne counterpunches, a fist of temporality right in the soloplexis.

I didn't work there long and had expected to quit anyway, unable to bear the ethical dilemmas (y'know, exploiting the sick, the scared, the lonely, the stupid, etc.) any longer. But that's not why I quit: in reality the units weren't selling. Everyday I was proudly refused like someone handing out flyers at Dundas Square. I would say "smoke, guilt free!" and they would laugh deviously. How puzzling...

Maybe I was a bad salesman, maybe the units were a rip-off (they were), but today I think their lack of popularity also has something to do with the raunchy allure of bad air. I think people like the idea that every breath is a brooding puff of some big dispersed cigarette. That's right cigarettes: quick-draw smog treats packed with any industrial chemical the heart could desire (and eventually asphyxiate from). There's something incredibly erotic about lighting a girl's cigarette for her. Yes cigarettes themselves are a well-worn accessory of displaced sensuality, but no phase of this sacred social fire dance bears more erogenous connotations than waving that ceremonial torch inches from a woman's lips, a connection welded by a tongue of pure heat.

She'll often leave with at least a thank you, or perhaps even a compliment since she's finally found an excuse to flirt. I once had a girl say "thanks, guy-with-the-amazing-lips." I scratch your mouth you scratch mine. That's really what's going on isn't it? A transfer of satisfaction. Reaching out to give a gal her fix, even though it's killing her, just this once prioritizing desire over cliches of bodily preservation.

I don't smoke, but I understand. Without a coffee I just can't face the waking world. It's not a problem, it's just something to look forward to every single day. There are no addications, only recurring goals. And, just like eating or the failures of those around you, you can ride out and treasure these slow, marginally destructive visceral itches for a lifetime (one statistically "normal" in length to boot). But breakfast, lunch, dinner and sex just aren't enough anymore. I want more set-pieces in my stage of pleasure principles than just the ones rolling down through the ol' mammalian helix inevitably to me. Fuck your genetic gumball machine. That chew lost its flavor years ago. I'll cultivate my own drives, even if they kill me.

What's so sexy about smoking is exactly what's so unsexy about a health nut. Each monoxidal exhalation obscures our allegedly "indubitable" survival instinct. Plumes of human transcendence swivel their hips skyward as we celebrate our freedom from our bodies and the demands they place on our consciousness, trying like real estate developers to buy out the delicate, freefalling meadows of careless psychic reflection. One of the reasons why smoking is so easily tied to contemplation of one's surroundings; when we deliberately opppose self-preservation we spring in automatic retreat from self-directed thought. Thoughts become outside of oneself just as respiration is no longer an internal life process, but an external phantasm.

Whoever said cigarettes imply some sort of infantile Freudian fixation has it backwards. It's the health nuts that live in fear, still clinging to physical growth, heads buried in the bosom of maternal nourishment. Smokers are in a far more advanced state of development for they suckle on the teat of death - now that's an eye for the future. This a difficult argument to make in the face of our culture's traditional representations of smokers i.e. the ones of cinema are often of the "chain" variety, which manage to wordlessly (aside maybe from *cough*) exude a state of arrested development rather than, as I propose, existential progress. Well, the movies have it half right. You see cigarettes facilitate another very human and very crucial ritualistic excuse: really do we essentially regard ourselves lighting a tobacco product or the engines of an escape hatch from the world - from physical involvement, as well as mental. AKA: "Fuck off I'm having a cigarette." On an eternal smoke break, these keepers of the flame live in suspended animation, their progress inverted to an internal rhythm, their meadows always blowing, the breeze a thick nitrate grey. Their earthly involvement is now spiritual.

And thus, because over 20% of people smoke, our air could not possibly improve through public action. The other 79% don't care, and the ones that do are the disenfranchised shrill that the eternally cool scoff at out of erotically wheezing throats. Smokers have checked out of the life-club and most non-smokers wish they could do the same (without slowly dying) or at least tag one of the many hypothetical cocky statements they have tucked away (for any cocky-approved scenario they might encounter) with some kind of resolute plume of toxins, like the ghost of assertions slapping them a high five i.e. "air is old news...get over it" (puff...cough).