March 10, 2003
Jean makes me want to smoke cigarettes. She makes me want to light the next one with the one I’m finishing. I haven’t really smoked consistently in seventeen years and it was never my biggest vice. But Jean could change all that. I see her twice a year at a mutual friends house. The house in question is a non-smoking residence (as is my own—depending on what you’re smoking) so we lurk in the kitchen with the window open and blow our second hand smoke out the crack. We sit on stools and talk to each other about our lives. About how winter kills us. How cooking saves us. About how our friends annual Robbie Burns night, where we always see each other, positioned in the calendar at the arse end of winter, drags us through this treacherous seasonal passage and girds our drooping loins for the onset of spring. Jean reminds me of why I took up smoking in the first place. At boarding school girls can be divided into two camps: the smokers and the non-smokers. Those that spend huge tracts of time in bathrooms with cans of ozone depleting deodorant gripped in their hands, behind the bicycle shed, sheltering under the cricket pavilion, negotiating the muddy paths of the nearby woods, all in order to have a smoke. I don’t know what the other camp does as I was never part of them. I suppose they went to the tuck shop, toasted white bread, chatted up boys, maybe even studied. But I was smoking. It takes a surprisingly long time to get the hang of smoking as any smoker will tell you. Hours of green gill inducing nausea on buses returning from away hockey matches, bathroom dizziness, head bobbing over the bowl, horizontal spins. All this was an initiation ceremony worth enduring for the pleasure of the company of women. A certain kind of woman. When I look at the smokers in my class, some of whom I am still close to, they are the ones still getting into trouble, still turning their lifes around in their hands looking for new surfaces, new shapes.
I know other smokers, but Jean is the one who instantly transports me back to this society that adopted a very specific ritual to denote it from all other lodges.
Lately I have been listening to Jean. When I hear her voice I want to run out and buy a pack of high tar smokes and gasp through them in quick succession. I want to brush my teeth, like I used to in school, and then light up in order to taste the tobacco better. Jean works as an interpreter at the United Nations. She has a voice that reassures one that all will be well with the world, and this in spite of the subject matter she is interpreting. She fulfills the requirements of her job with such grace, imagination and passion, converting the discourse of desiccated nations into an urgent poetry. If you listen to the Security Council hearings (my only concession to the impending war as I have couched my ostrich-like sloth in the convenient stance that I hate war-mongers, but I also hate the anti-war mongers: down with mongerers!) she is there telling you how important it is to talk. To sound the voice. Her Scots inflected speech can make you hear the time we are in. And it can convince you that whatever happens we must go on talking into the night, against the odds, channeling streams of sound into gummed up ears in the hope not of boring a passage to the brain, but simply because defeat is to lose one’s voice. To concede that we are rendered inarticulate is a fine admission, but silence is still a fair approximation of death.
All that smoking has only made her voice more beautiful.
("To concede that we are rendered inarticulate is a fine admission, but silence is still a fair approximation of death.")
I think so too. Not to mention your fans really dig it when you post.
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Jean makes me want to smoke cigarettes. She makes me want to light the next one with the one I’m finishing. I haven’t really smoked consistently in seventeen years and it was never my biggest vice. But Jean could change all that. I see her twice a year at a mutual friends house. The house in question is a non-smoking residence (as is my own—depending on what you’re smoking) so we lurk in the kitchen with the window open and blow our second hand smoke out the crack. We sit on stools and talk to each other about our lives. About how winter kills us. How cooking saves us. About how our friends annual Robbie Burns night, where we always see each other, positioned in the calendar at the arse end of winter, drags us through this treacherous seasonal passage and girds our drooping loins for the onset of spring. Jean reminds me of why I took up smoking in the first place. At boarding school girls can be divided into two camps: the smokers and the non-smokers. Those that spend huge tracts of time in bathrooms with cans of ozone depleting deodorant gripped in their hands, behind the bicycle shed, sheltering under the cricket pavilion, negotiating the muddy paths of the nearby woods, all in order to have a smoke. I don’t know what the other camp does as I was never part of them. I suppose they went to the tuck shop, toasted white bread, chatted up boys, maybe even studied. But I was smoking. It takes a surprisingly long time to get the hang of smoking as any smoker will tell you. Hours of green gill inducing nausea on buses returning from away hockey matches, bathroom dizziness, head bobbing over the bowl, horizontal spins. All this was an initiation ceremony worth enduring for the pleasure of the company of women. A certain kind of woman. When I look at the smokers in my class, some of whom I am still close to, they are the ones still getting into trouble, still turning their lifes around in their hands looking for new surfaces, new shapes.
I know other smokers, but Jean is the one who instantly transports me back to this society that adopted a very specific ritual to denote it from all other lodges.
Lately I have been listening to Jean. When I hear her voice I want to run out and buy a pack of high tar smokes and gasp through them in quick succession. I want to brush my teeth, like I used to in school, and then light up in order to taste the tobacco better. Jean works as an interpreter at the United Nations. She has a voice that reassures one that all will be well with the world, and this in spite of the subject matter she is interpreting. She fulfills the requirements of her job with such grace, imagination and passion, converting the discourse of desiccated nations into an urgent poetry. If you listen to the Security Council hearings (my only concession to the impending war as I have couched my ostrich-like sloth in the convenient stance that I hate war-mongers, but I also hate the anti-war mongers: down with mongerers!) she is there telling you how important it is to talk. To sound the voice. Her Scots inflected speech can make you hear the time we are in. And it can convince you that whatever happens we must go on talking into the night, against the odds, channeling streams of sound into gummed up ears in the hope not of boring a passage to the brain, but simply because defeat is to lose one’s voice. To concede that we are rendered inarticulate is a fine admission, but silence is still a fair approximation of death.
All that smoking has only made her voice more beautiful.
- rachael 3-10-2003 6:53 pm
("To concede that we are rendered inarticulate is a fine admission, but silence is still a fair approximation of death.")
I think so too. Not to mention your fans really dig it when you post.
- jimlouis 3-11-2003 2:45 pm [add a comment]