Jogging on the spot

I''m held hostage by nicotine and the need to segregate this primary addiction with a secondary one, the Balcony, where plumes of hundreds of chemicals can saturate my lungs with impunity. A game of mental tag has me oscillating between resentment at having to step out and an appreciation of the outdoor air the balcony provides. As with most compromises, I try to convince myself that this isn't an act of obsequity on my behalf but a participatory exercise in sound reasoning: smoking outside reduces indoor pollution; the clothes subsequently smell better; the offbeat, involuntary communion with nature--or at least with sod grass--adds serenity to my spirit. All good reasons. Then one reason adds to another and produces an irony.

The complaint by a neighbour of smoke seeping through the walls is the reason for this imposition. Chalk it up to the fear of carcinogens. But the sun bears its increasingly unfiltered, ultraviolet peeps full onto the balcony, scalding my skin. I find the word "melanoma" crabbing my mind while out here more and more often, and it sends a superstitious, sickening wave through me. My one dangerous habit has now lead to a second: sitting out in the sun for long periods of time.

And I guess I'm forced to accept that I needn't smoke and another needn't suffer for my own addiction; reason sides with complainant. And I guess I have to further concede that a doubling of carcinogenic risk is my fault. And I would, with a big, shit-eating grin on my face, if my awareness that the two gas-guzzlers driven by the complainants, their use of electrical devices, purchases of untold petrochemical products (from vitamins to handbags), and the multitude of linkages to coal-driven industry consequent to their participation in present society didn't mean that they severely, daily, with not a thought in their empty, troglodytic, blustering, minimized brains, contribute to the fact that sitting out on my balcony in the sun exposes me to a heightened risk of developing melanoma; for they have helped thin the ozone layer, replacing it with carcinogenic air. It's one of those ironies that's rich and maddening. Watching someone wag a self-righteous, condemnatory finger at another over some perceived transgression of morality always struck me as a filthy act, petty to the point of nauseating, redoubtable, a marker of why this species might not deserve to be around.

And saying that I note another irony: my own judgement rears its sermonizing head, finds an indignant roar swell and rise into a towering rage savagely desiring, needing, to raze their bones to dust, the complainants, the landlords, the media selecting which bit of information is capital-friend to prescribe, which not. Then I begin thinking of the colluding handlers of the media, see the web of mutually-generating influence, and know all of the impotent hate of the devil, all of Prometheus' woe, a blind and blissful eagerness to decapitate the head of an organism that unfortunately resembles the hydra in regenerative acumen.

But no Boethius, I, unless everyone is; and I refuse a recourse to calmer planes of thought. The tranquilizing affect of philosophical distancing and speculation, meant to perpetually defray a course of action, has no truck with me in my truer moments. It--and this worries me--might like these words be an attempt to convince myself that this isn't an act of obsequity on my behalf but a participatory exercise in sound reasoning.