Thursday, November 29, 2007

we're going to have to skin it if we want to bring it inside.

Sky is grey, wind blowing dead leaves around in little whirlwind circles in the parking lot. It’s a great example of a November day in New England.

The chill in the air isn’t serious, but would certainly make you think twice about flopping down onto the grass to get a better look at the clouds.

There is construction going on outside my window, and I wonder about working outside in this kind of weather. I’m sure once you’re moving the cold doesn’t intrude too much, but it seems like these guys only move as much as they have to: there seem to be a great number of breaks and shovel leaning going on around the site. At any given point several men smoking cigarettes and watching as the rest of the work flows on around them.

I’m always astonished that people still smoke. I never have, but my parents and grandparents did, and a lot of my friends through high school and college picked it up at least for a little while. Most of the friends I still have from that period have given it up--there are just so many ways you’re bombarded with health information these days that it seems like you can’t help but digest the fact that it is going to kill you and in the mean time make you look old and haggard before you’re ready to be mistaken for a grandmother.

So how did these guys duck the information overload? Its just another example of how the people around you influence your own actions: I don’t see how people could keep smoking, and yet there are a great many people out there who don’t see how they could ever stop--its too social or too ingrained or too pleasurable to be put aside so easily. And yeah, so its going to kill you eventually. But so is everything else. You just have to keep in mind that no matter what happens we’re all going to die and you’ll see that the whole death card isn’t really as big an issue as it might seem at first. We’re all going to get there someday, and wouldn’t it be something if you determined your own path, even that little bit?

Not that I am suddenly going to take up smoking just to get a jump on figuring out how I am going to die. Generally I am motivated by what might give me a slightly longer life span rather than a shorter one. Though today it doesn’t really seem worthwhile I must say. I read a bunch of stuff earlier (go to slate if you really want to read it, I will not link it and spread the sadness and mania) about avian flu and pandemics and global warming and general disaster preparedness and I just go to thinking: is survival really such a good idea? I mean, I’m not saying that I don’t want a chance at it like anyone else, but just: why would you want to live through the horror to live through more horror?

Say you get yourself all prepared and outfitted and manage to navigate the horribly debilitating worldwide illness that spreads, airborne, through your family, killing roughly half of those infected. So half of the people that you love and live with you now have to bury or dispose of and then you need to barricade yourself and the supplies you’ve hoarded into some little out of the way spot to keep from being killed for your pantry by the other grief stricken survivors who are now starving in the aftermath because they maybe didn’t stockpile quite as much as you did.

Kind of horrendous, right? To contemplate (at great remove, obviously, but still a major downer) loosing so many loved ones and friends and then having to defend yourself against others as similarly inflicted (if you actually did start saving shelf loads of canned tuna and dried beans like these columnists were recommending, which I don’t know if people in general are--my mother is, but she is a little on the “nut job” end of the “normal people spectrum”) . So yeah, anyone for an afternoon cancer stick?

No comments: