On Smoking and Accountability (WITBD)

Recently a friend gave me the opportunity to weigh in on their (cigarette) smoking habit, ergo, I credit/blame them for this piece, a piece for which I expect a strong response: 

The phone rang, I answered, “Hello?”

            “Hey. So... I was wondering if I could get your perspective on something?”
            “Shoot.”
            “So, I’m trying to quit smoking and I was wondering whether I should just go cold-turkey or do the patch.”
            “Hmm...” I was in bed, on the verge of sleep, watching Twin Peaks, i.e., neither fully functioning nor fully clothed (which, for yours truly, tend to go hand-in-hand). “Well, uh, if you quit cold-turkey then you’ve kind’a gott’a confront the thing head-on, which I like, whereas the patch just kind’a breaks the chemical addiction without necessarily forcing you to confront the psychological part, at least not initially, and so, like, with the patch you could quit without any pain, which I don’t like, but eventually you’re gonn’a have to confront the psychological part of the addiction, which quiting cold-turkey forces you to address head-on, which I like.”
            “Yeah...”
            “But then, if you’re gonn’a quit cold-turkey and you’re actually gonn’a make it stick you’re probably gonn’a need a reason, you know, a reason to not smoke, and, you know, it had better not be me because I’ve told you that I don’t mind the smell or the taste and you can’t do it just to make me happy and you can’t do it for me because, like, what if we break up, then are you just gonn’a start smoking again?”

“Good point.”

“So, what’s your reason?”

            “I don’t know.”
            “Well, why don’t you think about that and get back to me.”
            “OK, I will...” (End pertinent part of conversation.)
   

The next morning I texted my friend, “So, did you find a reason?”

            They responded, via text, “Drinking coffee, reading, smoking, so, no.”
            In light of the fact that it was morning and I was fully-functioning (and fully-clothed), my thinking cap was on and I decided to try and come up with my reason for not smoking, which I’d never really had to fully articulate before and which I felt inclined to do then and there because of my friend’s inability or unwillingness to come up with one for herself.

Here’s what I came up with:

The reason I don’t smoke is because I want to do everything within my power to ensure that I will be able to be there for people in the future, and smoking is something that I know detracts from my ability to be there for people in the future, ergo, I don’t smoke.

My reason for not smoking literally came to me like “poof”, but the old noggin’ wasn’t done yet because immediately after I came up with my reason I also figured out what I basically understand smoking to be about: It’s about accountability, and smokers don’t hold themselves accountable to anybody other than themselves.

Before y’all jump down my admittedly harsh judgement’s throat, the following is sort’a-kind’a the train of thought that lead to my “Smokers don’t hold themselves accountable to other people” (although it’s hard to duplicate, hence the “sort’a-kind’a”):

The reason why my reason is my reason is because I try and hold myself accountable to other people; that’s what being able to be there for others is all about, it’s about accountability.

What did/do I mean by accountability? For starters, I mean doing that which is within your power to ensure that you can Be There for people (which is a different thing than actually being there, which I think has more to do with loyalty and fidelity, which is another topic for another time). For example, not smoking, wearing your seat-belt, wearing your bike-helmet, getting relatively regular exercise and eating in such a way that you don’t jeopardize your health, these are all things that you can do in order to try and make sure that you can be there fore people in the future.

By accountability I also mean doing everything within your power to make it possible for others reach you, e.g., having a cellphone or mailbox or address via which you can actually and dependably be reached by others such that you can actually respond when people need you to respond. (Part and parcel to this aspect of accountability seems to be having a grasp on the language in which others might try to reach you such that you’re actually in a position to be able to respond, but this, too, is another topic for another time.)

Another part of what I mean by accountability involves checking in and letting people know “What’s Up,” such as in the event of an impending trip out of the country or address change. Case in point, I’m planning to move to NYC this coming fall in order to pursue writing as a profession, and my brother, Griffin, might be joining me, and if you have any questions about this recently developed plan of mine I encourage you to ask them so that I might be able to explain myself to you (my phone number and email/blog addresses and facebook page will all be remaining the same, fyi).

The final piece of my definition of accountability involves not just doing what you want to do merely because you want to do it, or, if you are going to do what you want to do merely because you want to do it, doing your best to provide an account to others of your motivations/reasoning and be ready/willing to answer questions to those effects.

   

I now encourage you, dear reader, to take a moment to think about the people you know who smoke--which could quite possibly include you--and ask yourself whether or not they’re people who do a good job holding themselves accountable to people other than themselves. Here’s my own personal list of the smokers in my life:

My mother. During the last two years she’s been in and out of the state of Oregon more times than, well, it’s a large number (I feel like there’s a missed joke opportunity here and if anyone can remedy it I’ll be much obliged). For the last two years she’s also been a smoker. A few weeks ago she went to Florida in order to get more sunshine and run a car-wash with her hubby (Dick), leaving all her friends and most of her family behind for what will supposedly be a period of no less than five years.  

One of my best and oldest friends (you know who you are!). Not all that good at accountability (although I know he’s working on it), i.e., he struggles to show up to stuff, struggles to return phone calls in a timely fashion, and has been notoriously flaky for almost as long as he’s been a...

My friend from the conversation above. Admittedly--as in, has admitted to me both before and after the above conversation and what it precipitated--hasn’t held themselves accountable to anyone other than themselves and has done what they wanted whenever they wanted for, like, the last four years, during which time--and I know I’m about to make a sizeable leap into what might seem to be a topic totally unrelated to accountability--every single one of their romantic relationships has been exciting but meaningless. Hmm...

   

Now, the above are only three of the, like, two-billion smokers the world over and, as another good friend of mine pointed out with an INCREDIBLY BOTHERSOME empirical counter-argument (the bane of a philosopher’s existence), it isn’t totally impossible for someone who smokes to be the sort of person that also does a really good job actually being there for people, which, I think is ultimately what’s most important if we’re talking about accountability. However, I still hold that it is impossible for someone who smokes to say that they do everything within their power to ensure that they will continue to be able to be there for people in the future. And that’s ultimately my point.

   

So, here’s the titular question: To smoke or not to smoke? And please, put aside all the fluffy little aesthetic arguments (e.g., it ages your skin and/or makes your mouth taste like, well, an ashtray).

You should not smoke if you hold yourself accountable to others and, via the definition of accountability laid out above, try to do everything within your power to be able to be there for others and understand that the primary condition for being able to be there and respond and, hopefully, actually show up to stuff is that you actually be alive and kicking, so to speak, and that smoking is something that you know damn well does absolutely nothing to help the cause of being alive and kicking and being able to be there for people. Not. A. Damn. Thing. If you know this to be true and you still smoke then my suggestion is: CUT THAT SH*T OUT.

            One should smoke if one does not hold themselves accountable to anyone other than themselves.

   

Movie Review: Super 8

           So, maybe it’s just me and maybe it’s just because I’ve been reading a little too much of good-old, sexy Jacki Derrida--



--and so am just super attuned to all things “Metaphysics Of Presence”, but I think that a great many reviewers of JJ Abrams’ recent Super 8 are knee-deep in the M.O.P. sh*t, so to speak, and being knee-deep in the M.O.P. sh*t is no good for reviewers and no good for those of us that read their reviews. Why? Because if/when a reviewer is knee deep in the M.O.P. sh*t, the tools they use for critical assessment are warped and the products of said warping get passed on to others in/through their reviews, just like a nasty case of... ORAL HERPES!



Egads!

So, you’re probably wondering “What, the eff, does M.O.P. (‘Metaphysics Of Presence’) mean? And, uh, can it really give me oral-herpes?” The answer to the second question is, unfortunately, yes. The answer to the first is contained in the following and also contains the cure.

In his Of Grammatology, Derrida explores the common-understanding of the relationship between writing, speech and, to a lesser degree, thought, in which speech is understood to be more “present” than writing, and thought more “present” than speech. Which definition of “present” is Derrida being critical of? One in which present is defined as complete, full, trustworthy (i.e., non-differantial... I'll explain this in a moment, to the best of my abilities). In response to this common understanding of the relationship between writing, speech, and thought, Derrida says “Je ne se No!” (i.e., speech is not more present than writing, thought is not more present than speech), and charges said common-understanding with being complicit in the history of what he calls the metaphysics of presence. To be complicit in the history of the M.O.P. means to posit/think/believe that something--like speech or thought--is fully present and/or trustworthy, without any gaps in it, all there, etc., but, more than this, it is also to posit/think/believe that something like speech (or thought) is more-present than things that are supposedly parasitic on and/or derivative of it, like writing, e.g., “Speech is more trustworthy than writing. Speech, that’s real, that’s where it’s at! If only we could get writing to be more like speech!!! Or, gosh-golly, so-and-so’s writing is a lot like speech, ergo, better, more accurate, more true." Over and against being complicit in the history of the M.O.P., Derrida wants us accept what that he calls differance--which means both to defer, in time, and to differ, in space--which Derrida wants us to accept as true of everything (thought, speech, writing, you, me, movies, what-ever), i.e., all things differ and defer and aren’t fully-present to themselves or others. So, rather than say things like, "Speech, that's real!" We should say things like, "Speech isn't more real than writing, but rather, writing is different than speech, and vice versa." Thoroughly confused? Well, I felt like I at least had to try to explain/define M.O.P. if I was going to fault people for falling into it’s traps.

So... In the case of Abrams Super 8, I noticed that a number of reviewers were knee-deep in the M.O.P.-sh*t. Here’s a quote from somebody that liked Abrams’ movie (thanks Rotten Tomatoes), “Remember the good old days? This is the movie you went to see on a Saturday afternoon in the good old days” (Tom Long of the Detroit News, italics me). Here we have a clear case of the critical-analytical herp caused by M.O.P., which is here indicated by the phrase “the good old days,” which, I’m sorry Tom Long, NEVER ACTUALLY TOOK PLACE!!! Or, at least, didn’t quite take place like you remember them, sorry (again). Why do I say this? Because I guarantee that Abrams Super 8 is better in almost every conceivable way than most of the creature films from the “good old days.” Don’t believe me? I double-dog dare you to go and watch a bunch of old creature films, hell, go and watch E.T. and tell me: Is the story better? Are the characters more engaging? Is the production value as mint? Go and watch E.T. and watch it from the perspective of your expectations and tastes and sensibilities today and don't compare Abrams' movie to your memory of E.T. and honestly tell me that Abrams’ movie doesn’t compare favorably. Long is complicit in the history of the M.O.P. in that he grants full-presence to his memories of the good-old days, which are never quite as good as we remember them being because of the nature/character of memory, which fills-in certain gaps and glazes-over cracks and... You get the idea.

On the flip side of the same coin, here’s a quote from somebody that didn’t like Abrams’ movie (thanks again, R.T.), “In a manner similar to Gus Van Sant's Psycho, it's merely a high-resolution photocopy devoid of its revered predecessors' soul” (Nich Schager of Slant, italics me). Here we have another clear case of herp, M.O.P.-style, which in this case is indicated by the words “photocopy” and “soul,” which are set in an antonymic relationship in order to justify why Schager didn’t like Abram’s movie (or Van Sant’s), suggesting that Abrams’ movie has no “soul,” whereas other movies, movies like Psycho--and movies like E.T., for that matter--do. Schager is complicit in the M.O.P. in that he posits that certain movies have souls--ergo, are fully present and trustworthy and Good--and certain movies are photocopies devoid of souls. You know what, Van Sant’s Psycho sucks in comparison to Hitchcock’s, but that doesn’t mean that Hitchcock’s has a soul whereas Van Sant’s does not.

Both Schrager and Long are guilty of basically the same thing, which is to view and review Abrams’ Super 8 from a fully-present perspective, Long from the perspective of the Good-Old Days, Schrager from the perspective of There-are-Movies-with-Souls-and-Movies-Without-Souls. This should be unacceptable behavior for movie critics the world over, which doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t occasionally indulge in nostalgia or engage in metaphysics, merely that we shouldn’t let our nostalgia or our metaphysics color our reviews of films, which other people are going to read and then take with them into the theater and into their conversations with others (herpes). It would be like, if I started watching every single movie from the perspective generated by my childhood memory of the quality of the original, animated, Transformers: The Movie, which had Leonard Nimoy and Orson Welles and Eric Idle and Judd Nelson--

(that’s right, Judd F’ing Nelson!!!)--as voice actors. If I approached movies from this perspective, then every single movie I didn’t like would be soulless, and every single movie I did like would take me back to the really, really good-old days in which Autobots battled Decepticons, protected the entire universe from Orson, er, UNICRON, and awesome 80s hair-metal and Weird Al tunes were the only tunes on the proverbial juke-box. Wait, maybe that’s not such a bad place from which to approach my movie reviews...
   

So, what’s my review of Super 8? Well, I probably wouldn’t pay to watch it again, but I have no problem imagining myself between the ages of 7-11, going to the movie and absolutely loving it and having a huge crush on the girl and starting to make monster movies with my friends as a result of how much I loved it, which I think is actually pretty high-marks for a movie, but then, I'm not between the ages of 7-11.