Smokey Joe

One thing about this cancer business that I've kind of avoided, until now:

What caused it.

Now, I'm a cause-and-effect skeptic. So many times things really don't cause things, or aren't the sole cause, or the principal cause, or even what we in the bar sometimes refer to as the legal cause. So many explanations are facile. Slavery caused the civil war; the clash of Islam and the West caused 9/11; man caused global warming. All have truth and a lot of untruth as well.

So, appropriately hedged, I have asked a passel of questions and read a lot, and now finger three causes of my head and neck cancer. In this post I light up the first: smoking.

My first cigarette was when I was 11 or 12, and I was smoking openly and regularly at 15. Unfiltered Camels. Compensating for something?

Whatever the underlying motivation, I sure loved cigarettes. Smoked about a pack a day. Opening the pack, striking a match, lighting the cigarette (and if she were there, my lady friend's) with a cupped hand. Playing with fire with slight of hand. Indoors or out, from breakfast until bed, and in bed until the lights went out. Surrounded by ashtrays and everything smelled like smoke, which means that to me everything smelled great.

The brand mattered. When my wife and I went on a drive south, I persuaded her to stop in Winston-Salem, so we could make a pilgrimage to the Camels plant. It was fine, redolent of smoke and machinery. And as you exited there was Old Joe, a Camel made of tobacco. The ancestor, I guess, of Joe Camel, the cartoonish mascot who came on about as I quit. Not sorry we missed each other; I always thought he trivialized a great product and institution. I took the stuff seriously.

I knew it was dangerous. We all did, and it was no problem at all. It was probably part of the allure.

Plus there is decent research indicating that smoking other substances was also unhealthy, and I sure did. Loved it. All the paraphernalia, the papers, the hookahs (later bongs), the roach clips. Pot was a pretty happy, peaceful world in the late 60's and early '70's. If you'd told me then it would still be illegal in 2010 I'd have called you crazy.

So things went until I was 33, when I stopped cold turkey.

So, some 25 years later, is it a credible cause of my cancer? The docs say yes. In fact I have a feeling they don't really know. But smoking today is so universally viewed as evil - well, it's a really safe answer.

If it was a cause of the cancer, was it worth it? You might as well ask if it was worth it being me, back in those days. If I'd had to identify who I was - you know, like lawyer/father/piano player/etc. - I certainly would have put smoker near the top of the list. Serious. Dangerous. Cool. Smoker.

Early Check-Out

Back when I used to think about doing myself in, I called it "Early Check-Out". As in, maybe I'll just go for early check-out.

I haven't thought about it in a long time (probably a good thing). But I recalled it while biking this morning. Not sure why. I'd rather be dead than exercising? If I swing left about a centimeter I will impale myself on that street sign?

Whatever the origin, it bothered me that, at age 60, I probably could no longer call it "early." So what other flip expression can I use to confront something monstrous like suicide?

Stingers

Here at the confluence of the Mississippi, Missouri, and Illinois rivers, the intersection of the continent's biggest watershed, it's hot. Steamy hot. I was worried that while off on vacation the garden would dry up, but nuh-uh. It's the Amazon. While trying to do a little pruning at 6 a.m. I was stung on the hand. I wondered what kind of tropical bug had invaded - maybe something big and green, with a curly tail? - but it turned out to be a plain Midwestern wasp. Waited for the rush of whatever these stings are supposed to bring to your head, but it was just a sting.

"Wasp" is the handle for Lizbeth Salander, currently the coolest woman in the world. It's funny to those of us who remember the old secondary meaning for "wasp" - an acronym for White Anglo Saxon Protestant, and kind of an emblem for the male power structure in America. Lizbeth's the polar opposite. Since it's in translation, I wonder if it's coincidence.

But there are no coincidences, right?

Moo

Where are the Grown-Ups?

Once again, current American politics is facing a serious problem: financiers in global firms that have way too little market or risk discipline. And once again the politicians answer by delivering us a piece of crap, the 2010 financial "reform" legislation. It didn't need to be; there were some interesting ideas floating around. (My own personal favorites are to breathe life back into the Clayton Act, and to pass a 21st century version of Glass-Steagall.) But the lawmakers in this sorry excuse for a legislative branch just want to make their political points and move on.

I think the Republicans deserve particular opprobrium from those of us who believe that the best solutions are free markets with goods and services that are properly priced. They did it before with Obamacare; they are doing it now with financial services legislation. These so-called conservatives think it is better for the country to let the Democrats pass massive legislation that is 80 percent crap than to fight and work to produce legislation that is 30 percent crap. Their calculus must be - let Obama and the Democratic hoist themselves with this stuff and we will pick up seats in Congress, and (oh joy of joys!) maybe beat the guy in his next election.

In the meantime, we get junk legislation that will never be repealed and the real problems in the country go unresolved.

What a waste. There are intelligent ways to address things like, say, over $30 trillion in unfunded Medicare liability. (That amount, by the way, is just about inconceivable.) Representative Ryan from Wisconsin, who is one of maybe ten grown-ups in the Congress, has such a plan, and it will probably lose him his job.

In the private world, a serious-sounding intelligent person with good arguments can usually hold the floor, change minds, and even inspire some measure of long-term perspective. Beats me why can't this be in the public world, but obviously it can't.

On the Beach

Back to the Republic of Equity

Where I was when things derailed.

For centuries there was a huge societal bias against debt. Good Christians were not allowed to be moneylenders. Debtors went to prison, not Chapter 7. The attitude seems punitive, archaic, vaguely antisemitic.

But maybe there was some ancient truth at play, one we could rediscover and reapply.

Debt means you use property you don't own. You borrow land, or a lawnmower, or most frequently - money. And you take this property you don't own and you use it now, because otherwise you'd have to wait and use it later (if you acquire it at all). Otherwise, and in the meantime, you have to go without.

The alternative, the going without, interests me. Many times I've found not having things meant finding substitutes that turned out just fine. When you go somewhere where's no Internet, no power, no telephone: you go to candles, and reading by lamplight, and talking.

What would happen if all the non-emergency debt were liquidated? Would we go to candles and conversation around campfires? I don't think so. But we might go to no 3-D TV, no 5000 square-foot houses, no $200 lunches.

That may be nothing to fear. But it also could be more painful than that, much more, what we really do fear, and so we kick the can down the road.