I Don't Want to Buy What You Are Selling

(First published in Bali Advertiser, August 31, 2005)

You’ve got to reach a state of mind in which you don’t want it or need it. – William S. Burroughs II, beat writer and heroin addict, in a 1965 interview with Conrad Knickerbocker for the Paris Review

Burroughs, writer and addict, once attributed his longevity to his “rebirth” every time he kicked a habit. Each “cure” was a rejuvenation of mind and body, he said, even though he always relapsed and was on methadone when he died at the age of 83 in 1997. Burroughs knew way more about addiction than I ever will, but I know enough to have experienced the addict’s rebirth.

I’ve recently stopped smoking, or nearly so. I’ll smoke the last cigarette of my last pack when I’ve finished this column. It’s been a 20-year habit. Other smokers will know how hard it is to quit. It’s easy to give up everything except the cigarette with morning coffee, the happy hour smokes after work, the drag that assists a good bowel movement. At first, I was going to smoke only to keep alert during long hours working in the oil field in my 20s. Then I was going to quit at 30, next at 40. What finally worked was having a son and not wanting him growing up with a father puffing cancer sticks and later wheezing on oxygen tanks.

During the process of quitting, the similarity of all addictions -- cigarettes, booze, drugs, love, gadgetry, religion – struck me again. “There are also all forms of spiritual addiction. Anything that can be done chemically can be done in other ways, that is, if we have sufficient knowledge of the processes involved,” Burroughs told Knickerbocker in 1965.

Any addiction, any habit overdone, is a way of turning off the world, tuning it out, so that pain can’t get in. The habit is just something that replaces thinking and feeling, even if it doesn’t actually cause numbness in itself. When the habit is gone, the ignored and evaded sensations come rushing back on newly awakened nerves. And it doesn’t really matter if it was a heroin addiction or an unhealthy, consuming obsession with exercise.

Addicts, in the best cases, harm only themselves. But there is almost always some form of “secondhand smoke” that threatens the non-addicted as well. Burroughs’s example was “policemen … addicted to power, to exercising a certain nasty kind of power over people who are helpless. The nasty sort of power: white junk I call it – rightness; they’re right, right, right – and if they lost that power, they would suffer excruciating withdrawal symptoms.”

(That last quote is more or less a gift to anyone who will enjoy seeing parallels between President Bush’s administration and Burroughs’s cops.)

The secondhand irritant I have in mind are people who call me on the phone, knock on my gate, or stop me in the street, to try and sell some product or philosophy that promises to solve all my problems. Some salespeople are just salespeople; others are true believers out to convert the heathen to a therapy, religion, or multi-level marketing program offering unending wealth and unlimited happiness. And it is the promise of unending happiness – at least in this world -- that I reject. Material goods cannot bring it; God, gods, or mantras cannot bestow it; other people -- no matter how loving or giving they might be -- cannot provide it. These things may be able to bring momentary happiness or enjoyment; they cannot guarantee it forever and always.

The first cigarette of the day can be enjoyable, but the 20th tastes of the bottom of the ashtray, especially if it’s been preceded by 20 years of 20-cigarette days. And that first “cigarette” can be almost anything – some chemical high, a religious experience, an initial flush of physical and mental attraction. The danger is in the emotional investment that the experience can always be repeated with the same result. The hunger for the initial high always increases, the payout always decreases. And it’s difficult to break away, because one loses what’s already been put in, like a gambler who can’t stop feeding quarters into a slot machine hoping for the jackpot that will recoup all losses. It’s difficult to admit that one has been a fool for so long, that the payout is never coming, that unending bliss and peace are only the smoke dreams of con artists, advertising executives, and faux gurus.

Let’s make a deal: I’ll quit smoking and no longer subject you to my secondhand smoke; you no longer subject me to the blowback from your own obsessions. Whatever you are selling – a better mousetrap, a new religion, a new political party, a new life – don’t call me on the phone, don’t knock on my gate, don’t stop me in the street. I don’t want it. I don’t need it.

Copyright © 2005 Lee Roy LeRoi