Monkey, Get Off’a My Back!

(First published in the Bali Advertiser, July 28, 2010)

“Tobacco is a dirty weed, I like it. It satisfies no normal need, I like it. It makes you thin, it makes you lean, it takes the hair right off your bean. It’s the worst darn stuff I’ve ever seen. I like it.”
                                                            -- Graham Lee Hemminger, November 1915

This is a dangerous undertaking. Whenever I have written to blow my horn about beating an addiction, there is something in the act that triggers a relapse. Way back in March of 2007 when I wrote for the first time about quitting the cigarette habit for a year … a week later I was out celebrating the come-clean anniversary with a pack of smokes in a Jalan Jaksa pub in Jakarta.

After that little celebratory display of fuming (improbably and embarrassingly witnessed by somebody who had read my column crowing about beating tobacco), I lasted another 16 weeks before the stresses of a new job in Bangkok drove me back into the arms of the demon weed on a more than temporary basis. And for the next couple of years, I was an on and off smoker, mostly on, but never (or seldom) puffing on more than a few sticks a day. Better than before, but still enough to kill me.

Now I have been on the no-ciggie kick for another year – just shy of a couple of weeks at current writing – and tempting fate again by bleating about it. Strangely, at times during the past few weeks as we approach the year-marking date of Aug. 5, it has been more difficult to stick with the no-smoke regimen than it was in the first few weeks of going without last year – and then I was in another high-stress job that had many people in the newsroom out in the car park for a few puffs every hour.

If I can quit then, surrounded by all that peer encouragement, why should it be so difficult now, when I’m working out of the rice fields and mostly setting my own schedule?

I do not know, but it is clear that it is a strong and evil habit to break. And most smokers know they should quit even if they won’t admit it to anyone. Feel only pity for them as they slink into the choking air of the smoking booths at airports … and, feel anger, too, for the smokers in Indonesia who cannot find the courteous will not to smoke in restaurants, malls and other public places. But remember that they are ill and getting sicker all the time.

By now, many of the increased health risks that I incurred during a 25-year habit have significantly dropped backed toward those of non-smoker. My risk of coronary heart disease is half that of a smoker, for instance, and I no longer suffer from easy shortness of breath. Exercise activities – riding my bike down to Ubud and back or even longer rides on the circuits around town – are fights against muscle endurance and creaking joints and not gasping, wheezing struggles for oxygen.

As another quitter, English humorist A.P. Herbert, put it: “Thank heaven, I have given up smoking again! ... God! I feel fit. Homicidal, but fit. A different man. Irritable, moody, depressed, rude, nervy, perhaps; but the lungs are fine.”

Also, by now, the increased oxygen that has been making it to my lungs for the past year has helped to repair dry skin and heal premature wrinkles. Stains on fingers and teeth are gone, and should the missus and I decide to try for yet a third child, my little swimmers and skimmers are healthier and more abundant.

Of course, it’s a bit long now for me to still blame any of my natural moody irritableness on having quit smoking; I still do have the odd cravings that hit me sometime – sometimes but not always during moments of stress. Sometimes I would just like to retreat to the balcony for a light-up and a long, slow drag over a cup of coffee or while sipping an ice-cold beer.

That would really be a pleasure, I think, but giving in only crosses my mind for a moment, and then I remember some friends exiting Ngurah Rai after a long air journey from London. Before reaching us as they pushed their trolley forward they were already digging out their cigarettes and pulling off nicotine patches, several each. And I recall my own many times of running out of smokes in the middle of the night and hunting through ashtrays and trash cans for butts long enough to smoke. (Bathroom graffiti: “Please don’t throw your cigarette butts in the urinal. It makes them soggy and hard to light.”)

Nicotine, old cursed friend and tormentor, this time, I hope and pray, I’ve got you licked.

Copyright © 2010 Lee Roy LeRoi

Maybe There Is, Maybe There Isn’t

(First published in the Bali Advertiser, July 14, 2010.)

“The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.” – Psalm 14:1

There comes a time in almost every religious ceremony or service I attend – be it Christian, Buddhist, Hindu or Islamic – when my rational mind rebels and I start cursing the tyranny of belief.

In this frame of mind it is near impossible for me to assume any tolerant live-and-let-live attitude. I can see in the most benign of pastors and priests only a “generation of vipers” who prey on the people, enslaving them to rites and rituals that are economic, psychological and spiritual burdens.

So it is not surprising that in the midst of the three-month ceremony for my youngest son I would suddenly get a scoffing fit and have difficulty in controlling my impatience with the whole “primitive” – as I tend to think in the midst of an attack – rigmarole of incense, offering and holy water.

This sort of attitude, if known to its fullest extent, would not go down well with the in-laws. Usually, when not right in the middle of things – when I can contemplate in the abstract the meaning of a chicken pecking rice off my son’s baby-bald pate and then being passed under two bridged stacks of stones -- I can appreciate the woven offerings, the effigies that no one seems to know what they represent, just about anything really. It is when theory gives way to practice that I find myself hot, bothered by smoke, and cramped from sitting long minutes in positions my middle-aged joints can no longer handle.

It’s not necessarily that I don’t have the heart and mind for belief, you see; I don’t have the back and knees for it. Even in earlier days I didn’t have the physical stamina for weekly praise and hoopla and was usually dozing by the time the singing was over and the sermon had begun.

So it was interesting to come away from an experimental session with one of Ubud’s healing tribe without an immediate rejection of the hocus-pocus. And this was one of those full-on sessions with chanting and crystals and a song-induced trance -- after which the healer said I had, in some alternate reality, handed her a piece of my soul for her to hold for a while.

I am still not certain what to make of all of it, and have been keeping a close eye on things in case there was some witch doctoring involved that will have me baying and prancing at every full moon. And now it occurs to me that I didn’t ask the woman if she gave that piece of my soul back.

What are the implications of someone else walking around with a piece of my soul? Can she turn me into a zombie slave at will? How many other pieces of peoples’ souls does she have locked away in some device of black magic? Once she gets some critical non-mass together will she have the power to rule the world and plunge it into eternal darkness?

Actually, she was such a nice person, that if anything she would – if she could – plunge the world into some bright and shiny place so lovely and full of love that even curmudgeons would regularly smile, not only grimly, but with real joy. The thought of it gives me the shivers – oh, the horror!

The real problem with belief, though, is not so much the theatrical shows of pomp and ritual. These are mere play, and probably should be treated as such by many more people than they are.

In the realms of belief, the people who are the real trouble are the fanatics and the fanatical scoffers, both insisting that spiritual or religious affairs are life and death issues. They want everyone to take the questions of belief dead seriously, and they throw the most awful fits when they think people are ignoring them, which, for the most part, sensible people are doing.

The fanatics and the scoffers -- thinking that belief or unbelief is so important that they must persuade everyone to one or the other -- aren’t willing to accept that the choice is not as central to existence as a sense of peace and well-being; it seems too easy to them that happiness trumps hair-shirted misery, with or without a supposedly comforting god.

Whether or not there is a God or something else beside the here and now of our physical senses is the fundamental mystery of life; we miss it when we adopt an easy certainty about it for or against. But it just seems too hard at times to teach or learn the wisdom of awe and reverence for a divine ambiguity.



Copyright © 2010 Lee Roy LeRoi