All due props to Lou Reed.
(Help me Lou, what is a Jim-Jim?)
Nicotine
I don't know just where I'm going
But I'm gonna try for the kingdom, if I can
'Cause it makes me feel like I'm a man
When I put a smoke into my chops
And I'll tell ya, things aren't quite the same
When I'm sucking on my butt
And I feel just like my dad’s son
And I guess that I just don't know
And I guess that I just don't know
I have made the big decision, I'm gonna try to nullify my life
'Cause when I’m sparkin’ up that snout
When it shags my alveolar mass
When I'm closing in on death
And you can't help me, not you guys
And all you sweet girls with all your sweet silly talk
You can all go take a walk
And I guess that I just don't know
And I guess that I just don't know
I wish that I was born a thousand years ago
I wish that I'd sail the darkened seas
On a great big clipper ship
Going from this land here to that on a sailor's suit and cap
Away from the big city where a man cannot be free
Of all of the evils of this town
And of himself, and those around
Oh, and I guess that I just don't know
Oh, and I guess that I just don't know
Nicotine, be the death of me
Nicotine, it's my wife and it's my life
Because a coffin nail in my puss
Leads to a center in my head
And then I'm better off than dead
Because when the alkaloid begins to flow
I really don't care anymore
About all the Jim-Jim's in this town
And all the politicians makin' busy sounds
And everybody puttin' everybody else down
And all the dead bodies piled up in mounds
'Cause when the insecticide begins to flow
Then I really don't care anymore
When the nicotine is in my blood
And that blood is in my head
Then thank God that I'm as good as dead
Then thank your God that I'm not aware
And thank God that I just don't care
And I guess, I just don't know
And I guess, I just don't know
Saturday, June 4, 2011
Medicinal Tobacco
Marijuana is a schedule 1 drug, higher up the list than coke, since it has a high potential for abuse, no accepted medical use in the US and its unsafe.
Tobacco fits that category to a T.
It’s patent bollocks when Ivy League CEO’s testify that they don’t know what makes water boil. It’s patent bollocks when in addition to rapacious taxes, the government whacks these killers with multi-million dollar lawsuits and then lets them carry on doing what they do.
Tobacco use is rampant.
Tobacco users need to be registered with the state and be required to carry an ID card. They can only get the tobacco they need from state run dispensaries, and these dispensaries should be as appealing as all government institutions that deal with the needy.
The registration process should be invasive and grueling – true addicts will put up with any shit to get their fix.
Their insurance companies should be notified.
Anyone with tobacco paraphernalia on them or in their house that does not have their card on them is subject to confiscation and prosecution. Rental companies can evict illegal tobacco users. Insurance companies can raise rates.
If you are convicted of illegal tobacco use, your second offense requires mandatory registration. Part of the criminal proceedings will be the registration process. You will be required to carry a card, even in prison. With this card, you can go to private smoking areas to smoke government issue cigarettes, you will no longer be required to give blowjobs or take it up the ass to get your snout.
The government should stop fucking about with the tobacco industry and just take ‘em out. All that tax that the government is raking off of tobacco will continue to go straight to them. State run tobacco farms in Virginia and Cuba will keep supply costs low. The price of cigarettes will fall since big Tobacco is no longer getting their slice.
There will be state run detox facilities for kickers. You can sign in even if you are not a registered smoker. Once you are signed in you are left to purge the nicotine out of your system for 5 days. You are now clean. You are past the chemical addiction phase, your body recovers quickly. You are then mandatorily tested every week and subject to random tests. If you are a recovering smoker, you carry a card. While you have this card, prescribed medications to help you recover are free, and insurance companies are required to start lowering your rates. Recovering smokers gym memberships (or equivalent aerobic activities) are subsidized to a maximum of $1000 a year, deductible directly from their taxes.
There will be ‘Smokers Gregarious’ meetings, where people will hang about in bars getting legally drunk, or coffee shops getting legally wired and proclaim “My name is Michael Caine and I am a Smoker” (Oblique reference here to the Madness song, and that he quit right before his 70th birthday and that since there seems to be currently no shame in smoking, nobody really gives a fuck if you say it)
After 5 years clean, you are no longer required to carry a card.
People will grow their own just like people cook meth and grow weed. It’s not a problem. You treat all illegal producers the same way – whether it’s the way we treat marijuana growers or the way we treat meth cooks is immaterial, somewhere in that scale fits the rogue tobacconist.
We need to stigmatize smokers the way we stigmatized queers and niggers. They are easy enough to spot – they can’t get very far on COPD lungs before they have to light up, and they are truly the most reprehensible of addicts – dirty, unhealthy, hooked through the gills.
We started showing images of what smoking does to lungs and throats and children.
We need to STOP that immediately.
Smoking will die down on it’s own. There will always be a proportion of society that will do it, but it will become as obscene as a heroin junkie shooting up between his filthy toes.
If we glamorize it on TV with pictures of carcinoma riddled organs being culled from filthy smokers, the effect will be dulled. It happens with porn, it happens with gunplay on TV. Too much is never enough, it needs to be wild, outrageous and vivid.
Do not do this with smoking. There’s nothing glamorous about breathing through a hole in your throat, or having your tongue cut out or smelling like death.
Tobacco fits that category to a T.
It’s patent bollocks when Ivy League CEO’s testify that they don’t know what makes water boil. It’s patent bollocks when in addition to rapacious taxes, the government whacks these killers with multi-million dollar lawsuits and then lets them carry on doing what they do.
Tobacco use is rampant.
Tobacco users need to be registered with the state and be required to carry an ID card. They can only get the tobacco they need from state run dispensaries, and these dispensaries should be as appealing as all government institutions that deal with the needy.
The registration process should be invasive and grueling – true addicts will put up with any shit to get their fix.
Their insurance companies should be notified.
Anyone with tobacco paraphernalia on them or in their house that does not have their card on them is subject to confiscation and prosecution. Rental companies can evict illegal tobacco users. Insurance companies can raise rates.
If you are convicted of illegal tobacco use, your second offense requires mandatory registration. Part of the criminal proceedings will be the registration process. You will be required to carry a card, even in prison. With this card, you can go to private smoking areas to smoke government issue cigarettes, you will no longer be required to give blowjobs or take it up the ass to get your snout.
The government should stop fucking about with the tobacco industry and just take ‘em out. All that tax that the government is raking off of tobacco will continue to go straight to them. State run tobacco farms in Virginia and Cuba will keep supply costs low. The price of cigarettes will fall since big Tobacco is no longer getting their slice.
There will be state run detox facilities for kickers. You can sign in even if you are not a registered smoker. Once you are signed in you are left to purge the nicotine out of your system for 5 days. You are now clean. You are past the chemical addiction phase, your body recovers quickly. You are then mandatorily tested every week and subject to random tests. If you are a recovering smoker, you carry a card. While you have this card, prescribed medications to help you recover are free, and insurance companies are required to start lowering your rates. Recovering smokers gym memberships (or equivalent aerobic activities) are subsidized to a maximum of $1000 a year, deductible directly from their taxes.
There will be ‘Smokers Gregarious’ meetings, where people will hang about in bars getting legally drunk, or coffee shops getting legally wired and proclaim “My name is Michael Caine and I am a Smoker” (Oblique reference here to the Madness song, and that he quit right before his 70th birthday and that since there seems to be currently no shame in smoking, nobody really gives a fuck if you say it)
After 5 years clean, you are no longer required to carry a card.
People will grow their own just like people cook meth and grow weed. It’s not a problem. You treat all illegal producers the same way – whether it’s the way we treat marijuana growers or the way we treat meth cooks is immaterial, somewhere in that scale fits the rogue tobacconist.
We need to stigmatize smokers the way we stigmatized queers and niggers. They are easy enough to spot – they can’t get very far on COPD lungs before they have to light up, and they are truly the most reprehensible of addicts – dirty, unhealthy, hooked through the gills.
We started showing images of what smoking does to lungs and throats and children.
We need to STOP that immediately.
Smoking will die down on it’s own. There will always be a proportion of society that will do it, but it will become as obscene as a heroin junkie shooting up between his filthy toes.
If we glamorize it on TV with pictures of carcinoma riddled organs being culled from filthy smokers, the effect will be dulled. It happens with porn, it happens with gunplay on TV. Too much is never enough, it needs to be wild, outrageous and vivid.
Do not do this with smoking. There’s nothing glamorous about breathing through a hole in your throat, or having your tongue cut out or smelling like death.
Wednesday, June 1, 2011
Death and Heaven
Our understanding of the world around us is framed primarily in terms of our experience. We can demonstrate easily to a child the relationship between mass and weight. We can show how inertia works. We know what wet is and we know what blue is. We understand that earth is like a cannonball, the sun is like a fire. These things have always been this way and will presumably always be this way. Our senses have know limits and we have tools that bring our world within the limits of our senses - we can 'see' interstellar nebulae or intercellular organelles, we can hear whalesong and radio waves. Our most fabulous tools are our most abstract. We can describe our world in the most exquisite and evocative terms. Our understanding of the unknown has outstripped the limits of sensibility, we are in a realm where the supernatural powers of life and death and the meaning of absolutes are a crystalline bead of consciousness that must function according to these universal truths but is as yet unexplained by our knowing them.
That I deform the spacetime continuum and act in accordance with quantum mechanical theory is a secondhand knowledge. I'm sure that it sustains me and were it removed I would know the limits of my own mortality, but it is not an experience I enjoy or am even aware of. My knowledge of this world and by extension things in this world beyond my senses (like the immediate world beyond my closed door) is framed in terms of the familiar. A fatuous statement in itself, since it is impossible to frame your world in terms of the unfamiliar, but it is a summation.
I might be deforming the spacetime continuum, but I can't feel it. Everything that makes up my world is permanent (always there, always the same) and expressible in terms that I understand (Blue, Hot, Heavy, Distant) - you know, familiar.
If someone were to say to me that death and heaven were like nothing I'd ever experienced, this would be true (I'm still alive and I don't know what heaven would be like) but if it were true in the way that I don't know what life is like at Planck measurements of time and distance, then you sure as hell got me there. I understand that some pretty esoteric stuff happens at these limits, but what it would be like to have a consciousness that operates at this level is incomprehensible.
Death to me is straightforward. Death is a period of time, to all extents and purposes eternal, that is to my consciousness what that similar span was like for the eternity before my birth.
If I were to say what heaven is, it would have to be framed in terms of my experience of the familiar, and I would have to say that this is pretty much it.
If it gets any better than how I feel on a good day, and I don't get to experience it 'cause I'm a filthy little atheist, then I feel blessed.
I don't know who else would be in heaven. It would not be heaven by my understanding of how God is handling this if only my buddies (and some easily identifiable assholes) could get in.
My understanding of hell is right here on earth, the hell of living in this paradise while being tortured and killed for sport. Fortunately, I have not witnessed it directly. I have heard the testimony of those that have, and I believe it.
If heaven is ridding earth of the hell of human creation and God can make that happen then there must be some part of us being made in his image that ain't getting expressed properly in our genes.
When this happens, and spontaneously I might add since God is sticking hard and fast to the free will rules, and the earth is rid of poisonous scum, then I will rejoice. If I am part of the poisonous scum, I will be insensate, heaven will be yours.
I fear that after such celestial winnowing that heaven will be so big that those of us left to inhabit it will simply die out because of the distances involved in trying to find a mate.
That I deform the spacetime continuum and act in accordance with quantum mechanical theory is a secondhand knowledge. I'm sure that it sustains me and were it removed I would know the limits of my own mortality, but it is not an experience I enjoy or am even aware of. My knowledge of this world and by extension things in this world beyond my senses (like the immediate world beyond my closed door) is framed in terms of the familiar. A fatuous statement in itself, since it is impossible to frame your world in terms of the unfamiliar, but it is a summation.
I might be deforming the spacetime continuum, but I can't feel it. Everything that makes up my world is permanent (always there, always the same) and expressible in terms that I understand (Blue, Hot, Heavy, Distant) - you know, familiar.
If someone were to say to me that death and heaven were like nothing I'd ever experienced, this would be true (I'm still alive and I don't know what heaven would be like) but if it were true in the way that I don't know what life is like at Planck measurements of time and distance, then you sure as hell got me there. I understand that some pretty esoteric stuff happens at these limits, but what it would be like to have a consciousness that operates at this level is incomprehensible.
Death to me is straightforward. Death is a period of time, to all extents and purposes eternal, that is to my consciousness what that similar span was like for the eternity before my birth.
If I were to say what heaven is, it would have to be framed in terms of my experience of the familiar, and I would have to say that this is pretty much it.
If it gets any better than how I feel on a good day, and I don't get to experience it 'cause I'm a filthy little atheist, then I feel blessed.
I don't know who else would be in heaven. It would not be heaven by my understanding of how God is handling this if only my buddies (and some easily identifiable assholes) could get in.
My understanding of hell is right here on earth, the hell of living in this paradise while being tortured and killed for sport. Fortunately, I have not witnessed it directly. I have heard the testimony of those that have, and I believe it.
If heaven is ridding earth of the hell of human creation and God can make that happen then there must be some part of us being made in his image that ain't getting expressed properly in our genes.
When this happens, and spontaneously I might add since God is sticking hard and fast to the free will rules, and the earth is rid of poisonous scum, then I will rejoice. If I am part of the poisonous scum, I will be insensate, heaven will be yours.
I fear that after such celestial winnowing that heaven will be so big that those of us left to inhabit it will simply die out because of the distances involved in trying to find a mate.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)