grow up already

I have tried to quit smoking several times in the last couple of years. The first serious attempt in 2008 ended when I smoked a cigarette sometime during the 3rd day…which is the time of the peak physical nicotine withdrawal. Holy shit. That cigarette didn’t make me go “aaahh,” it made me fall limply back into my seat, every nerve ending alive with pleasure. It felt exactly like the time I got an IV drip of Dilaudid in the emergency room. It felt that good.

Several times I’ve made it past the 72 hour mark, which at that point your body is technically clear of nicotine. Your urges are still urges, but they are not brought on by actual withdrawal, just old nicotine feeding cues and psychological desires. The last time I quit I made it 11 days but had that desire of “just one” “once in awhile” so I still occasionally experience the dopamine explosion that a smoker gets when they haven’t had a cigarette in awhile.

So I lit that “just one” up and it felt and tasted like the first cigarette I ever smoked. Completely bereft of pleasure or relief, just a hot mess of burning tobacco, chemicals, and stink. It tasted like shit and made me feel lightheaded. No aaaahhh…quite anticlimactic. Except for the fact that within three days I was smoking a pack a day again.

If you’re at the point where the physical withdrawal has subsided and you’re fantasizing about that one cigarette, the best one you’ve ever had, you won’t get it by having one. There will be no aaaaaahhh because you won’t be replenishing a depleted nicotine supply. You don’t have any nicotine in your body anymore.

recorded the “explorer: inside death row” show on nat geo today. i’m like 15 minutes in and i’m already crying for the guy that’s going to get the lethal injection and agreeing with the former warden who helped with “over 100” executions and says, “we knew what they had done…and it wasn’t pretty…there weren’t any guys who ‘i don’t know if they should have gotten the death sentence for this or not, no man they should’ve shot him the minute they found him.'” the guy that is about to get executed is david martinez. he bludgeoned to death a girlfriend and her son in a drunken rage. the show never brings up the forensics or any proof whether or not he did it; we are lead to just assume that yes, questions regarding his innocence have been asked, and that is why they are covering him.

i guess what is left is how we are supposed to feel about him dying, and his speaking about dying to a camera and knowing about dying ahead of time. even his victims had the luxury of not knowing, if that is a luxury at all. and we are supposed to think about his family members and how they feel, as well as the family members of the woman and young boy he killed. it seems like lose/lose for all involved. the father of the young boy killed by martinez says he wishes his lethal injection would’ve been more violent and painful, to more closely match the pain martinez inflicted upon his son. and martinez’s daughter is there, viewing his body afterwards, sobbing. it is heartbreaking. but both are! what is more sad, honestly?

what we don’t see are the victim’s families reactions to the news of the death of their own.

creating this sadness for martinez’s family isn’t “winning,” but i still think that, as in history until now, vengeance is as human of an urge as any. no matter how civilized we are, it still brings some type of comfort to a lot of victim’s familys. god i don’t want to know what kind of comfort that is. i don’t think it’s the type of comfort you or i may know about, ever.

The Foresthill Bridge has opened a can of worms for me, and it started the day I saw it. I never really thought about people dying by jumping from bridges or other tall things. Now I think about it often, and I’m sad every time I hear about someone doing it. I am drawn to this. I should add that I’m not considering it. At least no more than the consideration of the existential question inside all of us when we’re up high: What if I jumped?

I just wonder how it must feel to be standing up there. Jumpers have a much higher success rate than other methods, and yet it is considered an impulsive act. What I’m going to wonder about next, I’m sorry to anyone reading this who might have found it because a loved one died by jumping (especially at the Foresthill Bridge, the term “Foresthill Bridge suicide” draws a lot of views to this blog). But when I hear about a suicide there, I think about how long it takes to fall. It takes 10 seconds, over twice as long as the the Golden Gate (4 seconds). I do not think about the rest, most people wouldn’t be conscious or cognizant anymore.

I wish there was always someone at that bridge to let people know they matter. Even if they don’t think they matter to those around them, when they jump it matters to me.

As much as I enjoy an unencumbered chance to look at the divide, to scare myself with that question we all (or all should) ask: What if I jumped? And for us, we step down, almost punch drunk with the fear and the delight of affirmation that no! we will not, would not ever, jump. But for the people who do not look at the divide with childish assertions of life and desire for life, what of them? I wish there was a barrier there. It would say: It matters to us.

tonight i stayed up because i heard it was going to rain. it hasn’t for a couple of weeks so i knew it would make that rain smell.

i was outside just as it started. i leaned over the balcony and started inhaling deeply. nothing except cold air burning my nose. i told myself to calm down, assured myself the smell would come. and after the ground got wetter, maybe after another 30 seconds, which felt like too long, like i should give up, after i had thought of several reasons why the smell was not going to come this time (ground not hot enough or dry enough, too soon since last rain? et cetera) it came to me.

i just peaked out the window. it’s not raining anymore and it’s still there!

This morning I woke up at 4am. At around 9am I decided I wanted to take a drive. I took 50 East to Placerville and noticed a sign for Hwy 49 to Auburn and took that route.

So I’ve heard of the Foresthill Bridge, because it was in that movie xXx. Actually I saw that stupid movie. I had no idea it was visible from 49 and today it just poof! popped into view  while I was trying to navigate road work lane closures. I was absolutely mesmerized. I almost rear ended the Lumina in front of me twice. What is it about that bridge?

I went home and started researching. It’s the tallest bridge in California, standing 730 feet. Doesn’t sound like much but considering the Golden Gate is only 200 something feet off the Bay, you get the idea. Actually, imagine that all of the water underneath the GG vanished (maybe that will happen one day before a tsunami?). It would look really fucking tall. And that’s the Foresthill Bridge, all the time. It was built to replace the old, much shorter Foresthill Bridge when the Auburn Dam was a possibility. The bridge was never meant to be that way, and if the canyon below it were to be flooded for the dam as planned, you would only see the metal underside.

It would only be 130 feet higher than the surface of the water. Nobody would jump off of it to commit suicide. While I couldn’t find an exact number for suicides, since 1973 44 people have fallen or jumped. In 2005 a man hung himself from the bridge. In 2007 a couple jumped together, bringing their pet dog with them.

After a 19 year old jumped, his friends & family left a journal on the bridge. Inside were their memorials to him. The journal remained for awhile (is it still there?) and eventually there were two more entries:

“My name is Crissy. I came here to jump today, but now I can’t.”

“Seeing everything people have put here and what they have to say about you makes me think I don’t even know you and you have saved my life.”

There are people who think the bridge is at the center of something called a “temporal nexus” because it appears straight at every angle except from Google Earth, where a strange bend (or shadow? bendy shadow?) can be seen.

What is it about this bridge? I need to go back and walk across.

this is it, man

just downloaded a shitload of prefuse 73. listening to perverted undertone. god this reminds me of justin. the first time i heard this song, we had been hanging out for like a week. i had been at his house all night, possibly the night of The Scene.* he had put on some mixtape with a bunch of prefuse on it and was helping his roommate clean their apartment while i lounged on the couch. i was leaning out the window and smoking a cigarette and this song came on and it made everything so perfect. the total contentment of that moment amazed me because it might have been the first time since trevor died that i was happy.  even better was the fact that i got to enjoy it alone while he was simply nearby. when i finished my cigarette i dozed off, still feeling that way. later he woke me up (still there! didn’t dream it!) and took me to bed.  he really fucking got to me.  i still think about him. all the what-the-fucks and he’s-just-not-that-into-you won’t change it.

it was things like these feelings and the objective shit combined. how we both loved the movie short circuit, mutual laughage at eachother’s jokes, how he knew and loved every song on my ipod right down to the slim whitman, his own taste in music getting me into a record four bands in three weeks, how he looked like a motherfucking male model except much dirtier, the way he called me after a fishing trip to wish me goodnight and never called me again. all of these things and The Scene* are absolutely megan bait.

i’m over it in the not-a-stalker sense. i think a big reason i still want him is because sometimes it’s nice to feel that fire inside. and someone you only knew for three weeks is perfect for that. nevertheless i’d still accept a longer timeline, even if it gave him the chance to suck as much as everyone else does.

* The Scene is this: one day we went fishing and caught dinner. so that night we’re back at his place and i walk into the kitchen and i see him sorta swaying to kool keith, shirtless with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, pouring his beer into some kind of marinade for our fish. how can you forget someone who does these things?

summer song is just matt. i thought it was so cool and deep that he liked atmosphere. he left a couple of lines from summer song on my myspace once. they were “there she goes with that look in her eyes/the souls of those that got took by surprise” and i thought it was so cool and deep that he had chosen them. he didn’t even write them though. fucking pathetic. if there are any 7th graders (or um, extremely stupid 22 year olds) reading this, let the spectacular failure of that relationship be a lesson to you: someone knowing which song lyrics are “just right” doesn’t mean shit. in fact, it means they’re a bigger prick than someone who just says what’s on their mind, however ineloquent that might be.

A couple months ago I was hanging out with my best friend and her boyfriend. She was all, “Yeah the other night R*** and I were talking about all of your ex-boyfriends. It was funny.” She went on to describe exactly what I recently realized, too. In her words that night- and my own shoddy realization- here’s the gist of it:

The one that was addicted to Vicodin, the one who stole from you, the one that choked you, the one that killed himself, the cokehead, the one who started doing heroin, the hairy one, the one who was bisexual, etc.

Yeah. I give up. I gave up, after the bisexual.