Misbehaving

I’m thinking of starting a winery. I’d like to call it “Barrels of Bad News” featuring a range of wines for every occasion including:
- Nausea and Regret Merlot
- Weight Gain Riesling
- Bad Decisions Chardonnay
- I said what? Pinot Grigio
- God I’m sexy Cabernet Sauvignon
- I’ve always hated you Shiraz
- When will I learn Chablis
- I am not slobbering Chianti
- Who’s afraid of Virginia Wolf Cab Franc

There will be a minimum purchase of 8 bottles and a club discount for those who order 2 cases at a time. Monthly giveaways of restaurant sized blue boxes will be awarded to premium clientele.

I started ruminating on this when my neighbourhood late night bottle collector actually stopped me to gush like a crazed fan that my house was his favourite stop. Time to take a good hard look I thought.

I went through a similar situation around 13 years ago when I made the heartbreaking decision to break up with my best friend, Belmont Milds. I had smoked with a conviction that most can only dream about. Rain, sleet, tornadoes, nothing got in the way of my pack a day romance, the longest relationship I had known lasting close to 20 years.

I would smoke and smoke and smoke some more and then in the middle of the night as I reached for my Ventolin inhaler to keep my asthma at bay, I would light a fresh one .
Though it was a tough call, smoking or breathing, I finally made the call to lose the butts and acted swiftly before I could change my mind.

For me, it was no less than a patch that threatened an instant heart attack if I as much as took one covert drag of a ciggy. And with the patch came a month long spiral of depression and grief as I learned to live with the day to day reality of life without my soul mate.

Friends assured me I wouldn’t regret it and bolstered me with tidbits like, “Food will taste completely different.” What they didn’t tell me was I would discover an inner sweet tooth that would have me chasing the dragon for a bag of jube jubes like a common junkie. I was in a grand funk railroad.

Initially I remember wondering how people who didn’t smoke actually got through the day. Do they simply sit and stare into space? It’s amazing how much extra time you have when you aren’t pulling on a dart every 20 minutes. I was inconsolable, convinced that my essence was directly related to that blue and white pack and without it I was a fraud, a shadow of my former self. My right arm had been amputated, my soul was reassessing, re-jigging, trying to find a comfortable position.

Around the second week of this self -induced torture, I found myself in New York interviewing Fran Lebowitz for a literary program I was working on. On top of my state of panic about going one on one with the Queen Mother of quip, I was having second, third and forty fifth thoughts about my insistence that cigarettes were really bad for me. Ms. Lebowitz breezed into the hotel suite and lit up a spectacular aromatic American cigarette, a few feet from me. When someone pointed out that it was a non-smoking suite, she simply said, “What are they going to do, arrest me?” She then sized me up and asked me why I wasn’t smoking as though it was as obvious a question as why I wasn’t wearing pants or had a turd sitting on my shoulder. I tried to appear confident yet casual as I answered, “Well I couldn’t breathe so I had to choose between smoking and breathing”

She eyed me suspiciously and with a sly grin replied, “Breathing is highly overrated” My god she is profound, I thought as I mentally ripped the Marlboro from her hand. I could easily have made an afternoon of it but hell no, not even La Lebowitz could break my code. It takes so much work; I mean really hard work to quit something that you love that the idea of returning to square one is unbearable.

It took a good long while before I didn’t think about sparking up 30 times a day but slowly, it started to fade to the background and the first time I realized an entire day had passed without even thinking about a cigarette was landmark. Still , thirteen years later, the smell of a freshly lit cigarette makes me nostalgic and if Health Canada came out with an apology admitting that they had been wrong all along and cigarettes were actually a benefit to our health, I would frankly mow you down getting to the nearest corner store.

There was a time, a long long time ago when bad behaviour was celebrated. I’m talking the days of epic public displays of bad behaviour the likes of Richard Burton, Peter O’Toole and Richard Harris. I fondly remember a story of Richard Burton and Peter O’Toole shooting Becket. The movie being wrapped, they went on a colossal bender only to be called back for one shot of O’Toole putting a ring on Burton’s finger. The story goes, that by the time they caught up to them, they were so intoxicated that they couldn’t connect finger to ring. I loved this story though in this era they would be hustled off to rehab before they could say Jack Rabbit. Not to minimize addiction but it seems rehab is the new sexy. Camaraderie today is a shared carbonated water and colonic. It just doesn’t have the same ring.

And what really sends me over the edge is the coffee boycott. Come on, must we be stripped down to the wood. When I hear someone proudly announce they have given up coffee, they might as well be telling me they have become a Scientologist. I simply won’t have it. Sure, if you legitimately don’t like coffee I can come to terms. We probably will never hang out but I get it. It’s the ones that actively and ridiculously insist on removing it from their repertoire for health reasons that send me knocking my head against a wall.

Who decided that we have to be perfect? I’d like to meet with them over a bag of pork rinds and a couple brewskies and get to the bottom of this. Is it necessary for everyone to live to be 140? Not to mention the overcrowding this kind of thinking evokes. Sure, I don’t have to be the most popular blue box on the street, I can compromise. Perhaps Murray Merlot should be an occasional guest instead of having his own key to my home. I even considered meditation until I remembered that the few times I’ve tried it at the end of a yoga class, I usually end up giggling like an obnoxious six year old. But coffee, don’t touch my coffee. I mean it back away slowly.