Atrophy (Fall 07)

by The Wise Man

Those Armenians smoke too much, but I respectfully disagree.

I know it’s an inflated price, but nothing matches the feeling of buying a pack of cigarettes. “Parliament Lights...”

Because at the gas station they got those holders, those sci-fi cigarette chute machines; it makes a pack look like a military ration. I don’t normally smoke the first one when I buy it though, I drive down Glenoaks, let myself think about savoring it. A great cigarette needs a complement; so normally I’ll buy one of those Russian ice cream cones and sit outside a cafe. Sure it’s a vice, it’ll probably kill me, but I think it’s worth it. That’s why I savor each guiltless puff; I let the warm smoke comfort my heart. I like to let the tar coat my lungs, and feel the warm air traveling down through my soul.

I fit into this Armenian caricature, but I won’t hold my breath for American approval anyway. I mean most folks I work with these days pound through twelve cups of coffee so they can slog through their day; hoping...no, praying they have time to go home and masturbate. Just because they got every inch of their 500 Friends episodes assimilated into their brains doesn’t make it attractive; I’ll be the iconoclast.

But I prefer America....

I’m not one for the post-Soviet nostalgic types; Lenin can get sodomized by hoe from communal farms for all I care. Save your Engels for the pulsing proletarians; the chain-breaking, bourgeois-bilking, CCCP shirt wearing nostalgic. I just read Animal Farm and let the whole thing go. The few trickling hammer-and-sickle celled tend to make me nauseous. However, those are few and far apart these days anyways. There aren’t many manifesto thumpers among these Armani silk shirt sporting Barskahyes; running 250 dollar hookah bills isn’t exactly “collectivizing the farm”. Not to mention the Hayastancis, whose unquenchable car fetish doesn’t exactly make Brand Boulevard look a like a bread line.

Then there is nationalism....

Now I never had an issue with the whole Armenian cause; baikar baikar and all that is great, I’m an Armenian after all. See the only problem is they got these yuppies graduating with 6-year political science/history/Armenian triple majors looking for their piece of political prominence; and now everyone has to give their genocide speech. It’s come to the point where I blush every time I hear that same Hitler quote read back, and each time with some awkwardly dramatic pause as if nobody ever heard it before; as if this speaker is the only one who typed in “Armenian Genocide Quotes” on Google. As if Hitler’s grotesque weight is somehow our strongest corroborating source. Forget it though; you have to admire the effort, the poor people pumping furious breaths into a cause that seems hauntingly palsied. Such furious breaths for a cause others deem so unworthy that the constant repetition ventures further into self-parody than inciting conviction. Our cause that hasn’t collapsed merely because its weightlessness; no one has deemed us worthy enough to ameliorate our concerns, no one has deemed us threatening enough to crush our discontent.

But I believe in America…

This is the land of Wilsonian reforms and still-birthed house resolutions. I just feel the judge and the jury shouldn’t be the land with Andrew Jackson on twenty dollars bills. I don’t really see the need for reconciliation anyway. Let’s line up the great collaborators themselves, Turks and Kurds, and shoot out until the sky turns black. That would provide something no house resolution could provide, continuity. Finally, we will have our solution. Our tragedy so enveloped in massacres, war and apartheid; we will be robbed of our aberration.

I better stop now before I hit weak, banal “murder is bad”-type conclusions...

So I let the cigarettes numb down my nerve endings. I let the smoke warm my heart, I let it all existential flame burn out like a brief candle. I learn to live with atrophy; and learn to love the breaths of cancer.