Crackpots #7: GEEK (Patreon)

This week's edition of Crackpots comes from Brad Phillips. You can subscribe to his substack at the link before or purchase one of his funky t-shirts here...

***

I never meant to be who I’ve become. Fifty years old, naked in bed, scrambling to find one of three disposable vapes; two Geek Bars—Haunted Blueberry and Spooky Vanilla, each 15MG—and the rare, flavorful Mike Tyson Apple Melonberry, which promises seventy-five hundred hits of fruity nicotine for just eleven dollars.

If twenty-year old me could speak to present day me, he’d say you suck, you let us down, you’re not a man. He’d say, the kids who called you a loser in grade school were right.

I always suspected they were.

I first started smoking in 1993. Smoking regularly. I’d been crushing half-finished smokes left in overstuffed ashtrays by my mom and grandmother since 1988, when I was in eighth grade. Everyone smoked in my house back then, and out in the world. People smoked in hospitals and while delivering newscasts, in shopping malls and on the train. Cigarettes were beautiful, acceptable, and less than five bucks a pack. It was glorious. My mother used to send me to Mac’s Milk with a note, asking them to bend the rules and let Bradley buy two packs of Craven As and a copy of Chatelaine, fashion magazine par excellence amongst Canadian single mothers. I took my time, because back then I stashed Penthouse inside of Soldier of Fortune, hoping to see some oily knockers and robust bush when the clerk wasn’t looking. Times have changed. Pubic hair is verboten in pornography today, and cigarettes are roundly viewed as evil, cancerous, overpriced and unattractive.

The idea that cigarettes might be something other than a way to relax and look sexy began to take shape during my final years in high school. Warning labels appeared on packs, with photos of tumoury mouths and wheezing, emphysemic bingo grannies clutching oxygen masks. They warned that I was increasing my likelihood of getting cancer by a zillion percent. My grandmother just bought the ornate, cigarette-pack shaped pieces of patterned cardboard that hit the market days after the warnings did, and hid the offensive imagery. But like me, she now knew we’d one day have to quit. At Uncle’s Fish & Chips two doors down from Mac’s Milk, there were now smoking and non-smoking sections. Twelve hundred square feet, one side hazy with smoke, one side slightly less so, now seems clearly absurd, and pointless. But in the early nineties, it made sense. I knew which side I was on—thought I’d always be on—smoking, but as I aged, fear remained my constant companion. And as it usually does, fear eventually won.

I first attempted to quit smoking in earnest in my mid-thirties, and tried every dumb fucking thing imaginable. One technique I didn’t try, and which guarantees success, was marshalling will power to tolerate moderate discomfort for maximum one week. That never appealed to me. Instead I spent untold sums on bullshit products and services. I was hypnotized, and I wore nicotine patches over my entire body. I read a book by Allen Carr, then went to one of his seminars, after which I promptly lit a cigarette. These techniques weren’t successful largely because I didn’t actually want to quit smoking, I was just scared of getting cancer. Eventually I quit trying to quit. I thought it would feel better than it did.

In 2012 I went to rehab in Vancouver, British Columbia. I was thirty-eight years old. Cigarettes were all I had left, and I smoked the shit out of them. Me and Fat Alex would go to Dairy Queen during our supervised Sunday breaks, order Blizzards and chain-smoke sitting on a curb by the recreation centre Alex was barred from swimming in because of his parole conditions. Fat Alex was allegedly a great swimmer, and a formidable diver for a man of his size, but I never got to see it. Those were the last days of real smoking, of smoking like cancer couldn’t get me, and even it if could I’d kick its ass.

Twelve months after my last drink I moved back to Toronto, where smoking distracts citizens from the mind-numbing mediocrity of home. Being close to my family again reminded me I should try to get healthy, that everyone was aging and I couldn’t be useful from inside an iron lung. But being home also reminded me of where I grew up, a stone’s throw from the Pickering Nuclear Power Plant (PNPP). It was rumoured that the power plant Homer works at on The Simpsons was based on the one a few miles from my mother’s home. PNPP was temporarily shut down in 1997 over ‘safety concerns’. We heard it was because they found workers asleep, surrounded by stale donuts and empty beer bottles. My friend Rasool and I found two-headed turtles on the beach near the plant no less than five times. In 2013, the National Library of Medicine released a study which claimed there was no increase in cancers amongst populations exposed to tritium, a radioactive byproduct that was revealed to have been seeping into Frenchman’s Bay—the namesake of my junior high school—over the course of two decades.

I wasn’t convinced.

Tritium plus cigarettes, plus red meat, stress and self-loathing. I’d seen what cancer does and didn’t want it done to me. Too many risks. I had to eliminate one.

VAPELUV and HAZETOWN VAPES were both near my new apartment in the Little Portugal section of Toronto, where I settled upon my return. I could see there was something wrong right away. Names like those couldn’t mean anything good, and they definitely didn’t imply masculinity, something I’d always associated with smoking. The Marlboro Man would kick the shit out of a guy named MC VAPELUV. I spent a few weeks really weighing the options: palliative care and an oncologist whose kids names I know, but, I still haven’t sacrificed my manhood, or objectively uncool, non-sexually cuckolding products stocked at stores like HAZETOWN VAPES, but I’ve eliminated a known carcinogen.

I looked at the face of the woman who’d soon become my wife, at my mom’s face and my own weird face in the mirror. I imagined all three faces reacting to the news of my cancer diagnosis. It was rough. Nobody was happy, especially me. I did it again, all three people watching me frantically search for a grape flavored vape that lit up and was called something like GRAPE ICE RAZ TN 9000 with MEGA HD SCREEN ANIMATION. Their reactions made it clear they’d lost all respect for me, but, I told myself, that would’ve happened anyway, it just would’ve transpired differently. Behind their barely concealed disgust for what I’d become, I could see they were happy I was still alive.

I didn’t start with GRAPE ICE RAZ TN 9000 though, no, because this was 2013. It started with a vape I had to load with syrupy liquids that came in cylindrical plastic containers, that were meant to evoke such sophisticated flavors as cream donut and cinnamon popcorn. Oh, the t-shirts I’ve ruined because while watching a film in bed with my wife, I left my vape tool (I can’t think of another word for it) resting on my chest, and because the technology was new—or because they were made by children in dark, dank factories with zero quality control—the sweet cream donut nectar would leak, and for reasons unknown vape juice is harder to get out in the wash than blood stains, or red wine.

The videos, the vape athletics, do they still exist? Observant, hijabed Muslim girls in Malaysia blowing fat clouds of smoke? vapor?, demonstrating their mastery of the medium by turning a cloud of extra creamy latte into an elegant figure eight that consumes itself, becoming now sixteen, then thirty-two, an ourobouros of quasi-Vaudeville, full fuckface street busker bullshit. The glory days of an inglorious thing: rhythmic gymnastics for people courting diabetes and addicted to Fortnite. I was never one of them, no, but did I try their tricks in private? I’m ashamed to say I did. But as a friend said, the day you allow yourself to be seen vaping in public is the day you’ve abandoned shame in general.

Now it’s 2024 and GEEK BAR, ELF BAR and AIR BAR are ubiquitous. Some people still change the filters in their vape tools and load them with new, rare donut flavors, but not me. I go to Flame Zone on Delancey twice a week and buy one fruit flavored vape and one clear one. Clear because I love my wife and don’t want her to feel like she’s stuck inside a stripper’s Geo Metro when she’s home with me. So much of my time spent smoking cigarettes as a teenager was spent trying to hide or mask what now seems to have been an objectively unpleasant odor.

And it’s been so long since I smoked a cigarette myself that if someone near me is doing so, I feel slightly annoyed by the smell, and at times even judge them, like an ex-smoker, one of the worst people you can be. I will quietly upbraid them to myself, wondering why they don’t care that they’re giving themselves cancer. They look so oblivious, happily enjoying a smoke, seemingly unaware they’re sending the Grim Reaper a booty call.

Brad figured it out! Brad knows best. Dumb thoughts like these occupy my mind. I smoked cigarettes for thirty years, but guaranteed I’m consuming more nicotine today than I ever did back then. Like everyone, I vape everywhere. In restaurants, on the subway and non-stop in my apartment. I used to, many times a night during the darkest of winters, put on my jackets and boots and go outside to crush a smoke. Today I’ve somehow, not intentionally, learned to do absolutely everything I do—including making paintings and meditating—with a vape in my hand. Oh, I’m saving money! I smoked a pack a day when packs were almost twenty bucks, but now one twenty dollar vape lasts me close to a week! I’m being good with my money!

These are the thoughts, the stupid, stupid thoughts.

Human beings are experts at ignoring unpleasant facts, like the fact that death is inevitable. Next to me is a GEEK BAR PULSE FROZEN WHITE GRAPE. I don’t know where it was made, but I know it wasn’t somewhere with strict regulations. Chances are good it was made by a child. Only now do I realize I have no idea what the ingredients are, despite them coating my lungs for eighteen hours a day. I try to think that it’s okay. That stress, more than unknown chemicals or known carcinogens, is what really makes us sick. Wanting to quit smoking felt far more unhealthy than smoking ever did, so for now, I’m going to suck on a brightly coloured box with the conviction that I’m not a guy addicted to candy flavored vapor, I’m an ex-smoker.