Goop
The little bulbous ball of goop at the rear of the anglerfish is a male anglerfish... It is very dark down there in the deep, vast and dark and gristly and this little excuse for a male lurks in the void and when and if it encounters a female it grabs her by the er... tract and it actually melds with the female. Having nothing more to accomplish in life (finding this single female in the vast vast vastness of the big void is quite enough) it's heart stops, it's circulatory system melds with the female much like a parasite - mostly it dies except for one giant testicle. The rest of it's life is spent as goop or appendage, braindead, inoculating this humongous underbite. This happens practically every day in our very own oceans. Best not contemplate this anymore.
A balanced substance abuse
I quit smoking two years ago, I stopped watching TV a year ago, I have been a vegetarian all my life and I have taken care to eat proper dinners almost every weekday for almost four years. I rarely enjoy snacks or candy. Two years ago I even got control of my workaholism and started taking the evenings off and slept regularly for seven hours close to every night. For a while it has been fun and interesting experimenting with self control and asceticism but some times I miss my old bohemian self. The slightly neurotic guy who never slept, had espresso-breakfasts, smoked like a furnace, worked like a dog and drank like a fish. He was really a blast to be around (I believe), and it was great to be that guy. Well, I did overextend myself at some point. I remind myself of the stress-related chest pains, nasty coughing and the occasional slightly green 48-hour stint skin tone. But still.
I am an obsessive kind of person, I have trouble staying in the middle field. So since I took up working too much again two months ago I have engaged in 1) an art installation with Mitoso and friends, 2) a short film on dance, 3) a documentary book project with Jet-Jon, 4) a music film with Dr. Pling Plong, 5) an animated cartoon series and 6) starting a new company. It will take a lot of work to complete all these projects, it will probably take a full set of 16 hour days for over a year! It might be manic, but I have to admit I love it!
I also bought a pack of cigarettes, and boy oh boy! These little diabolical sticks have this terrible property that they feel even greater when you've been off them for a long while. With a warm, gentle rush they reminded me of all the great times we've had. And all the way back from the seven eleven I silently lamented the terrible fact that almost all the best things in life are dangerous.
But then I remembered a conversation I had last year with a toxicologist at the National Hospital. We were in a bar and he pointed out some of the obvious toxins in such a place: the cigarettes and the liquor. But then he went on to say that practically all substances are potential toxins, even water and apples, it's all a question of dosage. And I remembered a story my parents told me, about a couple they knew in the 60's who decided to try extreme veganism consuming only carrots and LSD, and they nearly died of carotene poisoning. So I conjecture that the problem with these extremely pleasant activities and substances is not that they are dangerous in themselves, but that they are addictive. One or two cigarettes may perhaps even be healthy, just as the occasional glass of wine and the sporadic 48 hour work burst. The problem is that people like me end up working 96 hours and smoking 25 cigarettes a day. If apples were as addictive as nicotine I guess they would have a surgeon general's warning too, because certainly if you ate twenty-five apples a day for 30 years dangerous side effects would emerge.
So the conclusion is that you can't smoke 20 cigarettes a day, because it is bad for you. What is needed is a wider substance abuse involving a larger selection of pleasant addictions. It's all a matter of having a balanced substance abuse.