Slaying the Demons

Today is 4:20, the national pothead holiday, and that means I'm supposed to do a column on grass. (Perhaps that should be "...concerning grass.")
Not gonna do it. (Although I'll be discussing smoking...)
I won't cover off weed today because (a) everyone else is doin' it and (b) I never have. Nothing against those who indulge--the idea of getting high, of perhaps losing control, doesn't appeal to me, is all.
I thought about doing a whiplash blog entry, whiplash being the kind of wild mood swings I get when I consider our future as a species. You've seen the doom and gloom often enough, I'd warrant; I haven't covered the positive stuff near as often, but it's out there. They've cloned bamboo, for instance...great news, as you can make damn near anything out of it and save most of the world's trees in the process. Between bamboo and, uh, hemp--shhh! Ken just said he wouldn't write about that!--we could solve a whole hell of a lot of problems.

Nah, all that stuff is too serious and, to be honest, requires more research than I'm willing to do today. So I'll write about that most inexhaustible of topics, my wife, Eva.

Before I get to her, I'd like to mention we went to see Ron James last night at Centre in the Square. I'm not sure I stopped laughing for the entire 90 minutes that man was on stage. He opened with "Great to be in Kitchener-Waterloo, the only place in Canada where a RIMjob is a good thing"...and was off and running, in inimitable Ron James style. (You can see several clips here). Great show, very highly recommended.

Eva.

She's trying, trying hard, to "remake her life". In hindsight, she's been on this path for years, but keeps getting caught in the brambles.

When I met Eva, both of us were about to careen off different cliffs. I'd been eating pseudo-food and little else for years, and exercising little but my right to remain seated; she had managed to kick most of her vices save those goddamn cancer-sticks, which were, of course, the worst vice my mind could dream up. She tried everything, and I do mean everything, to quit smoking. Some of those things even worked...once she went cigless for four years.

Meanwhile, the diet improved (in my case, it couldn't have gotten much worse, anyway). We made changes slowly, reasoning that too much of a shock to the system would simply rebound in our faces. The few times we really got serious about changing things, that's exactly what happened: We tried a low-carb diet a ways back that was phenomenally successful until all those carbs we'd banished got together en masse and broke our resistance. Trying to undo a lifetime of food preferences...trying to change your mindset from "food has got to taste good, or I won't eat it" to "food is fuel/medicine, and taste is completely irrelevant"...well, if anyone knows how to make that particular brainwashing technique stick, where the hell's your Nobel Prize?

But we're still trying. As I've said probably too many times now, Eva's joined a gym and is working out regularly. She's got not one, not two, but three personal trainers. The one she actually exercises with is sort of famous in the industry...usually he's training the trainers. And yes, she's noticed results already. In her case, she's not so much learning as remembering...Eva used to work out with weights all the time. She hasn't lost her physical strength, I'll tell you.

Mentally...she's even stronger. Unfortunately, that's not always a good thing, not when you're abandoning everything you used to enjoy about an old life. For a few years now we've been playing whack-a-mole with her addictions: slam one down, another'd pop up somewhere else. She stopped smoking, successfully, again...and when she joined the gym a smoke came back like dark magic. Just one a day--which is a hell of a lot less than she'd ever smoked in her smoking days--but that one a day makes her a smoker again, with a smoker's yearning for the nic-stick anytime she doesn't actually have one poking out. Sooner or later that one-a-day would turn to two, the two to a four and the ten to a twenty.
Her trainer, Will, said it was "a concern" but he thinks it'll go away as Eva re-immerses herself into the world of working out and learns to use the exercise as a stress relief valve. That's my wife's only flaw, in my eyes: she has no stress-relief valve...not a healthy one, at any rate. She's spent years and years convincing herself that stress is natural, stress is good, and Boredom Is The Enemy...in fact, I'm convinced she's pretzelled her brain into thinking relaxation is for weaklings. I've spent my entire married life butting my head up against that wall, with very limited success so far. But I'll keep at it.

Meanwhile, Eva's rededicated herself to washing all the stains of past vices out at once. This gym membership represents a huge commitment on her part...physical, emotional, and financial...although, as her mom told her, when you average out those financial costs over the additional lifespan she'll gain from being healthier, it adds up to pennies a day. But all those pennies will amount to nothing if she spends 'em on nicotene, right?

Smoking is the hardest of these demons to kill, mostly because it's been with Eva, masquerading as a True Friend, since she was all of eleven years old. She's permanently disabled an addiction to alcohol (she had her last drink over eight years ago, and doesn't miss it). She's stopped smoking marijuana (geez, there's that topic again) and successfully killed an over-reliance on over-the-counter drugs. But the smoking persists: every time Eva thinks she's offed that cigarette habit, it sneaks up on her from behind and ambushes her. It's frustrating for me, and I'm not even the one it's happening to.

My love has several tattoos. She's got a couple of cats, some Japanese script meaning "beautiful spirit", a wrist bracelet saying "Love-Strengh-Hope" and most notably a dragon guarding a clutch of eggs, each egg being symbolic. She has one more heavily symbolic tat planned for the day she's slain all her demons: a large Durga. I can't think of anything more fitting: Durga was created to fight demonic forces and she incorporates a weapon from each of the Hindu gods. Her name is Sanskrit for "invincible".

Incidentally, Eva's own name means "life" in Italian. And has she ever lived one, so far. I'm looking forward to the rest of it. I'm immensely and intensely proud of my wife, and I know she'll be successful at this.