‍

I myself can hardly tell the difference between a good or bad habit. There are the obvious suspects: smoking too much, drinking too much, spending all your money on nothing. The list goes on. I know the body has its limits, and we reach it whether we take the high road or The Low.

I recently gave up tequila and Twitter for lent, in good faith. I saw the others making the signal and so I joined them. In good faith. The next day, I arrived back in West Texas drinking a bottle of mezcal, joyfully defeated in a 200-year-old adobe house my friend has been renovating. We played music until the sun rose. I worked off the hangover with a coffee and disassociated on Twitter. In my near psychedelic self-inflicted illness it had dawned on me that I’m not even Catholic. Furthermore, I don’t believe in abstinence.

If there is a bad habit to be revealed here it is shame and setting yourself up for it. Shame is crippling, debilitating, and contorts the body to curl inward and away from the world we are born to be alive in. It acts as a slow death. Its other mask is doubt. “I am incapable” becomes the silently muttered, nearly unconscious mantra. It would be better to say: “When I wake up tomorrow, the first thing I’m going to do is smoke my cigarette with my coffee and I can’t wait!” Success waits for you in the morning.

I often think of my favorite writers, directors, painters, musicians, and so on… the painter sits cross legged, consumed by the blank canvas across from him. The Cigarette burns its lonely trail of smoke from his finger tips. The writer and his half-drunk bottle of red wine sitting next to his typewriter as he finds that warm voice that rises up out of his stomach and into his hands, bypassing the head completely. 

The bad habit I am concerned with is the bowing out from the act of creation on behalf of a mostly futile emotion. So I would say to you, or myself: smoke, drink, live recklessly, drive it like ya stole it. Because even this body is on loan and the clock never stops. Create and let it fill the void and maybe some bad habits will up and go. If they don’t, and they get the best of you, then I would think the only remedy is knowing that before that happens, you’ve already given the best of yourself to this strange and beautiful world that you belong to.