Don’t Set ANY Goals

There are lots of things you don’t have to try to improve at.

I used to smoke more than 10 cigarettes per day. (Do you think I’m cooler? Less cool? The same amount of cool? Ugh, never mind, don’t tell me.)

I was 22. I’d just moved to New Orleans, into a damp upstairs room adjacent to its own insufficient kitchen, and down the street from a place where I could buy (and did buy) calzones. I’d been recently dumped by My Life’s Big Love1, and I was terrible at my bad job. I believed my downstairs neighbors listened to an unreasonable amount of loud techno-thump music; it took me two months to realize that the sound was a minor sea of bullfrogs, thick and happy in the Deep South. I subscribed to a paper newspaper, and the only joy I could muster (joy is the wrong word, but) was to sit on the fire escape with the paper and smoke as many cigarettes as possible every morning. “As possible” because my lungs couldn’t take more than, like, six at a time. I smoked a few more at work, and bought packs by the carton, which was cheap, because Louisiana.

All illustrations by the author.

Everything was bad. Things were bad on petty personal levels (only one of my four burners worked, and my roommate was always eating my leftover calzone), and they were bad on deep existential levels (the school where I taught was under-resourced, and students sometimes died). A baby…