The narrative catalyst that brought about the ultimate physical separation of my wife from myself — when she texted me from Rochester threatening to never bring the children back unless I vacated our rental home — was a story I wrote about a character in a Star Wars role-playing game I’d started playing on the advice of my therapist. To start doing some of my “own” things.
Apparently, to her, it resembled too closely our real family, and she took offense, or was frightened, or merely offended or annoyed, but, in any case– we are not “we” any longer, nor ever shall be again.
I admit I was a bit of a mess becoming messier when this bomb was dropped, but in the past half-year, I’ve cleaned up. I’m with a good woman. I’m not as impulsive and reckless as some might say I had been. Not as many entertaining stories, but then, I don’t live to amuse “you”, eh?
In the course of becoming a better person who is always a worse person when tomorrow’s version glances back at him, my “free” time has diminished, and I’ve left that group of role-players. That group of fellow Star Wars geeks are closer friends to me than nearly any of the others in my orbit who hold that title. When my wif– when I was involuntarily placed into a mental hospital, all but one of the non-family callers were part of that group.
As such, they deserved more than an unexplained cessation of my semi-monthly visits. Here it is, reposted from its permanent location within our campaign files at Obsidian Portal.
My character is (was) Kelyn Langolier. When we meet him, he’s a smuggler. A scoundrel. His father killed himself when Kelyn was on the cusp of adolescence, willing him The Spelljammer — a modified starship with a weird and ancient engine that was stolen by a group of Trandoshan slavers.
As an adult, while Kelyn was off-world working as a legitimate “Space Trucker”, his wife turned up the gas and went to bed with their two daughters. None of them woke up.
Or so he thought.
Due to some dark pedigree of Force-sensitivity unbeknownst to Kelyn, the Imperial Inquisitors orchestrated the murder of Kelyn’s wife, but left clones in place of his abducted daughters, making it appear to be a murder-suicide resulting from the depression of a wife left behind once too often by a trucker trying to make ends meet.
Kelyn’s daughters — Adria and Bella — were tutored by Grand Inquisitor Draco as Sith “witches”. Kelyn turned to smuggling, then stumbled upon the “Dawn of Defiance” — the period between “Revenge of the Sith” and “A New Hope” wherein Senator Bail Organa is funding the nascent rebellion against the growing Empire. Eventually, he recovered his birthright starship, and his companions redeemed and returned his daughters to him.
If you’re a fellow Star Wars geek, you’ll love it. I hope. If you’re not, you might still like it. If you’re my please-soon-to-be-ex-wife, you’ll probably think it’s more about real life than it is.
In any case, here it be: a future-long-time-ago shock that will shit you up. Enjoy.
No time right now for a detailed update, so here’s a few of the highlights since my last major life update back near November of 2012.
0x01: Met a wonderful woman at work. She wore a poncho one day. I said, “It’s impossible to be unhappy wearing a poncho.” It’s a Mighty Boosh reference. Next day she left an orange juice bottle on my desk wearing a little poncho. We are still together, despite my sometimes difficult personality. She’s the best female I’ve ever had in my life, with the exception of the one who brought me into the world and the ones I brought here.
0x02: Started “vaping”, as per the penultimate (as of this writing) “Digital/Analog Freaky Smoke” entry. I’ve got 90% lung capacity now. Pretty good for smoking raw zware tobacco for two decades. No more wheezing at the end of a long exhalation, and no more of that stench you only notice when you stop smoking.
0x03: Shaved my head. Kept the goatee and mustache. Without facial hair, a man ain’t a man. A bald man without facial hair is demoted all the way to a baby. Grew the hair back. Shaved it again, and the current HEAD is bald with beard.
0x04: Contact with the girls has continued at $50 a week for a two-hour supervised visit. I contend that the $200 would be better spent directly on the children who want free access to their father. My opinions do not matter to anyone who makes decisions about my participation in my family. Namely: lawyers, this police state of ours, and a woman apparently scorned.
0x05: Continue to see Dr Gandalf. In March we were both surprised to realize it had been a year since my involuntary hospitalization at the Erie County Medical Centre. We’ve made a lot of progress. I’ve made a lot of progress, mostly credited to my new special lady friend. Needless to say, grieving the loss of ones family is “difficult” — even if that loss is (mostly) figurative. Maybe worse in this case, since my daughters aren’t “gone” from the world, but simply being kept from me. They’re not silent in their graves– they live and cry and need their father, yet are restricted to a few hours a month of closely supervised visits that preclude so much as a whisper between us.
0x06: My oldest daughter turns ten soon. I’ve missed over a year of the last years of her childhood. Girl? She’ll be a woman soon.
Orders of protection are generally classified as either “stay-away” or “refrain-from”. The former specifies that a party (the “respondent”) avoid all contact with another party (the “petitioner”) and perhaps other associated parties, such as children under the petitioner’s care. The latter simply requires the respondent to refrain from some specific behavior.
If the petitioner is in a state of desperation or urgency (e.g. being contacted by an exish-spouse with undue frequency and in states of inebriation and/or otherwise being a nuisance), s/he may not know or (understandably) care to learn the difference between these two types of orders. S/he may ask that the respondent be denied any communication with or access to his or herself and their children. S/he may have felt this was his or her only recourse, and, if s/he is a “she”, the petition will likely be stamped by a “family” court judge without consideration and “he” will be denied his right to be an active and available father.
The more you know…
If such a bureaucratic miscalculation is made, the petitioner may request that the order be vacated by the issuing judge of the original or a subsequently amended version of the order.
If the petitioner still fears some manner of harassment from the respondent, s/he may request the aforementioned “refrain-from” order which, if granted, would result in the arrest of the respondent for contempt of court should s/he “misbehave”. In cases that do not involve violence, a “refrain-from” order is logically the best and fairest choice. And, from the perspective of the petitioner, it puts even greater pressure on the respondent to modify his or her behavior, as s/he is still allowed to communicate with the petitioner, but if the petitioner construes any such communication as harassing or otherwise in violation of the order, s/he may call the authorities and have the respondent immediately arrested.
In the author’s opinion, such risk is worth being allowed access to his or her children.
Furthermore, assuming those children are in no danger from the respondent and were not exposed to the alleged harassment, a single-party refrain-from order is a more fair and just recourse for a petitioner who may have a legitimate reason to limit their communication and feels compelled to seek legal intervention in the matter.
0x07: I’m on Wellbutrin ER 300mg/day, Adderall ER 60mg/day, Klonopin 0.5mg/6h as needed, and some residual Provigil. The Provigil (presumably in conjunction w/the Adderall) gives me the anxiety somethin’ fierce, so it’s rarely used.
0x08: The divorce continues to crawl along. An agreement was made that if a professional evaluated me as suitable for unsupervised visitation, it would be done. The evaluation was made. It hasn’t been done. The next court date is in a week. It will probably be postponed. Again.
0x09: Complicating the divorce issues, my place of work shut down last month. I immediately notified my lawyer of this. I promptly applied for state assistance, and for a modification of the support order. Because speaking with the mother of my children would mean my going to jail, I was unable to freely communicate regarding any issues of financial needs. My modification petition was a blunt request for a “suspension”, since NYS unemployment insurance (“UI”) would barely cover my rent and bare essentials– not counting food as an essential.
0x0A: Got a job about two weeks later, mostly thanks to a good friend from the old place. Received a total of one UI check for about $300. Attended the scheduled support modification hearing after filling out another dozen pages of financial details. Opposing counsel requested it be rolled into the matrimonial proceedings. I don’t know what my obligations are now. My communications with anyone in this debacle has been unreliable, sporadic, downright refused, punished with jail time, costly, necessarily vague, rarely understood or fully addressed– it’s been shite, o my brothers.
That just about brings y’all up to date. I suppose I didn’t have to put it in bullet-list form, but I didn’t want to change the title.
The past year and a half has been, mostly, some kind of a special Hell. A relationship with a woman triggered it, and a relationship with a better woman has helped turn things around. In any case, I’m a better man than I was last year.
If we can’t say, every day, that we’re better than the other-self behind us in the clone-queue of our life, then we might as well be dead.
Mixed-martial arts class. Maybe it was to get in shape. Maybe it was to defend myself against women trained in karate with a history of violence. In any case, after three sessions of teetering near black-out levels of wheezing, I decided to shelve that pursuit until my lung capacity was at least greater than that of a dime bag. (* That said, a quick unrelated note that Pride Martial Arts in Williamsville is an excellent school with all-round awesome teachers and fellow students and I heartily recommend it to anyone in better shape than myself was, or with greater determination.)
Obviously, smoking carbon was doing something bad to my lungs. Maybe it was bad like anal rape versus smooth and loving consensual Barry Brown anal sex, since it did give me a kinda sexy voice and seems to have steeled myself against infections of other sorts. In either case, I’m still risking a rip.
I’ve debated the “badness” of cigarettes, but I’ll never deny that smoking “analog” is no better than locking yourself in a room in a house on fire. Still, unless you’re a monk begging for rice on the steppes of the Himalaya, shove your complaints about the “filthy” habits of others.
Was I afraid of cancer? Hell no. As with a not-insignificant cohort of smokers, the danger and self-destruction is a major draw, and kept me at it in times of grief and such. So, while cancer was not a problem, there was the bad breath, and the stinking clothing. Losing those couldn’t but help my then-active post-separation dating success.
This Is What You Want, This Is What You Get
When I was inpatient for “shock therapy” there was no smoking. When my wife indirectly had me committed to a mental asylum, it was the same. Those places aren’t the luxury resorts portrayed in film, folks. Not like Shutter Island, cigarette dangling from my lips as I and a creepy murder-rapist (in that order) trim the hedges with sharp instruments of grass destruction. Ahem.
Nicotine patches are issued. Even the sometimes-sadistic sentries of the sanitariums know a loony’s gonna be less riled if he’s getting his fix. That might temper the physical withdrawal, but there are other reasons we smoke. There is far more to smoking than just nicotine. First and foremost, there’s the smoking. Gum and patches aren’t gonna make beautiful greyscale billows blossom from my lips. “E-cigarettes” would.
For a guy buying mass-produced packs of cigarettes, that’s enough of a plus when deciding on a path out of the smoking room. I’d been rolling my own for almost two decades, starting with such devilish concoctions as “Black Death” and other half-zware European blends. For me, there was a ritual involved. When I was in the asylum, I crumpled notebook paper into something soft enough to roll, stripped off stand-in tobacco leaves, and rolled my fake cigarettes to pass the time and bypass the desire. E-cigs — “digital” cigarettes — have that gadgetry and ritual. There are countless devices and modifications and flavors and mixes.
Yeah, these are for me.
All The Right Friends
A co-worker and friend had been using the G6 from Halo. They intrigued me, but I wasn’t ready to plunk down $60 for the starter kit just yet. One morning on the way to work, I picked up a cheap disposable e-cig. Just a plastic cigarette you’d smoke as you would its analog cousin. At the time, I had nothing against which to compare it, but I was decidedly impressed at being able to smoke at a near-constant rate, indoors and out.
The next day, I put in my order for the G6 with a half-dozen “carts” pre-filled with Torque-56 flavor.
The G6 Starter Kit. Well, most of it.
Now I had a reference point. Although I’d later come to eschew this model, the G6 is far better than ghetto gas-station digi-fags, and an excellent choice for someone just dipping their lungs into the “vaping” scene. In addition to what’s pictured above, there’s a male USB dongle that screws into the white “cigarette” battery tube to facilitate charging directly at your PC or through a wall adapter as shown. Be very careful about where you stick your dongle! The ultimate reason for my “movin’ on up” to a different style of e-cig resulted from making the mistake of plugging mine into the USB adapter in my car. If it isn’t pushing the voltage through the amperage as shown on the official adapter, you’re gonna blow your dongle.
Hadn’t done that since college.
It’s a good starter kit, and I recommend it to those who aren’t sure they’re gonna stick with the vaping life. Me? Cold-turkey off the death-sticks after my first puff of clean, digitally-remastered smoke. However, I’ve a friend who didn’t take to them. He bought the G6. He likes it, but it just doesn’t take the place of cigarettes for him. In my personal experience, he’s a rarity among those who’ve tried a second-tier e-cig. Most have stuck with the digital suck, although many of them are only casual puffers.
I’ve heard of many who hated e-cigs when they first tried them. (What — you loved smoking the first time, too?) In all of those cases, they were suckled at the dirty plastic teat of a gas-station fag. If you’re seriously considering vaping as an alternative to old-fashioned dirt-smoking, then get something like the G6 or any of the other re-usable alternative kits from reputable dealers. Not a gas station. Not the mall. I’ll reference more later, but Halo is a great place to start.
I Ain’t No Rocket Scientist
I don’t keep up with the “vaping” community. My terms may be wrong. My understanding of the science may be wrong. However, I’m smart enough to know when I’m absolutely wrong, and I’m mostly right.
Uh, yeah.
Anyway, I should go over the mechanics and the terms before we move along. First, the vapist vernacular:
digital cigarette, e-cig, vaporizer – an electronic device intended to deliver nicotine
analog cigarette – the ones that burn leaves and “give you the cancer”
vape – to use en electronic cigarette
vapist, vaping, gang-vape – darkly humorous appelations for users and use of e-cigs
battery – in the G6, the part that looks like the cigarette
base – the neutral liquid base of e-juice, usually “PG” or “VG”
PG – propylene glycol base, thinner than VG
VG – vegetable glycerine base, thicker than PG
juice, e-juice – flavor and/or liquid nicotine suspended in a PG and/or VG base
atomizer – a heating element that vaporizes the e-juice, usually including some electrical resistance
wick – absorbant material that sucks up the juice, wherever it may be
cartridge – a tube filled with fibre and a wick through which atomized vapor is drawn
cartomizer – a combination cartridge/atomizer
tank – a cylinder containing e-juice for cleaner and longer vaping periods between refills
A “510” type drip-tip with the top on.
How does an e-cig work? A battery and two wires connected to an heating element. Activation is either automatic (just suck it) or manual, requiring a button press before you draw. Automatics provide a familiar gateway for beginners, but are rare in all but entry-level devices. Beneath the atomizer are holes to facilitate your inhale delivering the vapor to your hungry lungs.
The juice is usually saturated in a fibrous medium, or wicked up from another source, eventually brought across the heating element. In the case of simple “drip tips”, the liquid is dropped directly onto the element, which in those resemble a metal-mesh cone. I have one of these, but it is relegated to sampling new flavors, sharing with others, or testing my device. There’s a distinct crackling as the liquid is vaporized indicating power is being supplied.
Movin’ On Up
The G6 uses “cartomizers”. One drips e-juice into the fibrous material inside until it is soaked. I’d load my carts in the morning, and one would usually be dried out by the afternoon. Use a cartomizer too long and it starts to taste burnt. Worse than that, really. It’s a kinda metallic, acidic, really harsh nasal sting.
Maybe some have the patience to use them. I didn’t, so I decided to purchase a LavaTube from Volcano E-Cigs with a “tube-tank”. The LavaTube is part of a class of vaporizers that deliver a variable voltage charge (3.0V-6.0V) allowing the user to conserve battery life and/or modify the amount of smoke produced when vaping. The LavaTube has a “510” interface. Others have an “EGO” type interface. There are adapters to facilitate your using accessories made for one type in your other-type device.
An EGO-interface accessory (the Kanger T3), a 510 interface (on my LavaTube), and an adapter in between.
The LavaTube and tank gave me a new hymen and broke it all over again. Smoking from a tank with control over the voltage was a wonderful experience. No more dripping until it looked like the fibre in the cartridge might be soaked enough. I just filled the tube and a-vapin’ I did go.
The downside? Well, besides being plastic or glass and using rubber or metal stoppers, a tank is just a hollow cylinder. The “Tube Tank” still uses cartridges — they’ve just got holes punched near the bottom so that the juice in the tank is pulled inside and you don’t have to do the dripping.
But they’re still cartridges filled with what might as well be cotton and, although the constant moisture mitigates the issue somewhat, they eventually deliver that aforementioned horrible burn. Furthermore, that fibre is more likely to retain flavors than other methods of drawing the juice, which means you’re kinda forced to change the cart in your tank if you switch flavors.
I felt I was on the right track with the LavaTube, but not quite there. That cartridge was the deal-breaker for me.
Fate stepped in and broke my LavaTube. I pressed the button, but nothing happened. I rolled cigarettes for the first time in months. Tasted like dirt. Grabbed some ghetto fags from the gas station. Not the same.
I frequent the “Super Flea” indoor/outdoor flea market in the warmer season(s), and recalled a booth there selling e-cigs. It was a weekday and the market was closed. A little googling found them: Vapor Trail in West Seneca. After work that day, I made the drive and bought another 510, this time with a different style of tank — the “Vivi Nova.”
Sans the graphics and inexplicably capitalised “PEDO”, it’s really classy packaging.
The “Torpedo” [ahem] is essentially the same as the LavaTube. What was new here was the tank. The Vivi Nova has a metal base with an integrated pedestal. Into that pedestal is screwed an assembly with an integrated atomizer and resistor, and a wound set of wicks lain atop the hollow in which it sits and jutting out on either side like bright white tentacles. The atomizers are typically fitted with 1.8Ω, 2.4Ω, and 2.8Ω resistors. That upside-down U with the feet is the Greek letter “Omega” and it represents the “ohm” — a unit of electrical resistance. It came with the tank, the pedestal bottom, the top, and three of those atomizers. (Ultimately, I found the 3.5V @ 2.4Ω combo works best for me.)
Well, now. Hoo-boy. If the Lava-Tube reconstructed my hymen and penetrated me like a virgin, this one switched my sex again and had me experiencing a truly sublime vaping experience.
Because the liquid just went through the wick (in turn wrapped in wire that served as the atomization element), there was no bulky fibre between me and my juice. It was, and remains, the cleanest type of vaping I’ve experienced.
Let’s Not Go […] Just Yet
Vivi-Nova attached to LavaTube.
The Viva Nova is good, but nothing’s perfect, right? Not yet, at least.
One can easily burn out the wick by applying too much voltage. It’s not nearly as bad as the taste you get from a burnt or dried-out cartomizer, but it’s unpleasant. Fortunately, it sometimes restarts delivering pleasure anew when it gets sufficiently wet. (You realize all those turns of phrase are intentionally lewd, right?)
The other problem is not to do with the mechanism itself, but with the interchangeability of parts. I was delighted to find I could cheaply replace the atomizer tips, so I ordered a few. When they arrived, I discovered they weren’t right for my Vivi Nova. In one case, the pedestal height and the atomizer height combined made it impossible to screw on the top. In another, the atomizer was too short and there was a gap. I ended up purchasing a new Vivi Nova and set of replacement wick/atomizer stubs.
A recent alternative to the Vivi Nova is the iClear30 by Innokin. It’s a 3ml capacity dual-coil “clearomizer”. It doesn’t feature a removable tip, but a rotatable one is integrated into the stainless steel housing. The tube itself is plastic, which is a problem when you’re mixing certain juices.
Until Next Time
I’ve been sitting on this post for some time now. It’s a departure from my usual depression-and-post-marital-strife content, and a lot has happened in that area since the last update. So, with a final paragraph above and this epilogue, I’m gonna push this baby out for your consideration. Should I ever make the time to write them, future vaping articles will feature my adventures in mixing my own juice — amateur home-chemistry that virtually eliminates the primary recurring cost of digital smoke.
Until then, I hope all you dirty-puffers make the switch. Happing trails, fellow vapists.
