Parliament Lights (9): Two months ago it got bad. It got really bad. Agoraphobia; conditioning against social particulars; immature nerves; post-colonial Caucasian histrionics; whatever; they're terms; it was bad enough that I bought these things. A box of my father coughing blood into the sink for six years, even so. Two memories are the reasons why.
One: I show my father a British cigar ad, dutifully and firmly emblazoned with "WILL CAUSE CANCER." I applaud the bluntness, but he stops me short. "They are a relaxant," he says, suddenly clouded, and I stand in place, the air awkward.
Two: Seven years old, my first bicycle; my parents' friends make it a surprise. "Stay in the living room," they urge, while I crane my soft neck. Paul, the gentlest, holds between two fingers that which will kill him, in a decade. I am lifted onto his shoulders, and, walking to the backyard, the lit end touches my hand. It stings, and I gasp, but at that moment I catch sight of the bicycle. The pain is consumed by young awe.
Faced with a clerk and a rack, I pick the pack by aesthetics. My hands tremble: The genetic nic fit.
Nat Sherman (1):"I'll trade you one for one," she says, while we do the rounds. Down the block from our apartment complex (she exactly two floors above me) to the cross-street, from there to the river, over the guardrail, across the sidewalk, over the grass, to the fence. Then back, usually. Tonight, she wants a cheap cigarette, she says. "The equivalent of a short skirt at the Hippodrome - " (a slow drag) - "after weeks of ballroom dancing lessons." I tell her it's a bad metaphor, but I save the cigarette. She kicks her heels. "Nobody ever feels like the pretty girl," I tell her, but they're just words, and she's watching drunks cartwheel on the wharf, so I shut up and watch the ash grow beside her hand.
Camel Turkish Golds (2): A currency among convicts and quitters. Collateral for coffee, which I understand now. I understand the romanticization of vice, because how else could we keep poisoning ourselves in the pursuit of decreasingly effective respite? It isn't made-up that people die like this. Now I could be one of them.
I spent a summer trainwrecked; metaphorically loosing sparks from metal joints. Thirty-five hours a week operating a cash register for stability. "It'll give you interactions. You can get back in the habit." There was an ad for these there, the section-headers; the Platonic Ideal of the specific her holding a pack on a silver tray. The irony was bewildering: teams of Madison Avenue reps meeting for hours, comparing sheets of fuck-me eyes, paid thousands, check-marking a comparable bust, a comparable haircut, a comparable smirk. Stuck with it for hours then; giving in to it now.