1. I try to smoke. Listen, no lectures. It’s not like I’ve ever successfully smoked in my life. It’s a Thing with me, really. My mother smoked when I was little and still does, and given that I like my Mom and find her comforting, cigarettes have a warm effect on me. I like looking in my bag and seeing a pack of cigarettes, even if I never smoke them, which I generally don’t. I like the smoke smell and the ceremony involved. But I don’t like actually inhaling smoke.
I drove home yesterday, feeling sort of bizarre in the head, as if I was 18 years old and had just watched a movie about myself at 25. You know that feeling? So, I tried to smoke while driving. It didn’t work. I’m a nervous driver and a nervous smoker, and it failed miserably, but for the few seconds in which I was balancing the cigarette and flicking the lighter while shielding my face from the wind, I felt normal. I felt like my Mom, who is capable and strong, and who begins defusing a fuzzy head by smoking. My cigarette yesterday lasted two seconds before I pulled into my apartment and mashed it on the ground.
2. I buy t-shirts that have a picture of a happy knife on them, surrounded by the words, “Hey kids! Stick me in your enemies.” I don’t have a habit of buying t-shirts from the internet. I think the last t-shirt I bought was from NaNoWriMo in 2002, and like all t-shirts when applied to my body, it went down past my toes and ballooned at the stomach. This is because I am 5’3 and have no torso.
I’m a little pissed with the whole racing time thing. Everyone who told you time goes faster when you’re older was correct, and while it’s most obviously because Adult Time is broken up differently than Kid Time (more plans, looking ahead, pay period increments, vacation, etc.), there’s something psychologically twisty about the whole thing. It’s gotten to the point where whenever I hear news of an old friend (marriage, baby, house, prostitution), it feels like a rushed ending of an otherwise balanced movie. In other words, I think, “It’s great you’re getting married and having that baby, and getting extra skin under your chin, but I’m going to remember you as 19 and sitting on the roof of the school, drinking horribly cheap vodka and claiming the only thing you want to be when you grow up is a pirate.”
Is that selfish? Probably. It doesn’t feel weird for me to go through these things, but I’d like to keep friends, old and new, in their stupid-youth boxes.
Ah, well. I have a feeling this won’t go away — what about all those poets obsessed with innocence lost? I don’t think this is innocence lost, though. I really doubt we were ever innocent to begin with. I think it’s just plain time lost – maybe a little magic, too.
You could probably start writing my posts for me: hey, guess what, I tried to smoke again, and why am I this old and why is everything moving so fast and wasn’t five years ago great? (The last part can apply no matter my current age.)
Ah, nothing like cleaning up someone’s puke to remember what love it is. (The puke was mine, incidentally, which also explains my extended absense here.)
This isn’t the first time I’ve told this story.
I’ve always hated my overlapping front tooth. Five years ago, drunk at The Big Wu Family Reunion, I became convinced that if I exerted enough pressure on the tooth for several hours a day and was consistent in the practice, it would slowly realign itself, like braces, except for free. I was in a tent at the time, and I leapt up in the heat of my discovery and spilled a bottle of vodka on Andrew’s sleeping bag. Andrew, who didn’t drink at the time and had warned me to be careful with the liquor around his stuff, didn’t really yell at me when I confessed the spilling, but was obviously unhappy, and I burst into tears, half in the bag and emotional because I didn’t even get a chance to tell him about my great tooth idea before he walked off, presumably to find something to clean up the mess.
Matt, who’d been lingering by the fire, pulled me over next to him and put a book of matches in my hand. A good toy for a drunken sap. But, no, the reason he did it had nothing to with teeth or liquor: earlier in the day, I’d been asked to light the camp fire and I’d had to woefully admit I didn’t know how to strike a match. My parents, wary of my phenomenally clumsy nature from a young age, had kept me away from anything to do with fire, and I’d grown up with a healthy fear of burning off my fingers. I’d weakly struck the back of book a time or two, but had been too afraid to give it the extra force.
Matt asked why I was upset and I told him, and then, with the excitement that can only come after the fifth or so drink, I relayed my tooth plan, which he thought was a brilliant idea. We spent several minutes pushing on my tooth. Then, he grabbed the matchbook and flawlessly lit one. He told me to try, and so I did, determined not to be afraid. On the first try, my match burst into thick, brilliant flame. Matt said, “Feel better?” And I did.
I can remember almost nothing about that camping trip except for this. We all had a fun, lazy, giddy time, but there’s something about this kindness that sticks with me, a persistent reminder of a history not yet spoiled.
Abbey and Andrew, bundled for Winter.
So, the cold’s coming. I’m glad. This was the longest summer in the history of all worlds in all universes.
I’m not a smoker, I’m emphatically and endlessly not a smoker, so emphatic I write run-on sentences to illustrate. But I always seem to smoke when the moment calls for it. When standing in the burgeoning cold (if cold can burgeon), smokers tell secrets and I want the secrets, so I accept when offered.
I don’t smoke well. Today, hanging outside a school, my cupped hand lost a battle against the wind and I couldn’t light my offered cigarette. The non-smoker of the group flicked the light and ended up singeing my bangs. I didn’t even notice at first until a blackened curl blew in my eye. The smoker took the lighter and I leaned in, igniting on the first try. He had smoker hands: adept, able, calloused, artistic, guarded. I inhaled twice and coughed the first time. The second time, my nose burned, but I held my own. With this particular smoker, I elicited no secrets. He’s layers upon layers upon layers and there’s the small chance I’m missing the point and he’s paper-thin in intentions. Who knows? The cigarette he gave me didn’t have a filter and the tobacco stuck on my tongue. The blackmail I have on people. The dirt. I soak these stories, though I have no ill intentions with them and don’t even know what to do with the information.
In Philosophy Club, the precursor to the singed hair afternoon, I could hardly listen because I was focused on what was not being said, by the way this person was twisting their ring or how this person has a goatee now, and what does it all mean? I used to think I had trouble paying attention in class because I was bored, but I think it’s because I’m constantly distracted, my senses magnetic. If only there were another extraction method besides tobacco, but I’ve found no match. I try to keep the smoke in my teeth, no further than my tongue, but sometimes it reaches my lungs and I’m on fire.
1. Pay $3 for parking and then walk 10 blocks to the Triple Rock, only to be told by the nervous-looking, bulky doorman that the show is sold out. Make the special type of shocked face reserved for hearing news of sold-outdom.
2. Walk back to the car. On the way, get accosted by a man who shakes your hand and offers you acid. Once you throw him, replace him with a singing Jamaican man whose lyrics consist only of “pretty laddddies, hey, pretty laddiees.”
3. Duck in Hard Times. Buy hot chocolate. Walk out and illegally cross two streets to avoid the singing Jamaican.
4. Drive to the Varsity Theater. Get there too early. Sit in front of a used bookstore and nearly weep when you find a book not only titled, “From Your Loving Grandma,” but is actually FROM someone’s loving grandma, complete with a long, hand-written note to the granddaughter. Allison from Aitken, Minnesota, what have you done?
5. Get to Varsity. Talk loudly about a very personal story until you realize your ex-boyfriend is directly in front of you on a ladder, replacing the marquee letters. Immediately dispatch to a used record store.
6. Look at posters. Look at dumb hats. Look at fake “cigarette” cases. Get eyed by the man on the phone behind the counter.
7. Go back to the Varsity. Pay $5. Be the only audience member, sitting one inch away from Martin Dosh. Two more people join the group. One’s a band member’s girlfriend and the other is a roadie. Feel completely awkward. Dispatch to lobby.
8. Sit in lobby, talk about boys, drink a weak 7&7 and a can of Sprite. Leave.
9. Drive to Perkins. Meet Chris. Yell at him for ordering pot roast. Be amused when the waiter also yells at him for ordering pot roast. Who orders the pot roast at Perkins?
10. End journey by eating fries with gravy. Wonder where $20 went when nothing actually happened.
Chris had a high fever last night, which is notable because he’s rarely sick and the fever came on in about three seconds. One moment, he was furiously playing Diablo II, the next he was slumpy-shouldered in his chair, hand over his eyes. He’s fine now, but it’s strange how a fever can change the skin. It speckled his face with pale strawberry-red blotches and a glowy sheen across his forehead. His eyes were half-shut and glassy and nearly green. He looked completely different and sometimes I forget the body can do its own thing, no matter what the brain wants.
That was it. Tomorow is: jazz at the Varsity, a new blue shirt, coffee in the morning and loving October, my favorite month.