Nicotine, nicotine, good old nicotine.
As if some higher force has commanded, I dug through my shameful lady-bag and looked for a fag. No cigarettes here, sir. Just tobacco debris that pollute the shallow darkness. I curse.
And I panic. There must be some cigarette somewhere. It's the devil's hour - 3AM, and I can't get a ride to rush to the nearest StarMart. There's hope. There must be Hope or some other stick somewhere.
I didn't give up digging. This time, I swam under my desk, into the jungle of my drawer. It is here I keep the bills, pills, phone numbers, old notebooks, my box of reserve contact lenses, an empty canister of Wrigley's Orbit, and heaps of mysterious white paper-crumpled and stuffed into the belly of my wooden shrine to a cheap Mac emulation. There must be some forgotten, bent cigarette here.
Of course this is also where I keep some used packs, twenty-two crumpled or folded Lucky Strike soft packs, and four Black Bat hard packs to be exact. But I couldn't find any Strike or Bat. My un-Lucky day.
But wait --- Sandwiched between the hard covers of my deserted journal that holds the keys to my secret daydreams and the passwords to all my accounts in the cyber-universe --- is a flat Philip Morris. Shaped like a coffee stirrer, I patiently rolled it into the original form that God intended for it.
If cigarettes had expiration dates, this unholy find would have been way, way unacceptable for my choosy lungs. But I couldn't complain. (Yeah, it tasted like cockroach urine).
I smoked. I waited for the ghostly tendrils to form rings or claws or strangers' faces. I stared.
A dead pack was staring back. Its facial expression was imposing, it's message was clear. As if this nonliving thing intends to insult me, to mock my existence, to condemn my addiction.
It was a government warning. Smoking kills.
And it got me thinking. Wasn't I already dead when I first dated the cunning Marlboro Man? Or did he murder me?
why i blog when no one's reading
- dave aL
- this is my 2-year-old tribute to both the lonely streets and the crowded parties of the world wide web. some will find my thoughts enlightening, some disturbing, some intriguing, some meaningless. perhaps some will find them like empty shout-outs to people who are never there. perhaps nobody will even read my blog. but this is my message in a bottle... dreaming somewhere, a soul finds it docked at a sacred shore... well, of course, it can just be easily lost like junk in cyberspace...
6 comments:
smokers go to hell.
I love how you write. Vivid and exciting, and with a sharp edge. Not bullshitty. It's a refreshing perspective of addiction to cigarettes and er...everything else.
i always have the same feeling when i wake up juz few mins after midnight.. looking for a cigar. as if i can't continue breathing witout one.
eew, is your room a garbage dump site filled with shit and all those crapolas? you make me want to puke.
no it isn't a garbage dump site... it's my portal to the universe, my key to the cosmic question of existence and my bus stop for the eternal ride.
this blog doesn't match up with the "corporate curse" blog you posted - chardonnay, black bats? hmmm, me thinks you like the perks of being in the narrow-corporate ladder as you put it...i'm just b*tch*ng you, love. hehehe... and, yes, it was murder. purely premeditated...
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