You can put it out but I can't put it out 
I seem to have picked up a new habit. It didn’t seem like a good idea to start smoking, but I do seem to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown and so, what the hey? I thought to myself one night at a party. Why not ease the breakdown process with some carcinogenic cigarette smoke? I purloined one from a girl’s pack when she wasn’t looking, and borrowed somebody’s lighter. It was a nice social prop, at any rate, walking around with an unlit cigarette and asking somebody to light it for me. Other cigarette smokers will always be more than willing to aid you in your plight, and almost immediately I felt “in the loop,” and that much better about myself. I took two puffs and then almost passed out from a lack of oxygen, regaining composure against a wall, so as to not unnerve the other more experienced smokers in attendance. “Are you OK?” someone asked. Oh, yeah, yeah, I coughed, I feel better now. The cigarette had left me temporarily confused, jarred from the oxygen loss, but not in a bad way. Things were looking up.
As almost everyone has figured out, there seems to be no end to the unnervement process swirling around most people at all times. Like lunch hours with my mom might demonstrate, or the A&E television program “Intervention”—or BF herself, with her crushing good/bad ratio demonstration of the hopelessness of it all—life just isn’t that good, most of the time. You need to get high on industrial grade detergents or smoke a cigarette every once in a while. Things get you down.
I thought hard about my own situation and tried to figure out what was making me so uptight. My birthday was a little over one week away, my job situation seemed heavily precarious at best, and I was about one wisecrack away from having to construct a cardboard cutout and take up refuge with the bench dwellers in the park, who seemed to be entirely mistaking my presence anyway. So there was already an in. But this was unnerving, still. What were other people my age doing, I wondered? Nothing too good, by the looks of it. I knew people who were churning out kids en masse, buying cars and houses, or who knows what? Making the kinds of acquisitions which life in the first world guaranteed, which had something to do with the kind of chinos you wore from my vantage point, as per the subtle variation of khaki colors and how they related to your persona. I had no idea how any of this worked, obviously, but people all around me were clearly reveling in this set up, for all time, and so why should I be so hoiti toiti about it?
On a day off from work last week, I walked to the park. Said park dwellers had saved me a bench, apparently, and I nodded graceously to them before taking a seat. Within the hierarchy of park benches it was a good one, with plenty of sunlight, and a pleasant view of the goings on all around me. It seemed to be a leftover from when summer was in full swing, too hot in the sunlight to make it the prime real estate of park benches, but now the weather had become mild and its market value seemed to have skyrocketed unbeknownst to the homeless people all around me.
As I sat there, a man on a neighboring picnic table, lying fully supine, suddenly regained composure and sat up, urinating from his table without standing. When he was finished, he then zipped up his pants and readjusted his twine hobo belt before lying down again, resuming his nap in a near seamless transition. Amazing, I thought to myself. Is his table in such high demand that he was afraid of someone taking it? Or rather, did he just not feel like standing up? I pondered this for a while, although I may have been talking out loud, because simultaneously another homeless person walked by and began talking back to me. “Hey,” he said in the garbled speak of someone who had lost his dentures, “I was sitting there.” He waved a tired finger, motioning to the bench I was sitting on. Clearly he had failed to master the art of seated peeing and I had taken his bench in the meanwhile. “—Oh, well you can have it back,” I stammered, taking note of the other slightly more shaded benches on the periphery. “Nah,” he said, “you take it, but can I get a cigarette?” Having temporarily forgotten that I was now a cigarette smoker, and having failed to fully take this on as part of my Identity, I told him that I didn’t have any cigarettes, before, mid-sentence, I realized that I actually did, and pulled one from my pocket for him to have. It seemed like a fair trade, the going rate for a park bench evidently, where currency in these circles clearly manifested in the form of unlit paper cigarettes.
I watched him shamble off, and as I did, I lit my own cigarette. The trees blew in the wind, and the sun cascaded off shiny leaves. It would be fall soon, I thought between puffs of smoke, nature's entropy and all the rest of that stuff would soon be taking place. There would be a presidential election which a minority of the American public would take notice of, and my birthday would pass, uneventfully. I tried to make sense of these things. What did they actually mean? I wondered. Nothing: it was probably a matter of wardrobe. It was probably nothing more than a winter's coat. That didn't seem so bad to me. Or that's what I told myself between puffs of smoke.
