Cool Smoking Quotes

There is a place where the sidewalk ends And before the street begins, And there the grass grows soft and white, And there the sun burns crimson bright, And there the moon-bird rests from his flight To cool in the peppermint wind. Let us leave this place where the smoke blows black And the dark street winds and bends. Past the pits where the asphalt flowers grow We shall walk with a walk that is measured and slow, And watch where the chalk-white arrows go To the place where the sidewalk ends. Yes we'll walk with a walk that is measured and slow, And we'll go where the chalk-white arrows go, For the children, they mark, and the children, they know The place where the sidewalk ends.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz, who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated, who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,

I’m a modern man, a man for the millennium. Digital and smoke free. A diversified multi-cultural, post-modern deconstruction that is anatomically and ecologically incorrect. I’ve been up linked and downloaded, I’ve been inputted and outsourced, I know the upside of downsizing, I know the downside of upgrading. I’m a high-tech low-life. A cutting edge, state-of-the-art bi-coastal multi-tasker and I can give you a gigabyte in a nanosecond! I’m new wave, but I’m old school and my inner child is outward bound. I’m a hot-wired, heat seeking, warm-hearted cool customer, voice activated and bio-degradable. I interface with my database, my database is in cyberspace, so I’m interactive, I’m hyperactive and from time to time I’m radioactive. Behind the eight ball, ahead of the curve, ridin the wave, dodgin the bullet and pushin the envelope. I’m on-point, on-task, on-message and off drugs. I’ve got no need for coke and speed. I've got no urge to binge and purge. I’m in-the-moment, on-the-edge, over-the-top and under-the-radar. A high-concept, low-profile, medium-range ballistic missionary. A street-wise smart bomb. A top-gun bottom feeder. I wear power ties, I tell power lies, I take power naps and run victory laps. I’m a totally ongoing big-foot, slam-dunk, rainmaker with a pro-active outreach. A raging workaholic. A working rageaholic. Out of rehab and in denial! I’ve got a personal trainer, a personal shopper, a personal assistant and a personal agenda. You can’t shut me up. You can’t dumb me down because I’m tireless and I’m wireless, I’m an alpha male on beta-blockers. I’m a non-believer and an over-achiever, laid-back but fashion-forward. Up-front, down-home, low-rent, high-maintenance. Super-sized, long-lasting, high-definition, fast-acting, oven-ready and built-to-last! I’m a hands-on, foot-loose, knee-jerk head case pretty maturely post-traumatic and I’ve got a love-child that sends me hate mail. But, I’m feeling, I’m caring, I’m healing, I’m sharing-- a supportive, bonding, nurturing primary care-giver. My output is down, but my income is up. I took a short position on the long bond and my revenue stream has its own cash-flow. I read junk mail, I eat junk food, I buy junk bonds and I watch trash sports! I’m gender specific, capital intensive, user-friendly and lactose intolerant. I like rough sex. I like tough love. I use the “F” word in my emails and the software on my hard-drive is hardcore--no soft porn. I bought a microwave at a mini-mall; I bought a mini-van at a mega-store. I eat fast-food in the slow lane. I’m toll-free, bite-sized, ready-to-wear and I come in all sizes. A fully-equipped, factory-authorized, hospital-tested, clinically-proven, scientifically- formulated medical miracle. I’ve been pre-wash, pre-cooked, pre-heated, pre-screened, pre-approved, pre-packaged, post-dated, freeze-dried, double-wrapped, vacuum-packed and, I have an unlimited broadband capacity. I’m a rude dude, but I’m the real deal. Lean and mean! Cocked, locked and ready-to-rock. Rough, tough and hard to bluff. I take it slow, I go with the flow, I ride with the tide. I’ve got glide in my stride. Drivin and movin, sailin and spinin, jiving and groovin, wailin and winnin. I don’t snooze, so I don’t lose. I keep the pedal to the metal and the rubber on the road. I party hearty and lunch time is crunch time. I’m hangin in, there ain’t no doubt and I’m hangin tough, over and out!

We look up to see if it is day or night. If stars burn cool and moon does shine, we take to smoke divine and wine. If breath of sun does belch its heat, we boil coffee and prepare to eat.

What is this thing you call substance abuse? All I wanna do is forget and get loose. Drinking and smoking over and over What's so great about a life that's sober? There's nothing cool about being young When the monsters of night have stolen the sun. I'm tired of searching for words in the sky. All I wanna do is drink and die. Nothing is real. It's all a big lie. All I wanna do is drink and die. There's nothing cool about being young When the monsters of night have stolen the sun.

Fire burns blue and hot. Its fair light blinds me not. Smell of smoke is satisfying, tastes nourishing to my tongue. I think fire ageless, never old, and yet no longer young. Morning coals are cool: daylight leaves me blind. I love the fire most because of what it leaves behind.

I walked past Malison, up Lower Main to Main and across the road. I didn’t need to look to know he was behind me. I entered Royal Wood, went a short way along a path and waited. It was cool and dim beneath the trees. When Malison entered the Wood, I continued eastward.  I wanted to place his body in hallowed ground. He was born a Mearan. The least I could do was send him to Loric. The distance between us closed until he was on my heels. He chose to come, I told myself, as if that lessened the crime I planned. He chose what I have to offer. We were almost to the cemetery before he asked where we were going. I answered with another question. “Do you like living in the High Lord’s kitchens?” He, of course, replied, “No.” “Well, we’re going to a better place.” When we reached the edge of the Wood, I pushed aside a branch to see the Temple of Loric and Calec’s cottage. No smoke was coming from the chimney, and I assumed the old man was yet abed. His pony was grazing in the field of graves. The sun hid behind a bank of clouds. Malison moved beside me. “It’s a graveyard.” “Are you afraid of ghosts?” I asked. “My father’s a ghost,” he whispered. I asked if he wanted to learn how to throw a knife. He said, “Yes,” as I knew he would.  He untucked his shirt, withdrew the knife he had stolen and gave it to me. It was a thick-bladed, single-edged knife, better suited for dicing celery than slitting a young throat. But it would serve my purpose. That I also knew. I’d spent all night projecting how the morning would unfold and, except for indulging in the tea, it had happened as I had imagined.  Damut kissed her son farewell. Malison followed me of his own free will. Without fear, he placed the instrument of his death into my hand. We were at the appointed place, at the appointed time. The stolen knife was warm from the heat of his body. I had only to use it. Yet I hesitated, and again prayed for Sythene to show me a different path. “Aren’t you going to show me?” Malison prompted, as if to echo my prayer.

It was hard to imagine feeling that magical tingling sensation in the pit of her belly anytime soon. Best not to worry about it, she thought. She didn't need it. Well. She didn't want to need it. Yearning for love made her feel like a cat that was always twining around ankles, meowing Pet me, pet me, look at me, love me. Better to be the cat gazing coolly down from a high wall, its expression inscrutable. The cat that shunned petting, that needed no one. Why couldn't she be that cat? Be that cat!!! she wrote, drawing it into the corner of her page, cool and aloof.

It’s about Thiago,” she said, and he felt the cool touch of finality. Of course it was the Wolf. When he’d seen them curved toward each other, laughing, he’d known, but a part of his mind had insisted on denying it—it was unthinkable—and then, when she’d looked across the cavern to him like that, to him, he’d hoped… “He’s not who you think,” Karou said, and Akiva knew what was coming next. He braced for it. “I killed him,” she whispered. … … … Wait. “What?

We look up to see if it is day or night. If stars burn cool and moon does shine, We take to smoke divine and wine. If breath of sun does belch its heat, we boil coffee and prepare to eat.

By early evening all the sky to the north had darkened and the spare terrain they trod had turned a neuter gray as far as the eye could see. They grouped in the road at the top of a rise and looked back. The storm front towered above them and the wind was cool on their sweating faces. They slumped bleary-eyed in their saddles and looked at one another. Shrouded in the black thunderheads the distant lightning glowed mutely like welding seen through foundry smoke. As if repairs were under way at some flawed place n the iron dark of the world.

She went to the window. A fine sheen of sugary frost covered everything in sight, and white smoke rose from chimneys in the valley below the resort town. The window opened to a rush of sharp early November air that would have the town in a flurry of activity, anticipating the tourists the colder weather always brought to the high mountains of North Carolina. She stuck her head out and took a deep breath. If she could eat the cold air, she would. She thought cold snaps were like cookies, like gingersnaps. In her mind they were made with white chocolate chunks and had a cool, brittle vanilla frosting. They melted like snow in her mouth, turning creamy and warm.

I don’t smoke, although it looks fantastic in films. But I light matches on those thinking blank nights when I crawl my route out onto the roof of the garage and the sky while my parents sleep innocent and the lonely cars move sparse on the faraway streets, when the pillow won’t stay cool and the blankets bother my body no matter how I move or lie still. I just sit with my legs dangling and light matches and watch them flicker away.

What are the dead, anyway, but waves and energy? Light shining from a dead star? That, by the way, is a phrase of Julian's. I remember it from a lecture of his on the Iliad, when Patroklos appears to Achilles in a dream. There is a very moving passage where Achilles overjoyed at the sight of the apparition – tries to throw his arms around the ghost of his old friend, and it vanishes. The dead appear to us in dreams, said Julian, because that's the only way they can make us see them; what we see is only a projection, beamed from a great distance, light shining at us from a dead star… Which reminds me, by the way, of a dream I had a couple of weeks ago. I found myself in a strange deserted city – an old city, like London – underpopulated by war or disease. It was night; the streets were dark, bombed-out, abandoned. For a long time, I wandered aimlessly – past ruined parks, blasted statuary, vacant lots overgrown with weeds and collapsed apartment houses with rusted girders poking out of their sides like ribs. But here and there, interspersed among the desolate shells of the heavy old public buildings, I began to see new buildings, too, which were connected by futuristic walkways lit from beneath. Long, cool perspectives of modern architecture, rising phosphorescent and eerie from the rubble. I went inside one of these new buildings. It was like a laboratory, maybe, or a museum. My footsteps echoed on the tile floors.There was a cluster of men, all smoking pipes, gathered around an exhibit in a glass case that gleamed in the dim light and lit their faces ghoulishly from below. I drew nearer. In the case was a machine revolving slowly on a turntable, a machine with metal parts that slid in and out and collapsed in upon themselves to form new images. An Inca temple… click click click… the Pyramids… the Parthenon. History passing beneath my very eyes, changing every moment. 'I thought I'd find you here,' said a voice at my elbow. It was Henry. His gaze was steady and impassive in the dim light. Above his ear, beneath the wire stem of his spectacles, I could just make out the powder burn and the dark hole in his right temple. I was glad to see him, though not exactly surprised. 'You know,' I said to him, 'everybody is saying that you're dead.' He stared down at the machine. The Colosseum… click click click… the Pantheon. 'I'm not dead,' he said. 'I'm only having a bit of trouble with my passport.' 'What?' He cleared his throat. 'My movements are restricted,' he said. 'I no longer have the ability to travel as freely as I would like.' Hagia Sophia. St. Mark's, in Venice. 'What is this place?' I asked him. 'That information is classified, I'm afraid.' 1 looked around curiously. It seemed that I was the only visitor. 'Is it open to the public?' I said. 'Not generally, no.' I looked at him. There was so much I wanted to ask him, so much I wanted to say; but somehow I knew there wasn't time and even if there was, that it was all, somehow, beside the point. 'Are you happy here?' I said at last. He considered this for a moment. 'Not particularly,' he said. 'But you're not very happy where you are, either.' St. Basil's, in Moscow. Chartres. Salisbury and Amiens. He glanced at his watch. 'I hope you'll excuse me,' he said, 'but I'm late for an appointment.' He turned from me and walked away. I watched his back receding down the long, gleaming hall.

I sit, smoking, my head against the cool comfort of the fighter plane's wheel, its wing shielding but never embracing me. I'm a cold nestling tonight.

Your face, your mouth, your shoulder inconceivable to me now! Where did they go? It’s like I dreamed them. The stones we brought home from the beach lie face up on the windowsill, cooling. Come home. Do you hear? My lungs are thick with the smoke of your absence.

Of course,” said Mik, without missing a beat. “However, as cool a word as samurai is, I don’t think it’s what we really mean. We just want to be able to kick ass, right?” “Well, definitely don’t phrase it that way. We’d probably just become highly skilled at kicking people in the ass. Don’t turn your back on them,” she intoned. “They never miss.

Growing up, I'd already decided I wanted to be a beatnik. A Bohemian poet, I thought. Or a musician. Maybe an artist. I'd dress in black turtlenecks and smoke Gitanes. I'd listen to cool jazz in clubs, getting up to read devastating truths from my notebook, leaning against the microphone, cigarette dangling from my hand.

Snobbery might sometimes look cool, like smoking, but the end result is usually a repelling one.

Cigars are all the rage, dad. You should smoke cigars!" - Calvin "Flatulence could be all the rage, but it would still be disgusting." - Calvin's mom

We're the propaganda monkeys. The digital download junkies. The skunk smoking geezers With an inflatable Jesus. We're the kitsch and cool. Divide and rule.

I locked the door, for what good it would do me, and went to bed. The Browning Hi-Power was in its second home, a modified holster strapped to the headboard of my bed. The crucifix was cool metal around my neck. I was as safe as I was going to be and almost too tired to care. I took one more thing to bed with me, a stuffed toy penguin named Sigmund. I don't sleep with him often, just every once in a while after someone tries to kill me. Everyone has their weaknesses. Some people smoke. I collect stuffed penguins. If you won't tell, I won't.

They drove south with the night falling soft and blue around them. Away to their right the Front Range stood out against the last red ribbon of the dying day like ramparts of some dread empire. Through the open windows came the smell of cooling earth and sage long baked by the sun.

Human beings across every culture I know about require such stories, stories with cool winds and wood smoke. They speak to something deep within us, the capacity to conceptualize, objectify and find patterns, thereby to create the flow of events and perceptions that find perfect expression in fiction. We are built this way, we create stories by reflex, unstoppably. But this elegant system really works best when the elements of the emerging story, whether is is being written or being read, are taken as literal fact. Almost always, to respond to the particulars of the fantastic as if they were metaphorical or allegorical is to drain them of vitality.

Didn’t anyone stop to reflect that the so-called old people of today used to smoke pot, for heaven’s sake, and wear bandannas tied around their heads and picket the White House? When Amanda chided her for saying that something was “cool” (“I hate it when the older generation tries to copy the younger,” she had said), did she not realize that “cool” had been used in Abby’s time, too, not to mention long before?

From the molten basements of the world, two hundred miles down, it comes. One crystal in a seam of others. Pure carbon, each atom linked to four equidistant neighbors, perfectly knit, octahedral, unsurpassed in hardness. Already it is old: unfathomably so. Incalculable eons tumble past. The earth shifts, shrugs, stretches. One year, one day, one hour, a great upflow of magma gathers a seam of crystals and drives it toward the surface, mile after burning mile; it cools inside a huge, smoking xenolith of kimberlite, and there it waits. Century after century. Rain, wind, cubic miles of ice. Bedrock becomes boulders, boulders become stones; the ice retreats, a lake forms, and galaxies of freshwater clams flap their million shells at the sun and close and die and the lake seeps away. Stands of prehistoric trees rise and fall and rise again in succession. Until another year, another day, another hour, when a storm claws one particular stone out of a canyon and sends it into a clattering flow of alluvium, where eventually it finds, one evening, the attention of a prince who knows what he is looking for.

Where the Sidewalk Ends Shel Silverstein There is a place where the sidewalk ends And before the street begins, And there the grass grows soft and white, And there the sun burns crimson bright, And there the moon-bird rests from his flight To cool in the peppermint wind. Let us leave this place where the smoke blows black And the dark street winds and bends. Past the pits where the asphalt flowers grow We shall walk with a walk that is measured and slow , And watch where the chalk-white arrows go To the place where the sidewalk ends.

When the plane went down in San Francisco, I thought of my friend M. He’s obsessed with plane crashes. He memorizes the wrecked metal details, the clear cool skies cut by black scars of smoke. Once, while driving, he told me about all the crashes: The one in blue Kentucky, in yellow Iowa. How people go on, and how people don’t. It was almost a year before I learned that his brother was a pilot. I can’t help it, I love the way men love.

The storm front towered above them and the wind was cool on their sweating faces. They slumped bleary-eyed in their saddles and looked at one another. Shrouded in the black thunderheads the distant lightning glowed mutely like welding seen through foundry smoke. As if repairs were under way at some flawed place in the iron dark of the world.

The other dryads moved across the hillside, enjoying the cool air and the stars in the smoke-free night sky as they gave the Sibyl a tour of her new home. "And here are some rocks," they told her. "And over here, these are more rocks.

I gave Clive a sock full of catnip and a bowlful of tuna. My hope was to get him wasted and passed out before the action started. The treats had the opposite effect. My boy was ready to party down when the first strains of Purina came shrieking through the walls about one fifteen in the morning. If Clive could have put on a mini smoking jacket, he would have. He stalked the room, pacing back and forth in front of the wall, playing it cool. When Purina began her meows, though, he couldn’t contain himself. He once again launched toward the wall. He jumped from nightstand to dresser to shelf, scaling pillows and even a lamp to get closer to his beloved. When he realized he would never be able to burrow under the plaster, he serenaded her with some weird kind of kitty Barry White, his yowls matching hers in intensity.

The girl who signed her papers in lipstick leans against the drugstore, smoking, brushing her hair like a machine

He thought: Oh, I have fed on honey-dew. On wine and whiskey and champagne and the tender white meat of women and fine clothes and the respect of strong men and the fear of weak and the turn of a card and good horses and the crisp of greenbacks and the cool of mornings and all the elbow room that God or man could ask for. I have had high times. But the best times of all were afterward, just afterward, with the gun warm in my hand, the bite of smoke in my nose, the taste of death on my tongue, my heart high in my gullet, the danger past, and then the sweat, suddenly, and the nothingness, and the sweet clean feel of being born.

There are two social classes in Pakistan," Professor Superb said to his unsuspecting audience, gripping the podium with both hands as he spoke. "The first group, large and sweaty, contains those referred to as the masses. The second group is much smaller, but its members exercise vastly greater control over their immediate environment and are collectively termed the elite. The distinction between members of these two groups is made on the basis of control of an important resource:air-conditioning. You see, the elite have managed to re-create for themselves the living standards of say, Sweden without leaving the dusty plains of the subcontinent. They're a mixed lot - Punjabi and Pathans, Sindhis and Baluchis, smugglers , mullahs, soldiers, industrialists - united by their residence in an artificially cooled world. They wake up in air-conditioned houses, drive air-conditioned cars to air-conditioned offices, grab lunch in air-conditioned restaurants (rights of admission reserved), and at the end of the day go home to an air-conditioned lounges to relax in front of their wide-screen TVs. And if they should think about the rest of the people, the great uncooled, and become uneasy as they lie under their blankets in the middle of the summer, there is always prayer, five times a day, which they hope will gain them admittance to an air-conditioned heaven, or at the very least, a long, cool drink during a fiery day in hell.

Whoever had covered our sidewalk with seals and signs apparently had an ax to grind, but I wasn’t worried. Whatever they wanted, I wasn’t about to let it get to me. Nothing could feel quite so benign as a warm spring day in St. Nacho’s. So… For some unknown—and probably unknowable—reason, the Witches of Westwick were trying to freak me out. I blew out a long, thin stream of smoke and grinned. Cool. - Daniel Livingston

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz, who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated, who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war, who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull,

Who do they become when night descends, a cool puff of smoke, and vampires come out to party?

August was smoking hot, then September walked in as cool as a cucumber, and made her presence felt.

Go outside occasionally to smoke a cigarette. It’s a good way to make friends, it makes you look cool, and you’re already dead on the inside, anyway.

He thought, Yeah. Yeah, non-smokers live seven years longer. Which seven will be subtracted by the god called Time? It won't be that convulsive, heart-bursting spell between twenty-eight and thirty-five. No. It'll be that really cool bit between eighty-six and ninety-three.

I grew up being told, "If you do marijuana you'll be a slave for the rest of your life," and it only took me ten minutes to realize smoking marijuana was pretty cool. Then it was, "If you take LSD you'll be a slave for the rest of your life. Then it got to be, "If you take cocaine, you'll be slave for life." There was a time when I thought, "Hey, I've been taking Heroin for six months and I feel fine. You know, just on weekends." I actually believed that you didn't have to become addicted. I was wrong. The most important thing out of this is, don't lie to the kids. If marijuana is not going to make you homeless and addicted, don't tell people it is, because they'll found out it doesn't, then when they get to the stuff that really WILL, they ain't gonna believe you." - Dickie Peterson

Right Here. Beside a living, breathing human being who cares for me. I can see it in the cool lagoons of his eyes, hear it in the timbre of his voice when he speaks my name. Right here. Where the warmth of his skin tempers the February cold and the thinnest beam of his inner light overcomes winter's pall. He is a candle in the wilderness. Right here. Where the omnipresent specter of death takes flight, awed by the power of the two of us, hearts beating in unison, as we stumble through the darkness toward one another.

It’s just human nature – isn’t it? – to be more attracted to something that’s taboo. If someone tells you not to smoke, you wanna smoke. If they say, ‘Don’t do drugs,’ you wanna do drugs. That’s why I’ve always thought that the best way to stop people taking drugs is to legalise the f**king things. It would take people about five seconds to realise that being an addict is a terribly unattractive and pathetic way to be, whereas at the moment it still has that kind of rebel cool vibe to it, y’know?

Without hesitation, Thor Flung Mjolnir from h is hands. The hammer smashed into the giant's face, and reeled with the force. Lightning crashed down, striking the hammer, and Tyr saw Thor's features lit up, his red beard giving the brief impression that his face was on fire. Mojlnir, glowing red hot, returned to Thor's outstretched hand, and he sent it out again, once more smashing into the giant's head. Smoke rose up from where it had hit flesh, and there was a hissing as the rain cooled down the boiling skin.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by Facebook, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through photo slideshows at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connections of their youth through the machinery of night, who clicking and poking and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural brightness of tiny screens floating across the tops of cities contemplating likes, who bared their brains to the network and saw who got pregnant and who got fat and who’s living the life best lived by posting Instagrams of themselves staggering on tenement roofs illuminated, who passed through newly cropped profile pics with radiant cool eyes obsessing over whose ex’s new lover is the best looking ex-lover’s lover, who breaking their backs falling out of ergonomic chairs while shouting into the icy streets, Everybody look how clever I am, Look how much fun I am having, Look at this amazing party I went to, Look at how well-liked I am, Look at my effortless carefully constructed casual desperate thrown together fun, Everybody look, This is fun, Look, Look, I swear to God I am having so much fun.

In real life, I looked at my father and mother and understood dimly that it was harder to be a girl, that boys had it easier. Here, boys could buy and ride motorcycles and come and leave when they wanted to and exude a kind of cool while they stood shirtless at the edge of the street, talking and laughing with one another, passing a beer around, smoking cigarettes. Meanwhile, the women I knew were working even when they weren’t at work: cooking, washing loads of clothes, hanging them to dry, and cleaning the house. There was no time for them to just relax and be. Even then I dimly knew there was some gendered differences between my brother and me, knew that what the world expected of us and allowed us would differ.

I want you to stop taking cracker dust." "And he says it isn't a righteous streak," Andrew mused, more to himself than to Neil. "If it was righteousness I'd ask you to give up drinking and smoking, too," Neil said. "I'm only asking for this one thing. It doesn't have any effect on you anyway and it's an unnecessary risk. You don't need a third addiction." "I don't need anything," Andrew reminded him, right on cue. "If you don't need it, it'll be easy to give it up," Neil said. "Right?" Andrew thought it over a minute, then flicked his cigarette at Neil. It singed the material where it bounced off his shirt. Neil ground it out under his shoe when it hit the asphalt. The cool look he flicked Andrew was wasted; Andrew's gaze had already drifted past him in search of something more interesting. "I'm going to take your temper tantrum as a yes," Neil said. "I'll bring the money by your room tonight.

Vladimir stood next to one of the beams on the back porch of our new home, leaning on his back. He reached in his pocket and grabbed a pack of cigarettes, Marlboro Reds which were his favorites, and he lit one up. He was dressed all in black; black skinny jeans, black studded belt, black tennis shoes, black v neck shirt and he had the hood of his black jacket up over his head. He looked cool and collected, and somewhat villainous.” -Nina Jean Slack, Once Lost, Forever Found (Vol. #1)

Have you ever sailed across an ocean...on a sailboat, surrounded by sea with no land in sight, without even the possibility of sighting land for days to come? To stand at the helm of your destiny. I want that, one more time. I want to be in the Piazza del Campo in Siena. To feel the surge as 10 racehorses go thundering by. I want another meal in Paris, at L'Ambroisie, at the Place des Vosges. I want another bottle of wine. And then another. I want the warmth of a woman and a cool set of sheets. One more night of jazz at the Vanguard. I want to stand on the summits and smoke Cubans and feel the sun on my face for as long as I can. Walk on the Wall again. Climb the Tower. Ride the River. Stare at the Frescos. I want to sit in the garden and read one more good book. Most of all I want to sleep. I want to sleep like I slept when I was a boy. Give me that, just one time.

Okay, Dad. Please make sure your seats are in the upright position. Please do not smoke. Vaping is fine, if that’s your thing. Although I wouldn't advise it, because vapes still have nicotine in them, so you’re developing a nasty habit anyway. And nobody thinks you’re cool when you do smoke tricks.” “We’re not vaping,” I said. “Just fly the damn helicopter.

What can I say? Watching you play rugby makes me horny.” His fingers lightly stroked her back. “In that case, I’ll get you a season pass.

Who do they turn to on lonely moon-shadowed sidewalks? I'd love to hear them confess: Who do they become when night descends, a cool puff of smoke, and vampires come out to party?

Think of the power of repetitive imagery in advertising, especially to suggestible viewers and readers. It can make us believe almost anything—even that smoking cigarettes is cool.

It had been the quintessential autumn night, cool but not yet cold, the air smelling of wood smoke and leaves.

I loved the way the burned-out flashcubes of the Kodak Instamatic marked a moment that had passed, one that would now be gone forever except for a picture. When they were spent, I took the cubed four-corner flashbulbs and passed them from hand to hand until they cooled. The broken filaments of the flash would turn a molten marble blue or sometimes smoke the thin glass black. I had rescued the moment by using my camera and in that way had found a way to stop time and hold it. No one could take that image away from me because I owned it.

The women we become after children, she typed, then stopped to adjust the angle of the paper....We change shape, she continued, we buy low-heeled shoes, we cut off our long hair, We begin to carry in our bags half-eaten rusks, a small tractor, a shred of beloved fabric, a plastic doll. We lose muscle tone, sleep, reason, persoective. Our hearts begin to live outside our bodies. They breathe, they eat, they crawl and-look!-they walk, they begin to speak to us. We learn that we must sometimes walk an inch at a time, to stop and examine every stick, every stone, every squashed tin along the way. We get used to not getting where we were going. We learn to darn, perhaps to cook, to patch knees of dungarees. We get used to living with a love that suffuses us, suffocates us, blinds us, controls us. We live, We contemplate our bodies, our stretched skin, those threads of silver around our brows, our strangely enlarged feet. We learn to look less in the mirror. We put our dry-clean-only clothes to the back of the wardrobe. Eventually we throw them away. We school ourselves to stop saying 'shit' and 'damn' and learn to say 'my goodness' and 'heavens above.' We give up smoking, we color our hair, we search the vistas of parks, swimming-pools, libraries, cafes for others of our kind. We know each other by our pushchairs, our sleepless gazes, the beakers we carry. We learn how to cool a fever, ease a cough, the four indicators of meningitis, that one must sometimes push a swing for two hours. We buy biscuit cutters, washable paints, aprons, plastic bowls. We no longer tolerate delayed buses, fighting in the street, smoking in restaurants, sex after midnight, inconsistency, laziness, being cold. We contemplate younger women as they pass us in the street, with their cigarettes, their makeup, their tight-seamed dresses, their tiny handbags, their smooth washed hair, and we turn away, we put down our heads, we keep on pushing the pram up the hill.

As cool as glaucoma and lung cancer. Penny had never had a cigarette in her life, and if they did smoke together Penny would probably have a coughing fit that lasted forever and ended on an audible fart.

Say you could view a time lapse film of our planet: what would you see? Transparent images moving through light, “an infinite storm of beauty.” The beginning is swaddled in mists, blasted by random blinding flashes. Lava pours and cools; seas boil and flood. Clouds materialize and shift; now you can see the earth’s face through only random patches of clarity. The land shudders and splits, like pack ice rent by widening lead. Mountains burst up, jutting, and dull and soften before your eyes, clothed in forests like felt. The ice rolls up, grinding green land under water forever; the ice rolls back. Forests erupt and disappear like fairy rings. The ice rolls up- mountains are mowed into lakes, land rises wet from the sea like a surfacing whale- the ice rolls back. A blue-green streaks the highest ridges, a yellow-green spreads from the south like a wave up a strand. A red dye seems to leak from the north down the ridges and into the valleys, seeping south; a white follows the red, then yellow-green washes north, then red spreads again, then white, over and over, making patterns of color too intricate to follow. Slow the film. You see dust storms, locusts, floods, in dizzying flash-frames. Zero in on a well-watered shore and see smoke from fires drifting. Stone cities rise, spread, and crumble, like paths of alpine blossoms that flourish for a day an inch above the permafrost, that iced earth no root can suck, and wither in a hour. New cities appear, and rivers sift silt onto their rooftops; more cities emerge and spread in lobes like lichen on rock. The great human figures of history, those intricate, spirited tissues whose split second in the light was too brief an exposure to yield any image but the hunched shadowless figures of ghosts. Slow it down more, come closer still. A dot appears, a flesh-flake. It swells like a balloon; it moves, circles, slows, and vanishes. This is your life.

We entered the cool cave of the practice space with all the long-haired, goateed boys stoned on clouds of pot and playing with power tools. I tossed my fluffy coat into the hollow of my bass drum and lay on the carpet with my worn newspaper. A shirtless boy came in and told us he had to cut the power for a minute, and I thought about being along in the cool black room with Joey. Let's go smoke, she said, and I grabbed the cigarettes off the amp. She started talking to me about Wonder Woman. I feel like something big is happening, but I don't know what to do about it. With The Straight Girl? I asked in the blankest voice possible. With everything. Back in the sun we walked to the edge of the parking lot where a black Impala convertible sat, rusted and rotting, looking like it just got dredged from a swamp. Rainwater pooling on the floor. We climbed up onto it and sat our butts backward on the edge of the windshield, feet stretched into the front seat. Before she even joined the band, I would think of her each time I passed the car, the little round medallions with the red and black racing flags affixed to the dash. On the rusting Chevy, Joey told me about her date the other night with a girl she used to like who she maybe liked again. How her heart was shut off and it felt pretty good. How she just wanted to play around with this girl and that girl and this girl and I smoked my cigarette and went Uh-Huh. The sun made me feel like a restless country girl even though I'd never been on a farm. I knew what I stood for, even if nobody else did. I knew the piece of me on the inside, truer than all the rest, that never comes out. Doesn't everyone have one? Some kind of grand inner princess waiting to toss her hair down, forever waiting at the tower window. Some jungle animal so noble and fierce you had to crawl on your belly through dangerous grasses to get a glimpse. I gave Joey my cigarette so I could unlace the ratty green laces of my boots, pull them off, tug the linty wool tights off my legs. I stretched them pale over the car, the hair springing like weeds and my big toenail looking cracked and ugly. I knew exactly who I was when the sun came back and the air turned warm. Joey climbed over the hood of the car, dusty black, and said Let's lie down, I love lying in the sun, but there wasn't any sun there. We moved across the street onto the shining white sidewalk and she stretched out, eyes closed. I smoked my cigarette, tossed it into the gutter and lay down beside her. She said she was sick of all the people who thought she felt too much, who wanted her to be calm and contained. Who? I asked. All the flowers, the superheroes. I thought about how she had kissed me the other night, quick and hard, before taking off on a date in her leather chaps, hankies flying, and I sat on the couch and cried at everything she didn't know about how much I liked her, and someone put an arm around me and said, You're feeling things, that's good. Yeah, I said to Joey on the sidewalk, I Feel Like I Could Calm Down Some. Awww, you're perfect. She flipped her hand over and touched my head. Listen, we're barely here at all, I wanted to tell her, rolling over, looking into her face, we're barely here at all and everything goes so fast can't you just kiss me? My eyes were shut and the cars sounded close when they passed. The sun was weak but it baked the grime on my skin and made it smell delicious. A little kid smell. We sat up to pop some candy into our mouths, and then Joey lay her head on my lap, spent from sugar and coffee. Her arm curled back around me and my fingers fell into her slippery hair. On the February sidewalk that felt like spring.

Lilichka! (Instead of a letter)" Tobacco smoke eats the air away. The room,-- a chapter from Kruchenykh's Inferno. Recall,-- by the window, that day, I caressed you ecstatically, with fervor. Here you sit now, with your heart in iron armor. In a day, you'll scold me perhaps and tell me to leave. Frenzied, the trembling arm in the gloomy parlor will hardly be able to fit the sleeve. I'll rush out and hurl my body into the street,-- distraught, lashed by despair and sadness. There's no need for this, my darling, my sweet. Let's part tonight and end this madness. Either way, my love is an arduous weight, hanging on you wherever you flee. Let me bellow out in the final complaint all of my heartbroken misery. A laboring bull, if he had enough, will leave and find cool water to lie in. But for me, there's no sea except for your love,-- from which even tears won't earn me some quiet. If an elephant wants to relax, he'll lie, pompous, outside in the sun-baked dune, Except for your love, there's no sun in the sky and I don't even know where you are and with whom. If you thus tormented another poet, he would trade in his love for money and fame. But nothing sounds as precious to me as the ringing sound of your darling name. I won't drink poison, or jump to demise, or pull the trigger to take my own life. Except for your eyes, no blade can control me, no sharpened knife. Tomorrow you'll forget that it was I who crowned you, who burned out the blossoming soul with love and the days will form a whirling carnival that will ruffle my manuscripts and lift them above... Will the dry autumn leaves of my sentences cause you to pause, breathing hard? Let me pave a path with the final tenderness for your footsteps as you depart. (1916)

So we grew up with mythic dead To spoon upon midwestern bread And spread old gods' bright marmalade To slake in peanut-butter shade, Pretending there beneath our sky That it was Aphrodite's thigh... While by the porch-rail calm and bold His words pure wisdom, stare pure gold My grandfather, a myth indeed, Did all of Plato supersede While Grandmama in rockingchair Sewed up the raveled sleeve of care Crocheted cool snowflakes rare and bright To winter us on summer night. And uncles, gathered with their smokes Emitted wisdoms masked as jokes, And aunts as wise as Delphic maids Dispensed prothetic lemonades To boys knelt there as acolytes To Grecian porch on summer nights; Then went to bed, there to repent The evils of the innocent; The gnat-sins sizzling in their ears Said, through the nights and through the years Not Illinois nor Waukegan But blither sky and blither sun. Though mediocre all our Fates And Mayor not as bright as Yeats Yet still we knew ourselves. The sum? Byzantium. Byzantium.

She is the last of her kind, she thought. No wars had ever touched her, and she had lived through three; nothing had disturbed that world of hers, where gentlemen smoked on the porch or in hammocks, where ladies fanned themselves gently and drank cool water.

All this was only, in my father's estimation, a means; the end was the Earthly Paradise, the translation of William Morris's 'News from Nowhere' into 'News from Somewhere.' Then Whitman's sense of abounding joy in his own and all creation's sensuality would sweep away the paltry backwaters of bourgeois morality; the horrors of industrial ugliness which Ruskin so eloquently denounced would dissolve, and die forgotten as a dream (phrases from hymns still washed about in my father's mind) as slums were transformed into garden cities, and the belching smoke of hateful furnaces into the cool elegance of electric power. As for the ferocious ravings of my namesake, Carlyle, about the pettifogging nature of modern industrial man's pursuits and expectations -- all that would be corrected as he was induced to spend ever more of his increasing leisure in cultural and craft activities; in the enjoyment of music, literature and art. It was pefectly true -- a point that Will Straughan was liable to bring up at the Saturday evening gatherings -- that on the present form the new citizenry might be expected to have a marked preference for dog-racing over chamber music or readings from 'Paradise Lost,' but, my father would loftily point out, education would change all that. Education was, in fact, the lynchpin of the whole operation; the means whereby the Old Adam of the Saturday night booze-up, and fondness for Marie Lloyd in preference to Beatrice Webb, would be cast off, and the New Man be born as potential fodder for third Programmes yet to come.

Still, we permit the appearance of our meats, sauces, fruits, and vdgetables to dominate our tongues until it is difficult to divide a twist of lemon or squeeze of lime from the colors of their rinds or separate yellow from its yolk or chocolate from the quenchless brown which seems to be the root, shoot, stalk, and bloom of it. Yet I hardly think the eggplant's taste is as purple as its skin. In fact, there are few flavors at the violet end, odors either, for the acrid smell of blue smoke is deceiving, as is the tooth of the plum, though there may be just a hint of blue in the higher sauces. Perceptions are always profound, associations deceiving. No watermelon tastes red. Apropos: while waiting for a bus once, I saw open down the arm of a midfat, midlife, freckled woman, suitcase tugging at her hand like a small boy needing to pee, a deep blue crack as wide as any in a Roquefort. Split like paper tearing. She said nothing. Stood. Blue bubbled up in the opening like tar. One thing is certain: a cool flute blue tastes like deep well water drunk from a cup.

Dexter Blake liked a woman with some junk in her trunk. And the tall, curvy chick on the sidelines was packing a whole lot of booty. She had one of those itty-bitty waists, too. And her cups floweth’d over. Staring at her chest was practically a religious experience.

Eric Harris wanted a prom date. Eric was a senior, about to leave Columbine High School forever. He was not about to be left out of the prime social event of his life. He really wanted a date. Dates were not generally a problem. Eric was a brain, but an uncommon subcategory: cool brain. He smoked, he drank, he dated. He got invited to parties. He got high. He worked his look hard: military chic hair— short and spiked with plenty of product—plus black T-shirts and baggy cargo pants. He blasted hard-core German industrial rock from his Honda. He enjoyed firing off bottle rockets and road-tripping to Wyoming to replenish the stash. He broke the rules, tagged himself with the nickname Reb, but did his homework and earned himself a slew of A’s. He shot cool videos and got them airplay on the closed-circuit system at school. And he got chicks. Lots and lots of chicks. On the ultimate high school scorecard, Eric outscored much of the football team. He was a little charmer. He walked right up to hotties at the mall. He won them over with quick wit, dazzling dimples, and a disarming smile.

I say is someone in there?’ The voice is the young post-New formalist from Pittsburgh who affects Continental and wears an ascot that won’t stay tight, with that hesitant knocking of when you know perfectly well someone’s in there, the bathroom door composed of thirty-six that’s three times a lengthwise twelve recessed two-bevelled squares in a warped rectangle of steam-softened wood, not quite white, the bottom outside corner right here raw wood and mangled from hitting the cabinets’ bottom drawer’s wicked metal knob, through the door and offset ‘Red’ and glowering actors and calendar and very crowded scene and pubic spirals of pale blue smoke from the elephant-colored rubble of ash and little blackened chunks in the foil funnel’s cone, the smoke’s baby-blanket blue that’s sent her sliding down along the wall past knotted washcloth, towel rack, blood-flower wallpaper and intricately grimed electrical outlet, the light sharp bitter tint of a heated sky’s blue that’s left her uprightly fetal with chin on knees in yet another North American bathroom, deveiled, too pretty for words, maybe the Prettiest Girl Of All Time (Prettiest G.O.A.T.), knees to chest, slew-footed by the radiant chill of the claw-footed tub’s porcelain, Molly’s had somebody lacquer the tub in blue, lacquer, she’s holding the bottle, recalling vividly its slogan for the past generation was The Choice of a Nude Generation, when she was of back-pocket height and prettier by far than any of the peach-colored titans they’d gazed up at, his hand in her lap her hand in the box and rooting down past candy for the Prize, more fun way too much fun inside her veil on the counter above her, the stuff in the funnel exhausted though it’s still smoking thinly, its graph reaching its highest spiked prick, peak, the arrow’s best descent, so good she can’t stand it and reaches out for the cold tub’s rim’s cold edge to pull herself up as the white- party-noise reaches, for her, the sort of stereophonic precipice of volume to teeter on just before the speaker’s blow, people barely twitching and conversations strettoing against a ghastly old pre-Carter thing saying ‘We’ve Only Just Begun,’ Joelle’s limbs have been removed to a distance where their acknowledgement of her commands seems like magic, both clogs simply gone, nowhere in sight, and socks oddly wet, pulls her face up to face the unclean medicine-cabinet mirror, twin roses of flame still hanging in the glass’s corner, hair of the flame she’s eaten now trailing like the legs of wasps through the air of the glass she uses to locate the de-faced veil and what’s inside it, loading up the cone again, the ashes from the last load make the world's best filter: this is a fact. Breathes in and out like a savvy diver… –and is knelt vomiting over the lip of the cool blue tub, gouges on the tub’s lip revealing sandy white gritty stuff below the lacquer and porcelain, vomiting muddy juice and blue smoke and dots of mercuric red into the claw-footed trough, and can hear again and seems to see, against the fire of her closed lids’ blood, bladed vessels aloft in the night to monitor flow, searchlit helicopters, fat fingers of blue light from one sky, searching.

The brilliant rationalist had encountered a central, frustrating tenet of human nature: behavior change is hard. The cleverest engineer or economist or politician or parent may come up with a cheap, simple solution to a problem, but if it requires people to change their behavior, it may not work. Every day, billions of people around the world engage in behaviors they know are bad for them—smoking cigarettes, gambling excessively, riding a motorcycle without a helmet. Why? Because they want to! They derive pleasure from it, or a thrill, or just a break from the daily humdrum. And getting them to change their behavior, even with a fiercely rational argument, isn’t easy.

481 I went into the barbershop as usual, with the pleasant sensation of entering a familiar place, easily and naturally. New things are distressing to my sensibility; I’m at ease only in places where I’ve already been. After I’d sat down in the chair, I happened to ask the young barber, occupied in fastening a clean, cool cloth around my neck, about his older colleague from the chair to the right, a spry fellow who had been sick. I didn’t ask this because I felt obliged to ask something; it was the place and my memory that sparked the question. ‘He passed away yesterday,’ flatly answered the barber’s voice behind me and the linen cloth as his fingers withdrew from the final tuck of the cloth in between my shirt collar and my neck. The whole of my irrational good mood abruptly died, like the eternally missing barber from the adjacent chair. A chill swept over all my thoughts. I said nothing. Nostalgia! I even feel it for people and things that were nothing to me, because time’s fleeing is for me an anguish, and life’s mystery is a torture. Faces I habitually see on my habitual streets – if I stop seeing them I become sad. And they were nothing to me, except perhaps the symbol of all of life. The nondescript old man with dirty gaiters who often crossed my path at nine-thirty in the morning… The crippled seller of lottery tickets who would pester me in vain… The round and ruddy old man smoking a cigar at the door of the tobacco shop… The pale tobacco shop owner… What has happened to them all, who because I regularly saw them were a part of my life? Tomorrow I too will vanish from the Rua da Prata, the Rua dos Douradores, the Rua dos Fanqueiros. Tomorrow I too – I this soul that feels and thinks, this universe I am for myself – yes, tomorrow I too will be the one who no longer walks these streets, whom others will vaguely evoke with a ‘What’s become of him?’. And everything I’ve done, everything I’ve felt and everything I’ve lived will amount merely to one less passer-by on the everyday streets of some city or other.

When we were choosing homes, Czar made it plain to choose something we’d be comfortable in. This has a temperature-controlled wine and cigar room.” She frowned up at him and then blinked, those long lashes fanning her cheeks. “Do you even drink wine? Do you smoke cigars?” He grinned down at her. “No. But that doesn’t matter. It’s just fuckin’ cool.

The father and daughter made their way north, through unknown sylvan paradises where only the owls and skunks know their way around. The hard work of paddling non-stop for many hours had long since stopped being difficult for Saweyimew. In spite of her beauty and grace, her back had grown strong and sinewy from years of canoe trips. She reveled in the exhilaration it always brought her, after the first few hours left her body insensible to pain or discomfort. Warm and tingly, lulled into peaceful contemplation by hours of the rhythmic paddling, the smell of the water, exotic blooms, animal musk. It all combined as one to make her feel so alive. Especially when it rained, and her body steamed against the cool drops, feeling invincible against the elements. The mountain of her father's back was like a rock against anything nature could throw against them. The stream of fragrant pipe-smoke still flowing from his lips, regardless of any obstacle. She felt at that moment, nothing would ever stop her father's pipe from smoking. Nothing, not death, not any force of the living or spirit world, would ever still her father's heart. Rain cleansing her to the core, she was a spring of raw power and self-reliance, paddling against all adversity--their master completely. Her father's daughter. At times like that, when it rained, she entirely understood and shared her father's outlook on life.

You heard me. Let someone else send you to your blaze of glory. You're a speck, man. You're nothing. You're not worth the bullet or the mark on my soul for taking you out." You trying to piss me off again, Patrick?" He removed Campbell Rawson from his shoulder and held him aloft. I tilted my wrist so the cylinder fell into my palm, shrugged. "You're a joke, Gerry. I'm just calling it like I see it." That so?" Absolutely." I met his hard eyes with my own. "And you'll be replaced, just like everything else, in maybe a week, tops. Some other dumb, sick shit will come along and kill some people and he'll be all over the papers, and all over Hard Copy and you'll be yesterday's news. Your fifteen minutes are up, Gerry. And they've passed without impact." They'll remember this," Gerry said. "Believe me." Gerry clamped back on the trigger. When he met my finger, he looked at me and then clamped down so hard that my finger broke. I depressed the trigger on the one-shot and nothing happened. Gerry shrieked louder, and the razor came out of my flesh, then swung back immediately, and I clenched my eyes shut and depressed the trigger frantically three times. And Gerry's hand exploded. And so did mine. The razor hit the ice by my knee as I dropped the one shot and fire roared up the electrical tape and gasoline on Gerry's arm and caught the wisps of Danielle's hair. Gerry threw his head back and opened his mouth wide and bellowed in ecstasy. I grabbed the razor, could barely feel it because the nerves in my hand seemed to have stopped working. I slashed into the electric tape at the end of the shotgun barrel, and Danielle dropped away toward the ice and rolled her head into the frozen sand. My broken finger came back out of the shotgun and Gerry swung the barrels toward my head. The twin shotgun bores arced through the darkness like eyes without mercy or soul, and I raised my head to meet them, and Gerry's wail filled my ears as the fire licked at his neck. Good-bye, I thought. Everyone. It's been nice. Oscar's first two shots entered the back of Gerry's head and exited through the center of his forehead and a third punched into his back. The shotgun jerked upward in Gerry's flaming arm and then the shots came from the front, several at once, and Gerry spun like a marionette and pitched toward the ground. The shotgun boomed twice and punched holes through the ice in front of him as he fell. He landed on his knees and, for a moment, I wasn't sure if he was dead or not. His rusty hair was afire and his head lolled to the left as one eye disappeared in flames but the other shimmered at me through waves of heat, and an amused derision shone in the pupil. Patrick, the eye said through the gathering smoke, you still know nothing. Oscar rose up on the other side of Gerry's corpse, Campbell Rawson clutched tight to his massive chest as it rose and fell with great heaving breaths. The sight of it-something so soft and gentle in the arms of something so thick and mountaineous-made me laugh. Oscar came out of the darkness toward me, stepped around Gerry's burning body, and I felt the waves of heat rise toward me as the circle of gasoline around Gerry caught fire. Burn, I thought. Burn. God help me, but burn. Just after Oscar stepped over the outer edge of the circle, it erupted in yellow flame, and I found myself laughing harder as he looked at it, not remotely impressed. I felt cool lips smack against my ear, and by the time I looked her way, Danielle was already past me, rushing to take her child from Oscar. His huge shadow loomed over me as he approached, and I looked up at him and he held the look for a long moment. How you doing, Patrick?" he said and smiled broadly. And, behind him, Gerry burned on the ice. And everything was so goddamned funny for some reason, even though I knew it wasn't. I knew it wasn't. I did. But I was still laughing when they put me in the ambulance.

Over the past decade, the anti-smoking movement has railed against the tobacco companies for making smoking cool and has spent untold millions of dollars of public money trying to convince teenagers that smoking isn't cool. But that's not the point. Smoking was never cool. Smokers are cool. Smoking epidemics begin in precisely the same way that the suicide epidemic in Micronesia began or word-of-mouth epidemics begin or the AIDS epidemic began, because of the extraordinary influence of Pam P. and Billy G. and Maggie and their equivalents-the smoking versions of R. and Tom Gau and Gaetan Dugas. In this epidemic, as in all others, a very small group-a select few-are responsible for driving the epidemic forward.

You set out to tell a story of some sort, to tell the truth as you feel it, because something is calling you to do so. It calls you like the beckoning finger of smoke in cartoons that rises off the pie cooling on the windowsill, slides under doors and into mouse holes or into the nostrils of the sleeping man or woman in the easy chair. Then the aromatic smoke crooks its finger, and the mouse or the man or woman rises and follows, nose in the air. But some days the smoke is faint and you just have to follow it as best you can, sniffing away. Still, even on those days, you might notice how great perseverance feels. And the next day the scent may seem stronger—or it may just be that you are developing a quiet doggedness. This is priceless.

How happily we explored our shiny new world! We lived like characters from the great books I curled up with in the big Draylon armchair. Like Jack Kerouak, like Gatsby, we created ourselves as we went along, a raggle-taggle of gypsies in old army overcoats and bell-bottoms, straggling through the fields that surrounded our granite farmhouse in search of firewood, which we dragged home and stacked in the living room. Ignorant and innocent, we acted as if the world belonged to us, as though we would ever have taken the time to hang the regency wallpaper we damaged so casually with half-rotten firewood, or would have known how to hang it straight, or smooth the seams. We broke logs against the massive tiled hearth and piled them against the sooty fire back, like the logs were tradition and we were burning it, like chimney fires could never happen, like the house didn't really belong to the poor divorcee who paid the rates and mortgage even as we sat around the flames like hunter gatherers, smoking Lebanese gold, chanting and playing the drums, dancing to the tortured music of Luke's guitar. Impelled by the rhythm, fortified by poorly digested scraps of Lao Tzu, we got up to dance, regardless of the coffee we knocked over onto the shag carpet. We sopped it up carelessly, or let it sit there as it would; later was time enough. We were committed to the moment. Everything was easy and beautiful if you looked at it right. If someone was angry, we walked down the other side of the street, sorry and amused at their loss of cool. We avoided newspapers and television. They were full of lies, and we knew all the stuff we needed. We spent our government grants on books, dope, acid, jug wine, and cheap food from the supermarket--variegated cheese scraps bundled roughly together, white cabbage and bacon ends, dented tins of tomatoes from the bargain bin. Everything was beautiful, the stars and the sunsets, the mold that someone discovered at the back of the fridge, the cows in the fields that kicked their giddy heels up in the air and fled as we ranged through the Yorkshire woods decked in daisy chains, necklaces made of melon seeds and tie-dye T-shirts whose colors stained the bath tub forever--an eternal reminder of the rainbow generation. [81-82]

The cracks grew over him like vines, faster and faster. At first he bucked, whinnying metallic screeches. Then he gradually stilled, looking up at me with frightened glass eyes. He was growing. New, molten glass leeched out between his fissures, cooled and hardened only to crack again and make room for more liquid glass. The gears inside him moaned and creaked, and metal filings gathered at the base of his transparent stomach, only to fly up again and form more joints and chains and gears. Black smoke poured from his nostrils. Soon he was the size of a large dog, then a man, and still he grew and grew until he towered over my bed, as big as any plow horse I’d ever seen. Glass dripped down his flanks like sweat, a few rivulets still glowing with molten heat.

They sat for a time listening to the music and then Bond turned to Vesper: ‘It’s wonderful sitting here with you and knowing the job’s finished. It’s a lovely end to the day – the prize-giving.’ He expected her to smile. She said: ‘Yes, isn’t it,’ in a rather brittle voice. She seemed to be listening carefully to the music. One elbow rested on the table and her hand supported her chin, but on the back of her hand and not on the palm, and Bond noticed that her knuckles showed white as if her fist was tightly clenched. Between the thumb and first two fingers of her right hand she held one of Bond’s cigarettes, as an artist holds a crayon, and though she smoked with composure, she tapped the cigarette occasionally into an ashtray when the cigarette had no ash. Bond noticed these small things because he felt intensely aware of her and because he wanted to draw her into his own feeling of warmth and relaxed sensuality. But he accepted her reserve. He thought it came from a desire to protect herself from him, or else it was her reaction to his coolness to her earlier in the evening, his deliberate coolness, which he knew had been taken as a rebuff.

Sonya lays sound asleep, breathing deeply. I brush a wisp of hair out of her face. She’s twitching, gently snoring, and she smells of cigarette smoke from the bar and something else—cool ranch and toothpaste, I think. Regardless, she is more beautiful than ever. I sit next to her and speak in a whisper. “You know I will always love you. Of all the people I’ve met in my life, you are the most exceptional, the most caring, and the most deserving of happiness. I wish I could offer you more, but the best I can do is leave you alone. If you can just stay out of this place, stay away from this town and all the things that have happened here, I know you’ll find what you’re looking for.” I try to resist but I can’t help myself. I gently kiss her on the lips before going to sleep in the other room.

I grew up being told, "If you do marijuana you'll be a slave for the rest of your life," and it only took me ten minutes to realize smoking marijuana was pretty cool. Then it was, "If you take LSD you'll be a slave for the rest of your life. Then it got to be, "If you take cocaine, you'll be slave for life." I took LSD, and I wasn't a slave for life. There was a time when I thought, "Hey, I've been taking Heroin for six months and I feel fine. You know, just on weekends." I actually believed that you didn't have to become addicted. I was wrong. The most important thing out of this is, don't lie to the kids. If marijuana is not going to make you homeless and addicted, don't tell people it is, because they'll found out it doesn't, then when they get to the stuff that really WILL, they ain't gonna believe you." - Dickie Peterson

In 2008, some of the scientists who modeled the original 1983 nuclear winter scenario investigated the likely result of a theoretical regional nuclear war between India and Pakistan, a war they postulated to involve only 100 Hiroshima-scale nuclear weapons, yielding a total of only 1.5 megatons—no more than the yield of some single warheads in the U.S. and Russian arsenals. They were shocked to discover that because such an exchange would inevitably be targeted on cities filled with combustible materials, the resulting firestorms would inject massive volumes of black smoke into the upper atmosphere which would spread around the world, cooling the earth long enough and sufficiently to produce worldwide agricultural collapse. Twenty million prompt deaths from blast, fire, and radiation, Alan Robock and Owen Brian Toon projected, and another billion deaths in the months that followed from mass starvation—from a mere 1.5-megaton regional nuclear war.

Authority does not have to be a person or institution which says: you have to do this, or you are not allowed to do that. While this kind of authority may be called external authority, authority can appear as internal authority, under the name of duty, conscience, or super-ego. As a matter of fact, the development of modern thinking from Protestantism to Kant's philosophy, can be characterized as the substitution of internalized authority for an external one. With the political victories of the rising middle class, external authority lost prestige and man's own conscience assumed the place which external authority once had held. This change appeared to many as the victory of freedom. To submit to orders from the outside (at least in spiritual matters) appeared to be unworthy of a free man; but the conquest of his natural inclinations, and the establishment of the domination of one part of the individual, his nature, by another, his reason, will or conscience, seemed to be the very essence of freedom. Analysis shows that conscience rules with a harshness as great as external authorities, and furthermore that frequently the contents of the orders issued by man's conscience are ultimately not governed by demands of the individual self but by social demands which have assumed the dignity of ethical norms. The rulership of conscience can be even harsher than that of external authorities, since the individual feels its orders to be his own; how can he rebel against himself? In recent decades "conscience" has lost much of its significance. It seems as though neither external nor internal authorities play any prominent role in the individual's life. Everybody is completely "free", if only he does not interfere with other people's legitimate claims. But what we find is rather that instead of disappearing, authority has made itself invisible. Instead of overt authority, "anonymous" authority reigns.It is disguised as common sense, science, psychic health, normality, public opinion. It does not demand anything except the self-evident. It seems to use no pressure but only mild persuasion. Whether a mother says to her daughter, "I know you will not like to go out with that boy", or an advertisement suggests, "Smoke this brand of cigarettes--you will like their coolness", it is the same atmosphere of subtle suggestion which actually pervades our whole social life. Anonymous authority is more effective than overt authority, since one never suspects that there is any order which one is expected to follow. In external authority it is clear that there is an order and who gives it; one can fight against the authority, and in this fight personal independence and moral courage can develop.But whereas in internalized authority the command, though an internal one, remains visible, in anonymous authority both command and commander have become invisible.It is like being fired at by an invisible enemy. There is nobody and nothing to fight back against.

Botany smells like glue and blotter paper and pressed flowers. Paleontology smells like rock dust, bone dust. Biology smells like formalin and old fruit; it is loaded with heavy cool jars in which float things she has only had described for her: the pale coiled ropes of rattlesnakes, the severed hands of gorillas. Entomology smells like mothballs and oil: a preservative that, Dr. Geffard explains, is called naphthalene. Offices smell of carbon paper, or cigar smoke, or brandy, or perfume. Or all four.

Everything was so beautiful in this magical moment before sunrise. The wild blue irises around the pond, the violet shadows in the curves of the dunes, the white, filmy mist hanging over the buttercup valley across the pond, the cloth of gold and silver thtat was called a field of daisies, thye cool, delicious gulf breeze, the blue of far lands beyond the harbour, plumes of purple and mauve smoke going up on the still, golden air from the chimneys of Stovepipe Town where the fishermen rose early. And Teddy lying at her feet, his slim brown hands clasped behind his head. Again she felt thye magnetic attraction of his personality. Felt it so strongly that she dared not meet his eyes. Yet she was admitting to herself with a secret cadour which would have horrified Aunt Elizabeth that she wanted to run her fingers through his sleek black hair- feel his arms about her- press her face against his dark tender ne- feel his lips on her lips- Teddy took one of his hands from under his head and put it over hers.

Say you could view a time-lapse film of our planet: what would you see? Transparent images moving through light, “an infinite storm of beauty.” The beginning is swaddled in mists, blasted by random blinding flashes. Lava pours and cools; seas boil and flood. Clouds materialize and shift; now you can see the earth’s face through only random patches of clarity. The land shudders and splits, like pack ice rent by a widening lead. Mountains burst up, jutting and dull and soften before your eyes, clothed in forests like felt. The ice rolls up, grinding green land under water forever; the ice rolls back. Forests erupt and disappear like fairy rings. The ice rolls up-mountains are mowed into lakes, land rises wet from the sea like a surfacing whale- the ice rolls back. A blue-green streaks the highest ridges, a yellow-green spreads from the south like a wave up a strand. A red dye seems to leak from the north down the ridges and into the valleys, seeping south; a white follows the red, then yellow-green washes north, then red spreads again, then white, over and over, making patterns of color too swift and intricate to follow. Slow the film. You see dust storms, locusts, floods, in dizzying flash frames. Zero in on a well-watered shore and see smoke from fires drifting. Stone cities rise, spread, and then crumble, like patches of alpine blossoms that flourish for a day an inch above the permafrost, that iced earth no root can suck, and wither in a hour. New cities appear, and rivers sift silt onto their rooftops; more cities emerge and spread in lobes like lichen on rock. The great human figures of history, those intricate, spirited tissues that roamed the earth’s surface, are a wavering blur whose split second in the light was too brief an exposure to yield any images. The great herds of caribou pour into the valleys and trickle back, and pour, a brown fluid. Slow it down more, come closer still. A dot appears, like a flesh-flake. It swells like a balloon; it moves, circles, slows, and vanishes. This is your life.

MAKES: 2 quarts COOKING METHOD: stove COOKING TIME: 20 minutes This is an all-purpose barbecue sauce, with a distinct garlic and tomato flavor. We have used this recipe to rave reviews at the James Beard Foundation and the American Institute of Wine and Food’s “Best Ribs in America” competition. Use it as a finishing glaze or serve it on the side as a dip for any type of barbecue. 2 TABLESPOONS OLIVE OIL ¼ CUP CHOPPED ONION 1 TEASPOON FRESH MINCED GARLIC 4 CUPS KETCHUP 1⅓ CUPS DARK BROWN SUGAR 1 CUP VINEGAR 1 CUP APPLE JUICE ¼ CUP HONEY 1½ TABLESPOONS WORCESTERSHIRE SAUCE 1½ TABLESPOONS LIQUID SMOKE 1 TEASPOON SALT 1 TEASPOON BLACK PEPPER 1 TEASPOON CAYENNE PEPPER 1 TEASPOON CELERY SEED Heat the olive oil in a large nonreactive saucepan over medium heat. Add the onion and garlic and lightly sauté. Stir in the remaining ingredients and heat until the sauce bubbles and starts to steam. Remove from the heat and cool to room temperature. Transfer to a tightly covered jar or plastic container and store refrigerated for up to 2 weeks.

You know how some people think cool equals bored, and they act like they’re alien scientists who drew the short straw and ended up assigned to observe this lowly species, humans, and they just lean against walls all the time, sighing and waiting to be called home to Zigborp-12, where all the fascinating geniuses are? Yeah, well, Mik doesn’t sigh or lean, and his eyes are fully open like something awesome might happen at any time and he doesn’t want to miss it. If he’s an alien, he’s an alien from a gray planet without pizza or music, and he freaking loves it here.

I take 1 gram (1,000 mg) of NMN every morning, along with 1 gram of resveratrol (shaken into my homemade yogurt) and 1 gram of metformin.7 • I take a daily dose of vitamin D, vitamin K2, and 83 mg of aspirin. • I strive to keep my sugar, bread, and pasta intake as low as possible. I gave up desserts at age 40, though I do steal tastes. • I try to skip one meal a day or at least make it really small. My busy schedule almost always means that I miss lunch most days of the week. • Every few months, a phlebotomist comes to my home to draw my blood, which I have analyzed for dozens of biomarkers. When my levels of various markers are not optimal, I moderate them with food or exercise. • I try to take a lot of steps each day and walk upstairs, and I go to the gym most weekends with my son, Ben; we lift weights, jog a bit, and hang out in the sauna before dunking in an ice-cold pool. • I eat a lot of plants and try to avoid eating other mammals, even though they do taste good. If I work out, I will eat meat. • I don’t smoke. I try to avoid microwaved plastic, excessive UV exposure, X-rays, and CT scans. • I try to stay on the cool side during the day and when I sleep at night. • I aim to keep my body weight or BMI in the optimal range for healthspan, which for me is 23 to 25.

The glow and the smoke reminded me of the trip I took with Wendy to Kilauea, the volcano on the Big Island. That was just over a month ago, but it feels like years in the past. How could we have known that our own lives were about to erupt? That Volcano Ed was going to destroy everything? But I remember the guide at Kilauea saying that volcanoes are only destructive in the short term. In the long term, they move the world. They create islands, cool the planet, and enrich the soil. Their lava flows uncontrolled and then cools and hardens. The ash they shoot into the air sprinkles down as minerals, which fertilize the earth and make new life grow.

He wanted nothing more than to close his eyes and relish the coolness, but all he could afford to do was cough some smoke out of his lungs and turn back to the task at hand. Which apparently included scolding a certain hardheaded woman for not heeding his instructions. Meredith glared at him from where she stood pumping water into the trough, not a hint of apology in her demeanor. Travis stormed past her and worked the knot on Jochebed’s lead line. “I thought I told you to go up to the house.” The pump arm creaked as she gave it a series of vigorous yanks, then fell silent as water gushed into the trough. “As I recall,” she said, rubbing her palms into her skirt, “you never forbade me from working the pump. You simply expressed your doubts as to my ability to do so.” Travis’s grip on the cow’s rope tightened. “Don’t play word games with me, Meredith. You knew what I meant.” “Did I?” She reached for a stew pot and dipped it into the trough. “Seems to me that a man who claims protecting his brothers and his land always comes first wouldn’t be so quick to refuse able-bodied help just because that body happens to be female.” She set the full pot on the ground and crossed her arms over her chest. Travis’s eyes followed the movement, noting the curves it accentuated. Yep. Definitely female. He wouldn’t be arguing that point.

Then he said something about how L.A. is dust and exhaust and the hot, dry wind that sets your nerves on edge and pushes fire up the hillsides in ragged lines like tears in the paper that separates us from hell, and it’s towering clouds of smoke, and it’s sunshine that won’t let up and cool ocean fog that gets unrolled at night over the whole basin like a clean white hospital sheet and peeled back again in the morning. It’s a crescent moon in a sky bruised green after the sunset has beaten the shit out of it. It’s a lazy hammock moon rising over power lines, over the skeletal silhouettes of pylons, over shaggy cypress trees and the spiky black lionfish shapes of palm-tree crowns on too-skinny trunks. It’s the Big One that’s coming to turn the city to rubble and set the rubble on fire but not today, hopefully not today. It’s the obviousness of pointing out that the freeway looks like a ruby bracelet stretched alongside a diamond one, looks like a river of lava flowing counter to a river of champagne bubbles. People talk about the sprawl, and, yeah, the city is a drunk, laughing bitch sprawled across the flats in a spangled dress, legs kicked up the canyons, skirt spread over the hills, and she’s shimmering, vibrating, ticklish with light. Don’t buy a star map. Don’t go driving around gawking because you’re already there, man. You’re in it. It’s all one big map of the stars.

I know what I want to hear. I want to hear the "Believe it or Not" song. I want to play that shit loud. Really belt out the "Should have been somebody eeeeeelse" part, with a little bit of Zack de la Rocha venom. That would be pretty awesome right about now. But the other part of me, the part that wanted to be cool, knew that it was a much better idea to say, "Let's play the fucking Misfits." Because that's what you say to the cool guy in the combat boots who wants to smoke in your house. Because he's going to snarl-smile at you and say, "Fuck yeah!" And you're feel cool by association. "Let's play the fucking Misfits," I said. John snarl-smiled and saluted me with rock horns. "Fuck yeah." Told you.

He sent you a text message that read: FIre Sign - You're compatible with all signs. Your blood group breathes disappointment and happiness. You stick your tongue in the woman's mouth in order to cool down. The fog that burns on the ceiling is the steam of sweat. You buy pins and colored pictures from the shop. You pin them on your flesh when you receive a guest. The firewood comes to you throughout the night, wrapped in nightmares. When you wake up you have a bath on fire. You eat on fire. You read the newspapers on fire. You smoke a cigarette on fire. In the coffee cup you come across prophecies of fire. You laugh on fire. You have your lungs checked at the hospital, and they find a spring of errors that looks like a tumor. You dream of the final act: It goes out.

Now into the small ceramic pan I grate the block of couverture. Almost at once the scent rises, the dark and loamy scent of bitter chocolate from the block. At this concentration it is slow to melt; the chocolate is very low in fat, and I will have to add butter and cream to the mixture to bring it to truffle consistency. But now it smells of history; of the mountains and forests of South America' of felled wood and spilled sap and campfire smoke. It smells of incense and patchouli; of the black gold of the Maya and the red gold of the Aztec; of stone and dust and of a young girl with flowers in her hair and a cup of pulque in her hand. It is intoxicating; as it melts, the chocolate becomes glossy; steam rises from the copper pan, and the scent grows richer, blossoming into cinnamon and allspice and nutmeg; dark undertones of anise and espresso; brighter notes of vanilla and ginger. Now it is almost melted through. A gentle vapor rises from the pan. Now we have the true Theobroma, the elixir of the gods in volatile form, and in the steam I can almost see- A young girl dancing with the moon. A rabbit follows at her heels. Behind her stands a woman with her head in shadow, so that for a moment she seems to look three ways- But now the steam is getting too thick. The chocolate must be no warmer than forty-six degrees. Too hot, and the chocolate will scorch and streak. Too cool, and it will bloom white and dull. I know by the scent and the level of steam that we are close to the danger point. Take the copper off the heat and stand the ceramic in cold water until the temperature has dropped. Cooling, it acquires a floral scent; of violet and lavender papier poudré. It smells of my grandmother, if I'd had one, and of wedding dresses kept carefully boxed in the attic, and of bouquets under glass.

Jackie, can you tell me if someone’s dead or not?’ “Who it be? Maybe I heard something.” “Miranda Lopez.” I pulled out the charm and balanced it on my fingertips, and then I realized the photo was probably a better likeness. I pocketed the milagro ad held up the Polaroid. “I find out for you if you get me a dime.” I sighed and put the photo away. “You can’t smoke crack. You’re dead. And even if you weren’t, I’m not gonna score for you. I’m a cop. “ “You so full of shit. You ain’t no cop neither.” “Would I be wearing this fucking suit if I wasn’t a cop?” “I don’t know. I always thought you sold cars or something.” I tucked my chin toward my chest and stomped toward my gate. Jackie couldn’t help me. And how dare she call me a used car salesman? I wasn’t always a dork in a blazer. Once upon a time I was actually cool. Until the Cook County Mental Health Centre, anyway. After that, I guess I kinda stopped caring.

Whoever came about me, still settled down into Joe. I opened my eyes in the night, and I saw in the great chair at the beside, Joe. I opened my eyes in the day, and, sitting on the window-seat, smoking his pipe in the shaded open window, still I saw Joe. I asked for cooling drink, and the dear hand that gave it me was Joe's. I sank back on my pillow after drinking, and the face that looked so hopefully and tenderly upon me was the face of Joe. At last, one day, I took the courage, and said, 'Is it Joe?' And the dear old home-voice answered, 'Which it air, old chap.' 'Oh Joe, you break my heart! Look angry at me, Joe. Strike me, Joe. Tell me of my ingratitude. Don't be so good to me!' For, Joe had actually laid his head down on the pillow at my side, and put his arm round my neck, in his joy that I knew him. 'Which, dear old Pip, old chap,' said Joe, 'you and me was ever friends. And when you're well enough to go out for a ride - what larks!

James finished his curry and wandered off on his own. He noticed a girl leaning against a tree smoking. Long hair, baggy jeans. She was about James’s age, nice looking. He didn’t remember her from any of the intelligence files. “Hey, can I have a drag?” James said, trying to sound cool. “Sure,” the girl said. She passed James the cigarette. James had never tried one before and hoped he wasn’t about to make an idiot of himself. He gave it a little suck. It burned his throat, but he managed not to cough. “Not seen you here before,” the girl said. “I’m Ross,” James said. “Staying here with my aunt for a bit.” “Joanna,” the girl said. “I live in Craddogh.” “Haven’t been there yet,” James said. “It’s a dump, two shops and a post office. Where you from?” “London.” “I wish I was,” Joanna said. “You like it here?” “I’m always covered in mud. I want to go to bed, but there’s a guy playing guitar three meters from where I sleep. I wish I could go home, have a warm shower, and see my mates.” Joanna smiled. “So why are you staying with your aunt?” “Long story: Parents are getting divorced. Mum freaking out. Got expelled from school.” “So you’re good-looking and you’re a rebel,” Joanna said. James was glad it was quite dark because he felt himself blush. “You want the last puff, Ross?” “No, I’m cool,” James said. Joanna flicked the cigarette butt into the night. “So, I paid you a compliment,” Joanna said. “Yeah.” Joanna laughed. “So do I get one back?” she asked. “Oh, sure,” James said. “You’re really like . . . nice.” “Can’t I get any better than nice?” “Beautiful,” James said. “You’re beautiful.” “That’s more like it,” Joanna said. “Want to kiss me?” “Um, OK,” James said. James was nervous. He’d never had the courage to ask a girl out. Now he was about to kiss someone he’d known for three minutes. He pecked her on the cheek. Joanna shoved James against the tree and started kissing his face and neck. Her hand went in the back pocket of James’s jeans, then she jumped backwards.

don’t understand this at all. I don’t understand any of this. Why does a story have to be socio-anything? Politics . . . culture . . . history . . . aren’t those natural ingredients in any story, if it’s told well? I mean . . .” He looks around, sees hostile eyes, and realizes dimly that they see this as some sort of attack. Maybe it even is. They are thinking, he realizes, that maybe there is a sexist death merchant in their midst. “I mean . . . can’t you guys just let a story be a story?” No one replies. Silence spins out. He stands there looking from one cool set of eyes to the next. The sallow girl chuffs out smoke and snubs her cigarette in an ashtray she has brought along in her backpack. Finally the instructor says softly, as if to a child having an inexplicable tantrum, “Do you believe William Faulkner was just telling stories? Do you believe Shakespeare was just interested in making a buck? Come now, Bill. Tell us what you think.” “I think that’s pretty close to the truth,” Bill says after a long moment in which he honestly considers the question, and in their eyes he reads a kind of damnation.

GERMAN PANCAKES Preheat oven to 375 degrees F., rack in the middle position.   Prepare an 8-inch square pan by spraying it with Pam or another nonstick cooking spray, or coating the inside with butter. Hannah’s 1st Note: You can double this recipe if you like, so that it will serve 8 people. If you double this recipe, it will take approximately 55 minutes to bake. Hannah’s 2nd Note: This dish works best if you use an electric mixer. 6 strips bacon (I used applewood smoked bacon) 4 large eggs 1 cup whole milk (I’ve used heavy cream and that works also) 1 cup flour (Just scoop it up and level it off with a table knife.) 1 teaspoon vanilla extract 1 teaspoon salt 4 ounces cream cheese (half of an 8-ounce package) minced parsley to sprinkle on top (optional) Fry the bacon in a frying pan on the stovetop until it’s crispy. Let it cool to room temperature, and then crumble it into the bottom of your baking pan. In an electric mixer, beat the eggs with half of the milk (that’s ½ cup). Continue to beat until the mixture is light and fluffy. Add vanilla extract and salt. Beat until they’re well combined. Mix in the flour and beat for 40 seconds. Add the second half of the milk (another ½ cup) and beat until everything is light and fluffy. Pour half of the mixture over the bacon crumbles in the 8-inch square pan. Cut the cream cheese into 1-inch-square cubes. Place them evenly over the egg mixture in the pan. Pour the second half of the mixture over the cream cheese. Bake at 375 degrees F. for 45 to 55 minutes, or until it’s golden brown and puffy on top. Hannah’s 3rd Note: This breakfast entree is excellent when served with biscuits or crispy buttered toast.

last sixteen years Aidan’s detected a shift among spirits. He doesn’t know what it means yet, but he’s certain there’s a pattern.” “What kind of pattern?” “Dark spirits and demons are growing stronger.” I bet Nolan could have helped figure out the pattern. I can only imagine how different all of this would be if he had been here with me since the beginning, performing research for Aidan, trying just as hard as Aidan to find answers. Maybe he would have even found some. “Can you sense the demon?” he asks. I nod. Lucio stops dead in his tracks. Despite the flames growing ever higher around us, Lucio and I feel a cool breeze coming from down the road. Lucio starts walking in the direction of the chill, and I follow, placing my feet in the dusty footprints his steps leave behind. Even though he’s not much taller than I am, his feet are bigger than mine, and I feel like a little kid every time I place one of my sneakers in the spot where his dust-covered boot was seconds before. Lucio’s wearing shorts, and instead of looking at where we’re going, I’m watching the muscles in his calves flex and release with each step. He certainly looks strong enough to confront a demon. When he stops, I practically crash into him. “In there,” Lucio whispers, nodding in the direction of a squat stucco building on our left. It’s so small that it can’t possibly have more than one room. An icy breeze blows its splintered wooden door open, bringing a wall of smoke along with it, despite the fact that it’s the only building in sight that isn’t actually on fire. The door bangs against the tiny building with a loud crash as goose bumps rise on my sweaty skin. “Why did the demon choose this town?” I ask. “These people are completely helpless.” “Exactly,” Lucio says. “The same way we gather strength from helping spirits move on, a demon gathers strength from destroying spirits.” Despite the breeze coming from the darkness just a few steps away, I don’t think I’ve ever felt so hot. Somewhere inside

The phone went off. Private caller. “Thank fuck,” he said as he accepted it. “Payne—” “No.” Manny closed his eyes: Her brother sounded like hell. “Where is she.” “We don’t know. And there’s nothing that we can do from here—we’re trapped inside.” The guy exhaled like he was smoking something. “What the fuck happened before she left? I thought she’d be spending all night with you. It’s cool if you two . . . you know . . . but why did she leave so early?” “I told her it wasn’t going to work out.” Long silence. “What the fuck are you thinking?” Clearly if it hadn’t been all bright and sunny outside, motherfucker would have been knocking on Manny’s door, looking to kick some Italian ass. “I thought that would make you happy.” “Oh, yeah. Abso—break my sister’s fucking heart. I’m all for that.” Another sharp exhale, like he was blowing smoke. “She’s in love with you, asshole.” Didn’t that stop him in his tracks. But he got back with the program. “Listen, she and I . . .” At that point, he was supposed to explain the stuff about the results of his physical and how he was all freaked out and didn’t know what the repercussions were. But the trouble was, in the hours since Payne had taken off, he’d come to realize that however true that shit was, there was a more fundamental thing going on at the core of him: He was being a little bitch. What the go-away had really been about was the fact that he was shitting in his pants because he’d actually fallen in love with a woman . . . female . . . whatever. Yeah, there was a tremendous overlay of metaphysical stuff he didn’t understand and couldn’t explain, blah, blah, blah. But at the center of it all, he felt so much for Payne that he didn’t know himself anymore, and that was the terrifying part. He’d pussied out when he’d had the chance. But that was done now. “She and I are in love,” he said clearly. And damn him to hell, he should have had the balls to tell her. And hold her. And keep her. “So like I said, what the fuck are you thinking.” “Excellent question.” -Manny & Vishous