I Love Smoking Cigarettes Quotes

Her love was like cigarette smoke stirred into coffee. I drank it so fast it made me cough, but she’s not offering a refill at any price.

I quit smoking in December. I’m really depressed about it. I love smoking, I love fire, I miss lighting cigarettes. I like the whole thing about it, to me it turns into the artist’s life, and now people like Bloomberg have made animals out of smokers, and they think that if they stop smoking everyone will live forever.

And I want to play hide-and-seek and give you my clothes and tell you I like your shoes and sit on the steps while you take a bath and massage your neck and kiss your feet and hold your hand and go for a meal and not mind when you eat my food and meet you at Rudy's and talk about the day and type up your letters and carry your boxes and laugh at your paranoia and give you tapes you don't listen to and watch great films and watch terrible films and complain about the radio and take pictures of you when you're sleeping and get up to fetch you coffee and bagels and Danish and go to Florent and drink coffee at midnight and have you steal my cigarettes and never be able to find a match and tell you about the tv programme I saw the night before and take you to the eye hospital and not laugh at your jokes and want you in the morning but let you sleep for a while and kiss your back and stroke your skin and tell you how much I love your hair your eyes your lips your neck your breasts your arse your and sit on the steps smoking till your neighbour comes home and sit on the steps smoking till you come home and worry when you're late and be amazed when you're early and give you sunflowers and go to your party and dance till I'm black and be sorry when I'm wrong and happy when you forgive me and look at your photos and wish I'd known you forever and hear your voice in my ear and feel your skin on my skin and get scared when you're angry and your eye has gone red and the other eye blue and your hair to the left and your face oriental and tell you you're gorgeous and hug you when you're anxious and hold you when you hurt and want you when I smell you and offend you when I touch you and whimper when I'm next to you and whimper when I'm not and dribble on your breast and smother you in the night and get cold when you take the blanket and hot when you don't and melt when you smile and dissolve when you laugh and not understand why you think I'm rejecting you when I'm not rejecting you and wonder how you could think I'd ever reject you and wonder who you are but accept you anyway and tell you about the tree angel enchanted forest boy who flew across the ocean because he loved you and write poems for you and wonder why you don't believe me and have a feeling so deep I can't find words for it and want to buy you a kitten I'd get jealous of because it would get more attention than me and keep you in bed when you have to go and cry like a baby when you finally do and get rid of the roaches and buy you presents you don't want and take them away again and ask you to marry me and you say no again but keep on asking because though you think I don't mean it I do always have from the first time I asked you and wander the city thinking it's empty without you and want what you want and think I'm losing myself but know I'm safe with you and tell you the worst of me and try to give you the best of me because you don't deserve any less and answer your questions when I'd rather not and tell you the truth when I really don't want to and try to be honest because I know you prefer it and think it's all over but hang on in for just ten more minutes before you throw me out of your life and forget who I am and try to get closer to you because it's beautiful learning to know you and well worth the effort and speak German to you badly and Hebrew to you worse and make love with you at three in the morning and somehow somehow somehow communicate some of the overwhelming undying overpowering unconditional all-encompassing heart-enriching mind-expanding on-going never-ending love I have for you.

Write a list of things you’ll regret/I’d be on top smoking a cigarette.” I loved that line.

It’s the Longing that ultimately undoes you. When it finds you, it gnaws at your bones and tugs at your chest. It fills you up inside like rot and makes you dream dreams and it drowns you. The Longing keeps you in bed, clutching at your sheets while the world goes on outside. It smells like old leaves and cigarette smoke, mixed with the scent of far-off places you will hear of, but never see. It’s the gloss on a lover’s lips the moment you realize you will never kiss those lips again. It is the bittersweet, unrequited love of creation and it will break your heart again and again and again. If you know the Longing the way I do, then these words are redundant. We understand each other perfectly, you and I.

Oh I believe in loving cats and dogs and children and parents – sometimes – but I don’t believe in romantic love. Of course, there’s the momentary rush of hormones and chemicals that encourages us to mate, but it’s biology – it’s no more inherently mystical than the nicotine in that cigarette you’re smoking

Theta blew out another plume of cigarette smoke. “Not interested. Love’s messy, kiddo. Let those other girls get moony-eyed and goofy. Me? I got plans.

I just want to smoke my cigarettes & drink my whiskey & for you to love me for the monster I am.

You cannot kill me here. Bring your soldiers, your death, your disease, your collapsed economy because it doesn’t matter, I have nothing left to lose and you cannot kill me here. Bring the tears of orphans and the wails of a mother’s loss, bring your God damn air force and Jesus on a cross, bring your hate and bitterness and long working hours, bring your empty wallets and love long since gone but you cannot kill me here. Bring your sneers, your snide remarks and friendships never felt, your letters never sent, your kisses never kissed, cigarettes smoked to the bone and cancer killing fears but you cannot kill me here. For I may fall and I may fail but I will stand again each time and you will find no satisfaction. Because you cannot kill me here.

They will say I smoked cigarettes and marijuana, cursed hoarse as a crow in all my languages, and loved morphine and Demerol and tequila and pulque, women and men. I will shrug my illusion of shoulders and answer that I am a water woman, not a vessel, not something you can sail or charter. I am instead the tributary, the river, the fluid source, and the sea itself. I am all her rainy implications. And what do you, with your rusted compass, know of love?

That I am totally devoid of sympathy for, or interest in, the world of groups is directly attributable to the fact that my two greatest needs and desires — smoking cigarettes and plotting revenge — are basically solitary pursuits.

I wasn't interested in drinking beer or vodka or smoking cigarettes or doing all the other things Greta thinks I can't even imagine. I don't want to imagine those things. Anyone can imagine things like that. I want to imagine wrinkled time, and forests thick with wolves, and bleak midnight moors. I dream about people who don't need to have sex to know they love each other. I dream about people who would only ever kiss you on the cheek.

Personally, if I were trying to discourage people from smoking, my sign would be a little different. In fact, I might even go too far in the opposite direction. My sign would say something like, "Smoke if you wish. But if you do, be prepared for the following series of events: First, we will confiscate your cigarette and extinguish it somewhere on the surface of your skin. We will then run you nicotine-stained fingers through a paper shredder and throw them into the street, where wild dogs will swallow them and then regurgitate them into the sewers, so that infected rats can further soil them before they're flushed out to sea with the rest of the city's filth. After such time, we will sysematically seek out your friends and loved one and destroy their lives." Wouldn't you like to see a sign like that?

Wouldn’t that be an incredibly stupid thing to do? To say ‘I never want to smoke again’, then spend the rest of your life saying ‘I’d love a cigarette.’ That’s what smokers who use the Willpower Method do. No wonder they feel so miserable. They spend the rest of their lives desperately moping for something that they desperately hope they will never have.

In loving him, I saw a cigarette between the fingers of a hand, smoke blowing backwards into the room and sputtering planes diving low through the clouds. In loving him, I saw men encouraging each other to lay down their arms. In loving him, I saw small-town laborers creating excavations that other men spend their lives trying to fill. In loving him, I saw moving films of stone buildings; I saw a hand in prison dragging snow in from the sill. In loving him, I saw great houses being erected that would soon slide into the waiting and stirring seas. I saw him freeing me from the silences of the interior life.

I hurt myself just to prove I can. I smoke cigarettes I don't want and drink liquor that comes in plastic bottles. I fall asleep and screaming at love: LOOK. YOU'RE NOT THE ONLY ONE WHO CAN DESTROY ME. LOOK. I CAN DO IT MYSELF.

I’m not fascinated by people who smile all the time. What I find interesting is the way people look when they are lost in thought, when their face becomes angry or serious, when they bite their lip, the way they glance, the way they look down when they walk, when they are alone and smoking a cigarette, when they smirk, the way they half smile, the way they try and hold back tears, the way when their face says they want to say something but can’t, the way they look at someone they want or love… I love the way people look when they do these things. It’s… beautiful.

You told me mornings were the best time to break your own heart. So here I am, smoking your brand of cigarettes for the scent. I wonder if you still sing Beatles songs as you make coffee. You said your mother used to sing them to you when you couldn’t sleep, nineteen years before we met, twenty before you moved your clothes out of our closet while I was at work. By the way, I hate you for leaving all the photographs on the fridge. Taking them down felt like peeling off new scabs, like slapping a sunburn. I spent so many nights carving your body into pillows, I can promise you nothing feels like sleeping with your arm around me and your breath in my ear. Still, it’s comforting to know we sleep under the same moon, even if she’s so much older when she gets to me. I like to imagine she’s seen you sleeping and wants me to know you’re doing well.

Write a list of things you’ll regret I’d be on top smoking a cigarette Oh, we could be lovely If this could get ugly

He's the boy who smokes Marlboro cigarettes and I'm the girl who makes theater puppets. Dreams and ashes—two things in the universe that should never meet because they are opposites, right?

How funny you are today New York like Ginger Rogers in Swingtime and St. Bridget’s steeple leaning a little to the left here I have just jumped out of a bed full of V-days (I got tired of D-days) and blue you there still accepts me foolish and free all I want is a room up there and you in it and even the traffic halt so thick is a way for people to rub up against each other and when their surgical appliances lock they stay together for the rest of the day (what a day) I go by to check a slide and I say that painting’s not so blue where’s Lana Turner she’s out eating and Garbo’s backstage at the Met everyone’s taking their coat off so they can show a rib-cage to the rib-watchers and the park’s full of dancers with their tights and shoes in little bags who are often mistaken for worker-outers at the West Side Y why not the Pittsburgh Pirates shout because they won and in a sense we’re all winning we’re alive the apartment was vacated by a gay couple who moved to the country for fun they moved a day too soon even the stabbings are helping the population explosion though in the wrong country and all those liars have left the UN the Seagram Building’s no longer rivalled in interest not that we need liquor (we just like it) and the little box is out on the sidewalk next to the delicatessen so the old man can sit on it and drink beer and get knocked off it by his wife later in the day while the sun is still shining oh god it’s wonderful to get out of bed and drink too much coffee and smoke too many cigarettes and love you so much

We’re supposed to be reckless and careless and wild. And none of it is supposed to hurt. If we’ve kissed too many people, smoked too many cigarettes, had too much to drink, laughed too hard, offended too many people—we've done it right. We haven’t wasted any time. And Nathan and I have a lot of catching up to do.

I must have been in the car for a long time because eventually my sister found me there. I was chain-smoking cigarettes and crying still. My sister knocked on the window. I rolled it down. She looked at me with this curious expression. Then, her curiosity turned to anger. "Charlie, are you smoking?!" She was so mad. I can't tell you how mad she was. "I can't believe you're smoking!" That's when I stopped crying. And started laughing. Because of all the things she could have said right after she got out of there, she picked my smoking. And she got angry about it. And I knew if my sister was angry, then her face wouldn't be that different. And she would be okay. "I'm going to tell Mom and Dad, you know?" "No, you're not." God, I couldn't stop laughing. When my sister thought about it for a second, I think she figured out why she wouldn't tell Mom or Dad. It's like she suddenly remembered where we were and what had just happened and how crazy our whole conversation was considering at all. Then, she started laughing. But the laughing made her feel sick, so I had to get out of the car and help her into the backseat. I had already set up the pillow and the blanket for her because we figured it was probably best for her to sleep it off a little in the car before we went home. Just before she feel asleep, she said, "Well, it you're going to smoke, crack the window at least." Which made me start laughing again. "Charlie, smoking. I can't believe it." Which made me laugh harder, and I said, "I love you." And my sister said, "I love you too. Just stop it with the laughing already.

Consummation Of Grief I even hear the mountains the way they laugh up and down their blue sides and down in the water the fish cry and the water is their tears. I listen to the water on nights I drink away and the sadness becomes so great I hear it in my clock it becomes knobs upon my dresser it becomes paper on the floor it becomes a shoehorn a laundry ticket it becomes cigarette smoke climbing a chapel of dark vines. . . it matters little very little love is not so bad or very little life what counts is waiting on walls I was born for this I was born to hustle roses down the avenues of the dead.

Termite, you're young, and I'm not sure if you're going to understand what I'm about to say, but here's the nugget: Without the heart, nothing else matters. She could be the Goddess of Love, you could have all the mind-blowing sex you could physically handle, but when the shooting is over, and you're starting to think about getting a bite to eat, smoking a cigarette, or what you do with her now, you're just lying in bed with a woman who means little more to you than the remote control for your TV. Love is not tool; neither is a woman's heart. What I'm talking about, you won't find in that magazine." "How would you know? You just said you've only loved one woman. I think you need to test-drive a few cars before you buy one." "You can buy that lie if you want, but if you're working for a bank, you don't study the counterfeit to know the real thing. You study the real thing to know the counterfeit." Reese talking to Termite, pg. 109-110

It was a very special feeling to wake up in the morning, all alone in a flat, it was as though emptiness were not only around me but also inside me. Until I started at the gymnas I had always woken to a house where Mom and Dad were already up and on their way to work with all that entailed, cigarette smoke, coffee drinking, listening to the radio, eating breakfast, and car engines warming up outside in the dark. This was something else, and I loved it.

the smell of canals and cigarette smoke, all the people sitting outside the cafés drinking beer, saying their r's and g's in a way I'd never learn. I missed the future. Obviously I knew even before this recurrence that I'd never grow old with Augustus Waters. But thinking about Lidewij and her boyfriend, I felt robbed. I would probably never again see the ocean from thirty thousand feet above, so far up you can't make out the waves or any boats, so that the ocean is a great and endless monolith. I could imagine it. I could remember it. But I couldn't see it again, and it occurred to me that the voracious ambition of humans is never sated by dreams coming true, because there is always the thought that everything might be done better and again. That is probably true even if you live to be ninety.

But if Miss Golightly remained unconscious of my existence, except as a doorbell convenience, I became, through the summer, rather an authority on hers. I discovered, from observing the trash-basket outside her door, that her regular reading consisted of tabloids and travel folders and astrological charts; that she smoked an esoteric cigarette called Picayunes; survived on cottage cheese and Melba Toast; that her vari-colored hair was somewhat self-induced. The same source made it evident that she received V-letters by the bale. They were torn into strips like bookmarks. I used occasionally to pluck myself a bookmark in passing. Remember and miss you and rain and please write and damn and goddamn were the words that recurred most often on these slips; those, and lonesome and love.

She’s a nice girl. Not my type.” “You don’t like them nice?” He had another cigarette going. The smoke was being fanned away from his face by his hand. “I like smooth shiny girls, hardboiled and loaded with sin.” “They take you to the cleaners,” Randall said indifferently.

A person said on a PTSD site they weren't happy with their life but they were still breathing. I replied. Personally I love breathing I try to do it as often as I can between cigarettes...

We caught the tread of dancing feet, We loitered down the moonlit street, And stopped beneath the harlot's house. Inside, above the din and fray, We heard the loud musicians play The 'Treues Liebes Herz' of Strauss. Like strange mechanical grotesques, Making fantastic arabesques, The shadows raced across the blind. We watched the ghostly dancers spin To sound of horn and violin, Like black leaves wheeling in the wind. Like wire-pulled automatons, Slim silhouetted skeletons Went sidling through the slow quadrille, Then took each other by the hand, And danced a stately saraband; Their laughter echoed thin and shrill. Sometimes a clockwork puppet pressed A phantom lover to her breast, Sometimes they seemed to try to sing. Sometimes a horrible marionette Came out, and smoked its cigarette Upon the steps like a live thing. Then, turning to my love, I said, 'The dead are dancing with the dead, The dust is whirling with the dust.' But she--she heard the violin, And left my side, and entered in: Love passed into the house of lust. Then suddenly the tune went false, The dancers wearied of the waltz, The shadows ceased to wheel and whirl. And down the long and silent street, The dawn, with silver-sandalled feet, Crept like a frightened girl.

I feared death and I loved life. I yearned to live long enough to smoke one more cigarette, drink one more drink, experience seven more seconds of obscene bliss, and then, perhaps, but most likely not, I could die.

No… I’m NOT a city girl. Well, I mean I am ‘cause I grew up in Austin and all. I want nothing more than to get away from Austin and live in a small town with lots of land, and I would love to have a beautiful ranch style home and go outside every morning and feed the chickens. I want to hear nothing but nature. No cars, no horns, no freaking people blowing their damn cigarette smoke in my face. I want to be able to look up into the sky and see the millions of stars every night. I’ve never seen what a true night time sky looks like with all the stars. I would love that.

And then we heard a branch break. It might have been a deer, but the Colonel busted out anyway. A voice directly behind us said, "Don't run, Chipper," and the Colonel stopped, turned around, and returned to us sheepishly. The Eagle walked toward us slowly, his lips pursed in disgust. He wore a white shirt and a black tie, like always. He gave each of us in turn the Look of Doom. "Y'all smell like a North Carolina tobacco field in a wildfire," he said. We stood silent. I felt disproportionately terrible, like I had just been caught fleeing the scene of a murder. Would he call my parents? "I'll see you in Jury tomorrow at five," he announced, and then walked away. Alaska crouched down, picked up the cigarette she had thrown away, and started smoking again. The Eagle wheeled around, his sixth sense detecting Insubordination To Authority Figures. Alaska dropped the cigarette and stepped on it. The Eagle shook his head, and even though he must have been crazy mad, I swear to God he smiled. "He loves me," Alaska told me as we walked back to the dorm circle. "He loves all y'all, too. He just loves the school more. That's the thing. He thinks busting us is good for the school and good for us. It's the eternal struggle, Pudge. The Good versus the Naughty." "You're awfully philosophical for a girl that just got busted," I told her. "Sometimes you lose a battle. But mischief always wins the war.

Most, I loved James Baldwin's essays. There was to a Baldwin essay a metropolitan elegance I envied, a refusal of the livid. In Baldwin I found a readiness to rise to prophetic wrath, something like those ministers, and yet, once more, to bend down in tenderness, to call grown men and women "baby" (a whiff of the theater). Watching Baldwin on television—I will always consider the fifties to have been a sophisticated time—fixed for me what being a writer must mean. Arching eyebrows intercepted ironies, parenthetically declared fouls; mouthfuls of cigarette smoke shot forth ribbons of exactitude.

She called herself Starla, Queen of the Nile, and she had me from the first moment I saw her walk onto that stage. She wore nine-inch-heels and a dress that shone in the multi-colored lighting, glimmering through the haze created by the smoke machines and cigarettes.

Three years passed. Three years without a mother. In three years my grief has grown to enormous proportions. Grief is now a giant, sad whale that I drag along with me wherever I go. My grief fills rooms. It takes up space and it sucks out the air. It leaves no room for anyone else. Grief and I are left alone a lot. We smoke cigarettes and we cry. Grief holds my hand as I walk down the sidewalk, and grief doesn't mind when I cry because it's raining and I cannot find a taxi. Grief acts like a jealous friend, reminding me that no one else will ever love me as much as it does. Grief whispers in my ear that no one understands me. Grief is possessive and doesn't let me go anywhere without it. Grief is force and I am swept up in it.

I came to Los Angeles to bring back love. All great movies are about love. Love lost, found, destroyed, regained, bought, sold, dying, and being born. I love movies, but they've forgotten what they're about. Explosions, effects, that wasn't what it meant when I first got here. It was about lighting cigarette smoke so it looked like heavenly fire and lighting women so they looked like angels. I came here to bring true love back from the dead.

Together, on his back porch, his cigarette smoke rising like incense to the heavens, we spoke to the God of grace we both are so grateful to know up close and personal. It may be the most beautiful prayer I've ever heard. Jesus, for some reason you've given us another day, and you've set us in Narnia. There are people who still think it's frozen, and there are people who are longing to be thawed but don't know it. God, I pray that what you've called us to do would be the subversive work of the kingdom, that we would help participate in the melting of Narnia, and that people would come alive and would drink and dance and sing and just celebrate life in ways that are so marvelous that the world would press its face against the glass and see the redeemed celebrate life. Amen.

The smell of cigarette smoke in the air in a tavern that changes names often, a bar cursed because of a girl who died of a drug overdose in the basement, we put a few coins in the jukebox; chose “Angel Band” by Johnny Cash and sat down at the bar, ordered a soda, you wanted a whiskey on the rocks. We saw the coal miner who moved here from West Virginia knocking back liquor like I drink sweet tea. No one asked why he was so solemn today. It was warm. It was relatively quiet. To anyone else, this place could feel sinister. But to us, it was freedom. It was a hiding place. No one was ever here long enough to know us. And we liked it that way.

A sweeping vista of Northern sky opens up between the warehouses and hangs motionless above the cobbled streets. It’s a world of unrequited love beneath the smoke stacks and awkward moments in the underpass. A great crashing wave of romantic despair that washes over my dramatic heart, dousing it with a thin grey rinse. I’m James Dean, I’m Albert Camus, I posture in doorways with a lit cigarette dangling from the corner of my mouth. My great iron bedstead, my kitchen sink drama, the grainy black and white days of this life...

She’s finished her cigarette but hasn’t put it out properly, so it’s still smoking in the ashtray. I crush mine into it, grinding until both stop burning.

And she had a few lines that really spoke to me. I really liked “Write a list of things you’ll regret/I’d be on top smoking a cigarette.” I loved that line. I

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.

She wanted to remind him, whether his family was there or not. She wanted. And wanted. And endured in her wanting: the damp seat, the dry chicken, more champagne, the headache the champagne brought, the midges, the chat, his failure, no refusal, to look, look at me, I caused a thunderstorm with my passion and I sit here shaking under my skin and you don't notice because you're trying so hard not to notice, but all the people at the table there are really only you and me and you know it, the air is charged with it, it's a heat, a hot wind, and Marina and Seely are a sham next to it, Annabel ceases to exist, is simply obliterated in the gale of it, this isn't a fantasy, not my imagination, I can tell by the way you lift your fork, by the set of your jaw, by that sixth cigarette you are smoking me, or would if you could; but how long can we sustain it, how long till eruption, till the storm returns again and they can all see what it is, what it really is?

Trying to separate myself from the thing I loved most in the world. It was doomed to fail, just as it always is. Every moment of every day, in every theatre and bedroom and brothel, I found myself bored and restless, never fully present, never truly able to be there, in the room, with everybody else. At balls I would only feel myself when I slipped away to the bathroom, or slunk into an unused bedroom to smoke a cigarette, for in there I could sit down, and be silent, and be sad, and think of my loss and my misery and my overwhelming sense of ennui.

As I ride down the street, I stare into people’s homes, at shadows shifting behind curtains, at backs of heads watching TV, at all the houses with trucks parked in yards, duplexes filled with cigarette smoke, people who will fight to make sure things stay exactly how they are. They hate new ideas. They don’t question anything. They see body parts and skin color, and they think what’s on the outside is what matters. But when people don’t look at the inside of others and they don’t look at the inside of themselves, they’re missing practically everything.

a stunning glimpse of Buddy, at a later date by innumerable years, quite bereft of my dubious, loving company, writing about this very party on a very large, jet-black, very moving, gorgeous typewriter. He is smoking a cigarette, occasionally clasping his hands and placing them on the top of his head in a thoughtful, exhausted manner. His hair is gray; he is older than you are now, Les! The veins in his hands are slightly prominent in the glimpse, so I have not mentioned the matter to him at all, partially considering his youthful prejudice against veins showing in poor adults’ hands. So it goes. You would think this particular glimpse would pierce the casual witness’s heart to the quick, disabling him utterly, so that he could not bring himself to discuss the glimpse in the least with his beloved, broadminded family. This is not exactly the case; it mostly makes me take an exceedingly deep breath as a simple, brisk measure against getting dizzy. It is his room that pierces me more than anything else. It is all his youthful dreams realized to the full! It has one of those beautiful windows in the ceiling that he has always, to my absolute knowledge, fervently admired from a splendid reader’s distance! All round about him, in addition, are exquisite shelves to hold his books, equipment, tablets, sharp pencils, ebony, costly typewriter, and other stirring, personal effects. Oh, my God, he will be overjoyed when he sees that room, mark my words! It is one of the most smiling, comforting glimpses of my entire life and quite possibly with the least strings attached. In a reckless manner of speaking, I would far from object if that were practically the last glimpse of my life.

There's one big difference between the poor and the rich,' Kite says, taking a drag from his cigarette. We are in a pub, at lunch-time. John Kite is always, unless stated otherwise, smoking a fag, in a pub, at lunch-time. 'The rich aren't evil, as so many of my brothers would tell you. I've known rich people -- I have played on their yachts -- and they are not unkind, or malign, and they do not hate the poor, as many would tell you. And they are not stupid -- or at least, not any more than the poor are. Much as I find amusing the idea of a ruling class of honking toffs, unable to put their socks on without Nanny helping them, it is not true. They build banks, and broker deals, and formulate policy, all with perfect competency. 'No -- the big difference between the rich and the poor is that the rich are blithe. They believe nothing can ever really be so bad, They are born with the lovely, velvety coating of blitheness -- like lanugo, on a baby -- and it is never rubbed off by a bill that can't be paid; a child that can't be educated; a home that must be left for a hostel, when the rent becomes too much. 'Their lives are the same for generations. There is no social upheaval that will really affect them. If you're comfortably middle-class, what's the worst a government policy could do? Ever? Tax you at 90 per cent and leave your bins, unemptied, on the pavement. But you and everyone you know will continue to drink wine -- but maybe cheaper -- go on holiday -- but somewhere nearer -- and pay off your mortgage -- although maybe later. 'Consider, now, then, the poor. What's the worst a government policy can do to them? It can cancel their operation, with no recourse to private care. It can run down their school -- with no escape route to a prep. It can have you out of your house and into a B&B by the end of the year. When the middle-classes get passionate about politics, they're arguing about their treats -- their tax breaks and their investments. When the poor get passionate about politics, they're fighting for their lives. 'Politics will always mean more to the poor. Always. That's why we strike and march, and despair when our young say they won't vote. That's why the poor are seen as more vital, and animalistic. No classical music for us -- no walking around National Trust properties, or buying reclaimed flooring. We don't have nostalgia. We don't do yesterday. We can't bear it. We don't want to be reminded of our past, because it was awful; dying in mines, and slums, without literacy, or the vote. Without dignity. It was all so desperate, then. That's why the present and the future is for the poor -- that's the place in time for us: surviving now, hoping for better, later. We live now -- for our instant, hot, fast treats, to prep us up: sugar, a cigarette, a new fast song on the radio. 'You must never, never forget, when you talk to someone poor, that it takes ten times the effort to get anywhere from a bad postcode, It's a miracle when someone from a bad postcode gets anywhere, son. A miracle they do anything at all.

THIS COULD GET UGLY The ugly you got in you Well, I got it, too You act like you ain’t got a clue But you do Oh, we could be lovely If this could get ugly Write a list of things you’ll regret I’d be on top smoking a cigarette Oh, we could be lovely If this could get ugly The things you run from, baby, I run to

And I want to play hide-and-seek and give you my clothes and tell you I like your shoes and sit on the steps while you take a bath and massage your neck and kiss your feet and hold your hand and go for a meal and not mind when you eat my food and meet you at Rudy’s and talk about the day and type your letters and carry your boxes and laugh at your paranoia and give you tapes you don’t listen to and watch great films and watch terrible films and complain about the radio and take pictures of you when you’re sleeping and get up to fetch you coffee and bagels and Danish and go to Florent and drink coffee at midnight and have you steal my cigarettes and never be able to find a match and tell you about the the programme I saw the night before and take you to the eye hospital and not laugh at your jokes and want you in the morning but let you sleep for a while and kiss your back and stroke your skin and tell you how much I love your hair your eyes your lips your neck your breasts your arse your and sit on the steps smoking till your neighbour comes home and sit on the steps smoking till you come home and worry when you’re late and be amazed when you’re early and give you sunflowers and go to your party and dance till I’m black and be sorry when I’m wrong and happy when you forgive me and look at your photos and wish I’d known you forever and hear your voice in my ear and feel your skin on my skin (...) .

Jean-Luc takes a deep drag, flips a page of his book, and exhales. The smoke hangs in midair for a second like a ghost flashing through. In my usual world, I would’ve despised the sight and the smell of his cigarette. But this is not my usual world, and this is not my usual self. Instead, the smoke becomes a magical sight and even the smell captivates me.

The way you philosophize life, With those beer tins in your hand, Lady, such a poetry you are when you are drunk, And those cigarettes in between your pretty fingers, You look so very graceful when you are smoking, So very beautiful in the haze, Like some medieval artwork, So worthy to be on canvas… I just love to watch you struggle in bed, Fighting the sunlight with your pillow, And in all the glory of your Sunday morning hangover, Innocence oozes out of your drunken face, And Oh my Godless lady it’s time for your, Lemonades, Novocain and hour long shower in silence. I know it’s crazy to believe in silly things, But you look so very pure when you suffer from your addictions… --- Her Cigarettes And Beers

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.

Who needs money anyhow? Leastwise, not right aways we don't ... except for dopes. We ought to save enough so we can have a dope every day cause my brains get fried if I can't have myself an ice-cold dope. And cigarettes. I surely do appreciate a smoke. Dopes and smokes and Henry are the only things I love." "You like me some, don't you?" he said, without meaning really to speak aloud. In any case, Idabel ... did not answer.

Harry, you are dreadful! I don't know why I like you so much." "You will always like me, Dorian," he replied. "Will you have some coffee, you fellows? Waiter, bring coffee, and fine-champagne, and some cigarettes. No, don't mind the cigarettes--I have some. Basil, I can't allow you to smoke cigars. You must have a cigarette. A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want? Yes, Dorian, you will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you have never had the courage to commit." "What nonsense you talk, Harry!" cried the lad, taking a light from a fire-breathing silver dragon that the waiter had placed on the table. "Let us go down to the theatre. When Sibyl comes on the stage you will have a new ideal of life. She will represent something to you that you have never known." "I have known everything," said Lord Henry, with a tired look in his eyes, "but I am always ready for a new emotion. I am afraid, however, that, for me at any rate, there is no such thing. Still, your wonderful girl may thrill me. I love acting. It is so much more real than life. Let us go. Dorian, you will come with me. I am so sorry, Basil, but there is only room for two in the brougham. You must follow us in a hansom.

He was the one, however, with whom no one wanted his or her picture taken, the one to whom no one wanted to introduce his son or daughter. Louis and Gage knew him; they had met him and faced him down in New England, some time ago. He was waiting to choke you on a marble, to smother you with a dry-cleaning bag, to sizzle you into eternity with a fast and lethal boggie of electricity—Available at Your Nearest Switchplate or Vacant Light Socket Right Now. There was death in a quarter bag of peanuts, an aspirated piece of steak, the next pack of cigarettes. He was around all the time, he monitored all the checkpoints between the mortal and the eternal. Dirty needles, poison beetles, downed live wires, forest fires. Whirling roller skates that shot nurdy little kids into busy intersections. When you got into the bathtub to take a shower, Oz got right in there too—Shower with a Friend. When you got on an airplane, Oz took your boarding pass. He was in the water you drank, the food you ate. Who’s out there? you howled into the dark when you were frightened and all alone, and it was his answer that came back: Don’t be afraid, it’s just me. Hi, howaya? You got cancer of the bowel, what a bummer, so solly, Cholly! Septicemia! Leukemia! Atherosclerosis! Coronary thrombosis! Encephalitis! Osteomyelitis! Hey-ho, let’s go! Junkie in a doorway with a knife. Phone call in the middle of the night. Blood cooking in battery acid on some exit ramp in North Carolina. Big handfuls of pills, munch em up. That peculiar blue cast of the fingernails following asphyxiation—in its final grim struggle to survive the brain takes all the oxygen that is left, even that in those living cells under the nails. Hi, folks, my name’s Oz the Gweat and Tewwible, but you can call me Oz if you want—hell, we’re old friends by now. Just stopped by to whop you with a little congestive heart failure or a cranial blood clot or something; can’t stay, got to see a woman about a breach birth, then I’ve got a little smoke-inhalation job to do in Omaha. And that thin voice is crying, “I love you, Tigger! I love you! I believe in you, Tigger! I will always love you and believe in you, and I will stay young, and the only Oz to ever live in my heart will be that gentle faker from Nebraska! I love you . . .” We cruise . . . my son and I . . . because the essence of it isn’t war or sex but only that sickening, noble, hopeless battle against Oz the Gweat and Tewwible. He and I, in our white van under this bright Florida sky, we cruise. And the red flasher is hooded, but it is there if we need it . . . and none need know but us because the soil of a man’s heart is stonier; a man grows what he can . . . and tends it.

I realized that I had come here in the hope of once more finding that man so hopelessly in love: I had not seen him for years and years, although this memory lies like a transparency over all the visions I have of him. That evening, for the very reason that the surroundings were the same, the old image, coming into contact with a flesh and blood man smoking a cigarette, fell to dust and ashes, I had a shattering revelation: time goes by. I began to weep.

Whatever your gift is, bring it to someone else in their time of need. No gift---singing, writing, painting--is too small to share. Give without expecting to get back. People’s greed will shock you. Their generosity will shock you more. Be unconcerned with what others think of you. If you are a good person, someone will always love you, and someone will likely hate you, too. If you punch someone in a bar, get it on video. Be unapologetic about your faith in God, Country and Family. Everyone grieves differently. Don’t judge. And don’t be afraid to ask about a loved one who has passed. Don’t expect perfection from anyone, especially yourself. Learn when to let go of people who bring only pain. Time and distance don’t change true friendship. There is far more good in the world than bad. Don’t have the first cigarette. PTS is not an excuse for murder. This country has many, many patriots in it; you are not alone. Look for divinity everywhere--I promise you will see it. Desperate people do desperate things. Stress will age you. Exercise relieves stress better than smoking. When people lie about you, taking the high road can suck. Pain does not have to consume you. When it’s unavoidable, respect it and let it have its place in your life without letting it take over. God promises beauty through ashes. Give it time and you will see it. Fame doesn’t bring happiness. Living a good life goes. All makeup artists are not created equal. Accept that you are human, and eventually you need sleep.

I looked up at the dark sky and prayed to God for a better break in life and a better chance to do something for the little people I loved. Nobody was paying any attention to me up there. I should have known better. It was Terry who brought my soul back; on the tent stove she warmed up the food, and it was one of the greatest meals of my life, I was so hungry and tired. Sighing like an old Negro cotton-picker, I reclined on the bed and smoked a cigarette. Dogs barked in the cool night. Rickey and Ponzo had given up calling

But Linda and Bob are good, old friends. I feel their warmth even though they aren't there. Come and blueberry jelly on the sheets. Racing forms and cigarette butts in the bathroom. Notes from Bob to Linda: "Buy some smokes and take the car ... dooh-dah dooh-dah." Drawings by Andrea with Love to Mom. Pizza crusts. I clean their coke mirror with Windex. It is the only place I work that isn't spotless to begin with. It's filthy in fact, Every Wednesday I climb the stairs like Sisyphus into their living room where it always looks like they are in the middle of moving.

Last Saturday night I was in a club on the South Side of Chicago listening to live rock music and talking to a guitar playing veteran of the music scene in the city. He looked and talked like the musicians that I recall from my childhood; he was a thin, cigarette smoking, avant garde and interesting guy. We got to talking about a life in the relatively risky creative arts and he said, “Look, you could get that safe job and spend your whole life that way, but what are you waiting for? When you’re ninety-six years old and have three days left? Is that when you decide to do what you love?

JOINT CUSTODY Why did I never see it for what it was: abundance? Two families, two different kitchen tables, two sets of rules, two creeks, two highways, two stepparents with their fish tanks or eight-tracks or cigarette smoke or expertise in recipes or reading skills. I cannot reverse it, the record scratched and stopping to that original chaotic track. But let me say, I was taken back and forth on Sundays and it was not easy but I was loved each place. And so I have two brains now. Two entirely different brains. The one that always misses where I’m not, and the one that is so relieved to finally be home.

Sorry to inform you...but as a fellow failed miner, the problem is there's nowhere left to dig. We're real poets man. And whatever. But it's the digging, it's the holes! Its these burrows to half nestle in just to pass the time, to chafe the inner thigh of boredom and that level of power-demanding pain is only in existence because you really, really know that there isn't anything else. The holes. And me missing a shovel, that has created the voids, the tears, the fucks, the sucks, the shame, the stares, the songs, the words, and in admittedly, even more holes. Not having one of my shovels has somehow overcompensated the digs in which I've dug. The holes. The holes are why you smoke aware of cancer, a disease to take over years of boring lives, and give us a bone to gnaw on, overcome, defeat, lick-dry, or die. The holes are why you drink with your last dollars, when you know you're going to throw it up tonight anyway. The holes are why you think you're in love, and that's a hole that you might not climb back from. The holes, the holes the holes, making you question everything standing at a bus stop...smelling like cigarettes and perfume...signing up for classes you wont go to... hand covered in club stamps... face covered in guilt... Maybe go to a protest and just stand there...Or lay in bed when there's no way you can sleep...

Why do we care about Lizzie Borden, or Judge Crater, or Lee Harvey Oswald, or the Little Big Horn? Mystery! Because of all that cannot be known. And what if we did know? What if it were proved—absolutely and purely—that Lizzie Borden took an ax? That Oswald acted alone? That Judge Crater fell into Sicilian hands? Nothing more would beckon, nothing would tantalize. The thing about Custer is this: no survivors. Hence, eternal doubt, which both frustrates and fascinates. It’s a standoff. The human desire for certainty collides with our love of enigma. And so I lose sleep over mute facts and frayed ends and missing witnesses. God knows I’ve tried. Reams of data, miles of magnetic tape, but none of it satisfies even my own primitive appetite for answers. So I toss and turn. I eat pints of ice cream at two in the morning. Would it help to announce the problem early on? To plead for understanding? To argue that solutions only demean the grandeur of human ignorance? To point out that absolute knowledge is absolute closure? To issue a reminder that death itself dissolves into uncertainty, and that out of such uncertainty arise great temples and tales of salvation? I prowl and smoke cigarettes. I review my notes. The truth is at once simple and baffling: John Wade was a pro. He did his magic, then walked away. Everything else is conjecture. No answers, yet mystery itself carries me on.

I don’t like stories. I like moments. I like night better than day, moon better than sun, and here-and-now better than any sometime-later. I also like birds, mushrooms, the blues, peacock feathers, black cats, blue-eyed people, heraldry, astrology, criminal stories with lots of blood, and ancient epic poems where human heads can hold conversations with former friends and generally have a great time for years after they’ve been cut off. I like good food and good drink, sitting in a hot bath and lounging in a snowbank, wearing everything I own at once, and having everything I need close at hand. I like speed and that special ache in the pit of the stomach when you accelerate to the point of no return. I like to frighten and to be frightened, to amuse and to confound. I like writing on the walls so that no one can guess who did it, and drawing so that no one can guess what it is. I like doing my writing using a ladder or not using it, with a spray can or squeezing the paint from a tube. I like painting with a brush, with a sponge, and with my fingers. I like drawing the outline first and then filling it in completely, so that there’s no empty space left. I like letters as big as myself, but I like very small ones as well. I like directing those who read them here and there by means of arrows, to other places where I also wrote something, but I also like to leave false trails and false signs. I like to tell fortunes with runes, bones, beans, lentils, and I Ching. Hot climates I like in the books and movies; in real life, rain and wind. Generally rain is what I like most of all. Spring rain, summer rain, autumn rain. Any rain, anytime. I like rereading things I’ve read a hundred times over. I like the sound of the harmonica, provided I’m the one playing it. I like lots of pockets, and clothes so worn that they become a kind of second skin instead of something that can be taken off. I like guardian amulets, but specific ones, so that each is responsible for something separate, not the all-inclusive kind. I like drying nettles and garlic and then adding them to anything and everything. I like covering my fingers with rubber cement and then peeling it off in front of everybody. I like sunglasses. Masks, umbrellas, old carved furniture, copper basins, checkered tablecloths, walnut shells, walnuts themselves, wicker chairs, yellowed postcards, gramophones, beads, the faces on triceratopses, yellow dandelions that are orange in the middle, melting snowmen whose carrot noses have fallen off, secret passages, fire-evacuation-route placards; I like fretting when in line at the doctor’s office, and screaming all of a sudden so that everyone around feels bad, and putting my arm or leg on someone when asleep, and scratching mosquito bites, and predicting the weather, keeping small objects behind my ears, receiving letters, playing solitaire, smoking someone else’s cigarettes, and rummaging in old papers and photographs. I like finding something lost so long ago that I’ve forgotten why I needed it in the first place. I like being really loved and being everyone’s last hope, I like my own hands—they are beautiful, I like driving somewhere in the dark using a flashlight, and turning something into something completely different, gluing and attaching things to each other and then being amazed that it actually worked. I like preparing things both edible and not, mixing drinks, tastes, and scents, curing friends of the hiccups by scaring them. There’s an awful lot of stuff I like.

But when Hitler wanted Professor Blaschke to agree with him that smoking was one of the most harmful abuses of all and had a particularly bad effect on the teeth, he met with firm opposition. Blaschke himself was a heavy smoker, and perhaps therefore more tolerant than he should have been from a medical point of view. He claimed that smoking was positively good for you, because it disinfected the oral cavity and stimulated the blood supply. In a normal context, he said, smoking wasn’t at all harmful. But Hitler wouldn’t hear of it. ‘Smoking is and always will be one of the most dangerous of habits, and quite apart from the fact that I personally find the smell of cigar or cigarette smoke disgusting, I wouldn’t offer anyone I value or love a cigarette or cigar, because I’d be doing him no service. It has been shown for certain that non-smokers live

She paid rapt attention to the carpet design He did the same to his pint of beer. She wished she were ten thousand miles away He just wished she were here. He smoked a rolled-up cigarette She smoked a brand that was strong, As she dreamily savoured her newly-won life, While he wondered how things had gotten so wrong. She whispered the words of an old favourite song He joined – mistaking her meaning. She shed a few reminiscent tears He carried on – wildly dreaming. He reached for her hand. She snatched it away, Brushing invisible specks from her lap Then she endeavoured to say… “I don’t understand why you keep up this farce Why can’t you see there’s no way? I cannot revive what has long since died There’s nothing more I can say.” He cried like a baby; He pleaded and begged her to stay. She hated herself like a louse But still she got up – and walked away.

She wanted strangers to know God's love, so how much more did she want that for me? But instead of getting the daughter she deserved, who would be happy and satisfied with life in the county and marriage to a God-fearing man, she got a daughter who rolled her eyes when she was the unwilling recipient of lengthy prayers. But that didn't stop my mother from trying to bridge the gap. She loved me and wanted me to have access to the faith that had given her so much comfort. Above all she wanted us to be together in eternity. Before I walked away from the church, my family and I used to look in the same direction, toward the same sun. We believed there was one God and he was looking on us with love, because we were his children and we followed his commandments. There were those on the margins-my aunt who smoked cigarettes, Catholics, or the people who went to the mosque across the street from the hospital. But no one in our community would actually deny the existence of God.

The Harlot’s House. We caught the tread of dancing feet, We loitered down the moonlit street, And stopped beneath the harlot’s house. Inside, above the din and fray, We heard the loud musicians play The ‘Treues Liebes Herz’ of Strauss. Like strange mechanical grotesques, Making fantastic arabesques, The shadows raced across the blind. We watched the ghostly dancers spin To sound of horn and violin, Like black leaves wheeling in the wind. Like wire-pulled automatons, Slim silhouetted skeletons Went sidling through the slow quadrille. They took each other by the hand, And danced a stately saraband; Their laughter echoed thin and shrill. Sometimes a clockwork puppet pressed A phantom lover to her breast, Sometimes they seemed to try to sing. Sometimes a horrible marionette Came out, and smoked its cigarette Upon the steps like a live thing. Then, turning to my love, I said, ‘The dead are dancing with the dead, The dust is whirling with the dust.’ But she—she heard the violin, And left my side, and entered in: Love passed into the house of lust. Then suddenly the tune went false, The dancers wearied of the waltz, The shadows ceased to wheel and whirl. And down the long and silent street, The dawn, with silver-sandalled feet, Crept like a frightened girl.

Having become—with the passage of time—the anthropologist of my own experience, I have no wish to disparage those obsessive souls who bring back crockery, artifacts, and utensils from distant lands and put them on display for us, the better to understand the lives of others and our own. Nevertheless, I would caution against paying too much attention to the objects and relics of “first love,” for these might distract the viewer from the depth of compassion and gratitude that now arose between us. So it is precisely to illustrate the solicitude in the caresses that my eighteen-year-old lover bestowed upon my thirty-year-old skin as we lay quietly in this room in each other’s arms, that I have chosen to exhibit this floral batiste handkerchief, which she had folded so carefully and put in her bag that day but never removed. Let this crystal inkwell and pen set belonging to my mother that Füsun toyed with that afternoon, noticing it on the table while she was smoking a cigarette, be a relic of the refinement and the fragile tenderness we felt for each other. Let this belt whose oversize buckles that I had seized and fastened with a masculine arrogance that I felt so guilty for afterwards bear witness to our melancholy as we covered our nakedness and cast our eyes about the filth of the world once again.

You did not do my homework assignment for me,” he said, grabbing the collage again and looking it over. “I had insomnia,” I said. “I needed a creative activity.” Marlboro Man looked at me, seemingly unsure of whether to kiss me, thank me…or just tickle me some more. I didn’t give him a chance. Instead I picked up the collage and took Marlboro Man on a tour so he’d be prepared for our appointment. “Here’s a pack of cigarettes,” I said. “Because I used to smoke in college.” “Uh-huh,” he answered. “I knew that.” “And here’s a glass of white wine,” I continued. “Because…I love white wine.” “Yes, I’ve noticed,” Marlboro Man answered. “But…won’t Father Johnson have a problem with that being on there?” “Nah…,” I said. “He’s Episcopalian.” “Got it,” he said. I continued with my collage orientation, pointing out the swatch of my favorite shade of turquoise…the pug…the ballet shoe…the Hershey’s Kiss. He watched and listened intently, prepping himself for Father Johnson’s upcoming grilling. Gradually the earliness of the morning and the cozy warmth of my bedroom got the better of us, and before we knew it we’d sunk into the irresistible softness of my bed, our arms and legs caught in a tangled maze. “I think I love you,” his raspy voice whispered, his lips nearly touching my ear. His arms wrapped even more tightly around my body, swallowing me almost completely.

I had abandoned Elana; I deserved her uncertainty. I closed my eyes and focused on her touch. Perhaps she wouldn't have understood had I tried to explain it to her, but to me Elana was not only Elana--she was the sad-eyed love of mine who used to bag groceries at Woodley's in Buffalo; she was the sweet one who always sat across from me on the city bus in Niagara Falls; she was the girl I'd picked up hitchhiking in Mobile and dropped off in New Orleans, brash, full of sarcastic humor, but truly lonely and scared; she was the one I'd nabbed pinching Newports for her dad from the Marathon station I'd worked at in Bakersfield (I'd softened and paid for the pack myself); yes, she was the girl playing basketball with all the boys in the park, collecting cans by the side of the road, keeping secret pet kittens in an empty boxcar in the woods, walking alone at night through the rail yards, teaching her little sisters how to kiss, reading out loud to herself, so absorbed by the story, singing sadly in the tub, building a fort from the junked cars out in the meadow, by herself in the front row at the black-and-white movies or in the alley, gazing at an eddy of cigarette stubs and trash and fall leaves, smoking her first cigarette at dusk by a pile of dead brush in the desert, then wishing at the stars-she was all of them, and she was so much more that was just her that I still didn't know.

... And I said: 'What kind of trouble with your drama teacher?' She said: 'Well I'm having difficulty with the feelings.' I said: 'The... the f-feelings?' She said: 'You know...' ...she said: 'You know the, the feelings.' Like I would know. I said 'You saw me in a play?' She said. 'Yeah' 'And you thought it was good?' And she said 'Yeah, thought it was absolutely marv- ... ' I said 'Well, I can absolutely guarantee you that I'm not feeling anything. I'm at work. D'you know what I mean? I'm a bit busy. I'm a bit pushed. I have to do - I have to achieve about... 1500 things over a period of two and half hours or whatever the play length might be. I have to make love to a woman, smoke cigarettes, reach the door handle, hit the door handle when that verbal cue comes coz otherwise the lights will go funny, I have to, you know, get semi-naked and eat chilli con carne. You know. I'm occupied. I can't be feeling stuff. You know, that I do on my own time.' And you can't phone up on a wet Wednesday and say: 'D'you know what? [shakes head sadly]... I'm not feeling it. So I don't think I'll come in today.' People who teach acting they have to talk for a very long time. Sometimes two years of talk. Or sometimes three. And there isn't that much to say. And they start making it up, sometimes. Or they'll concentrate on things that are undeniable. Like you can't say: 'I am feeling it.' 'No you're not. No, I can't... you know, you're not feel-... I can't... you know, I'm sorry but I just - you're not feeling it, you gotta feel it.' 'Yeah I am. I think I'm feeling it...' You know, it's all completely unnecessary. The audience have no interest in what you might be feeling. You're supposed to give the appearance of feeling something. Like you did when you were a kid. It is an extension of what you did in the back yard when you played the bank robber and the other guy played... the policeman.

I found out Si was taking naps every day on Kay’s couch! I went to Phil and told him it was a problem. “Look, I know he’s your brother and he’s my uncle, but he’s not the kind of worker we need to have,” I told Phil, while trying to make a good first impression. I was trying to instill a new work ethic and culture in Duck Commander, and I couldn’t have Si sleeping on the job! “Don’t touch Si,” Phil told me. “You leave him alone. He’s making reeds and that’s the hardest thing we do. Si is the only guy who wants to do it, and he’s good at it. Si is fine.” Amazingly enough, in the ten years I’ve been running Duck Commander, we’ve never once run out of reeds. Six years ago, Si suffered a heart attack. He smoked cigarettes for almost forty years and then quit after his heart attack, so we were all so proud of him. Even before his heart attack, I wasn’t sure about putting Si on our DVDs because I thought he would just come across too crazy. He cracked us up in the duck blind and we all loved him, but I told Jep and the other camera guys to film around him. Honestly, I didn’t think anyone would understand what he was saying. When we finally tried to put him on the DVDs, he clammed up in front of the camera and looked like a frog in a cartoon just sitting there. He wouldn’t perform. Finally, we put a hidden camera under a shirt on Si’s desk. We were near the end of editing a DVD and showed a shooting scene to Si. He always takes credit for shooting more ducks than he really did. He’s said before that he killed three ducks with one shot! We were watching patterns hitting the water, and Si started claiming the ducks like he always does and going off on one of his long tangents. After we recorded him, we ran the DVD back and showed it to him. I think Si saw that he was actually pretty funny and entertaining if he acted like himself. We started putting Si on the DVDs and he got more and more popular. Now he’s the star of Duck Dynasty!

You surprise me, she says. Do I? he says. Why? Though I like to surprise you. He lights a cigarette, offers her one; she shakes her head for no. He’s smoking too much. It’s nerves, despite his steady hands. Because you said they fell in love, she says. You’ve sneered at that notion often enough—not realistic, bourgeois superstition, rotten at the core. Sickly sentiment, a high-flown Victorian excuse for honest carnality. Going soft on yourself? Don’t blame me, blame history, he says, smiling. Such things happen. Falling in love has been recorded, or at least those words have. Anyway, I said he was lying. You can’t wiggle out of it that way. The lying was only at first. Then you changed it. Point granted. But there could be a more callous way of looking at it. Looking at what? This falling in love business. Since when is it a business? she says angrily. He smiles. That notion bother you? Too commercial? Your own conscience would flinch, is that what you’re saying? But there’s always a tradeoff, isn’t there? No, she says. There isn’t. Not always. You might say he grabbed what he could get. Why wouldn’t he? He had no scruples, his life was dog eat dog and it always had been. Or you could say they were both young so they didn’t know any better. The young habitually mistake lust for love, they’re infested with idealism of all kinds. And I haven’t said he didn’t kill her afterwards. As I’ve pointed out, he was nothing if not self-interested. So you’ve got cold feet, she says. You’re backing down, you’re chicken. You won’t go all the way. You’re to love as a cock-teaser is to fucking. He laughs, a startled laugh. Is it the coarseness of the words, is he taken aback, has she finally managed that? Restrain your language, young lady. Why should I? You don’t. I’m a bad example. Let’s just say they could indulge themselves—their emotions, if you want to call it that. They could roll around in their emotions—live for the moment, spout poetry out of both ends, burn the candle, drain the cup, howl at the moon. Time was running out on them. They had nothing to lose. He did. Or he certainly thought he did! All right then.She had nothing to lose. He blows out a cloud of smoke. Not like me, she says, I guess you mean. Not like you, darling, he says. Like me. I’m the one with nothing to lose. She says, But you’ve got me. I’m not nothing.

The little sneak caught me one day, coming around the car when I was outside puffing away. “I was wondering what you were doing,” he said, spying me squatting behind the truck. He’d nailed me, but the look on his face made it seem as if our roles were reversed--he looked as if he were in shock, as if I’d just slapped him. When I went back inside, I found he’d taped signs to the walls: DON’T SMOKE! I laugh about it now, but not then. “Why are you so devastated that I’m smoking?” I asked when I found him. “Because. I already lost one parent. I don’t want to lose you, too.” “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I told him. “I’m going to stop.” But of course it wasn’t nearly that easy. As horrible as I felt, I was deep into the habit. I would quit for a while--a day, an hour--then somehow a cigarette would find its way to my mouth. I continued to rationalize, continued to struggle--and Bubba continued to call me out. “I’m trying,” I told him. “I’m trying.” He’d come up and give me a hug--and smell the cigarette still on me. “Did you have one?” “Yes.” “Hmmmm…” Instant tears. “I’m trying, I’m trying.” One day I went out to the patio to take what turned out to be a super stressful call--and I started to smoke, almost unconsciously. In the middle of the conversation, Bubba came out and threw a paper airplane at me. What!!! My son scrambled back inside. I was furious, but the call was too important to cut short. Wait until I get you, mister! Just as I hung up, Bubba appeared at the window and pointed at the airplane at my feet. I opened it up and read his message. YOU SUCK AT TRYING. That hurt, not least of all because it was true. I tried harder. I switched to organic cigarettes--those can’t be that bad for you, right? They’re organic! Turns out organic tars and nicotine are still tars and nicotine. I quit for day, then started again. I resolved not to go to the store so I couldn’t be tempted…then found myself hunting through my jacket for an old packet, rifling around in my hiding places for a cigarette I’d forgotten. Was that a half-smoked butt I saw on the ground? Finally, I remembered one of the sayings SEALs live by: Slow is smooth, smooth is fast. Not exactly the conventional advice one uses to stop smoking, but the conventional advice had failed me. For some reason I took the words and tried applying them to my heartbeat, slowing my pulse as it ramped up. It was a kind of mini-meditation, meant to take the place of a cigarette. The mantra helped me take control. I focused on the thoughts that were making me panic, or at least getting my heart racing. Slow is smooth. Slow down, heart. Slow down--and don’t smoke. I worked on my breathing. Slow is smooth. Slow is smooth. And don’t smoke.

We were quiet for a while. Then Paul said, "I almost did it once." "Did what?" "Killed myself." The confession alone was shocking enough. It was the stark, unapologetic fierceness of his tone that frightened me. "Why?" "I was depressed," he said with a smirk. "Did you really want to die?" "No one commits suicide because they want to die." "Then why do they do it?" "Because they want to stop the pain.” Once again, his lack of guile was unsettling. But his words resonated somewhere inside of me. He took a drag off the cigarette, raised his mouth, and sent three smoke rings into the air. Watching them dissipate, he asked me if I was happy. But before I had a chance to respond he said, "Don't answer that. It's a stupid question. I don't believe in the myth of happiness any more than you do." This is where Paul had it wrong. I did believe in the myth. I had to. Otherwise I don't think I would have been there. Happiness is elusive, for sure. But like love, and music, I believed in it because I could feel it.

Then we sat in silence for a while, smoking cigarettes, surrounded by oyster shells, and finishing the wine. I was all at once very tired. I looked out into the narrow street, this strange, crooked corner where we sat, which was brazen now with the sunlight and heavy with people - people out will never understand. I ate abruptly, intolerably, with the longing to go home' not to that hotel, in one of the alleys of Paris, where concierge barred the way with my unpaid bill' but home, home across the ocean, to things and people I knew and understood' to those things, those places, those people which I will always helplessly, and in whatever bitterness of spirit, love above all else. I had never realized such a sentiment in myself before, and it frightened me. I saw myself, sharply, as a wonderer, and adventurer, rocking through the world, rocking thorough the world, anchored. I looked at Giovanni's face, which did not help me. He belonged to this strange city, which did not belong to me. I began to see that. While what was happening to me was not so strange as in all have comforted me to believe, yet it was strange beyond belief.

Stewart unfolded the oilcloth that kept his Bible dry and began reading. Ross reached into his pocket and brought out his tobacco pouch. He removed his rolling papers and found them sodden as Snipes’ newspaper. Henryson, who also was anticipating a cigarette, found his papers in the same condition. “I was at least hoping my lungs might be warm and dry a minute,” Ross complained. “You’d think there’d be one little pleasure you could have, even on a day scawmy as this one,” Henryson said. “You ain’t got no rolling papers, do you Stewart?” Stewart shook his head, not raising it from his Bible. “How about a few pages of your Bible there?” Ross asked. “That’d make a right fine rolling paper.” Stewart looked up incredulously. “It’d be sacrilegious do such a thing as that.” “I ain’t asking for pages where something important’s being said,” Ross entreated. “I’m just asking for two pages where there’s nothing but a bunch of so and so begot so and so. There ain’t nothing to be missed there.” “It still don’t seem right to me,” Stewart said. “I’d say it’s exactly the Christian thing to do,” Henryson countered, “helping out two miserable fellows who just want a smoke.” Stewart turned to Snipes. “What do you think?” “Well,” Snipes said. “Your leading scholars has argued for years you’ll find cause to do or not do most anything in that book, so I’m of a mind you got to pluck out the verse what trumps the rest of them.” “But which one’s that?” Stewart asked. “How about love thy neighbor,” Henryson quickly volunteered. Stewart bit his lower lip, deep in thought. Almost a minute passed before he opened the Bible and turned to Genesis. Stewart perused some pages before carefully tearing out two.

Two pairs of strangers performed. Jane watched them. Mr. Nobley watched her. Then it was her turn. She curtsied to the audience, to Mr. Nobley, and faced him in the center of the floor. All eyes watched them. Jane looked for Martin in the crowd. Maybe I really don’t want this, she thought. This is summer camp. This is a novel. This isn’t home. I need something real. Root beer and disposable umbrellas and bare feet real. “I believe we must say something.” It was Mr. Nobley who spoke. “Sorry,” she said. “Are you unwell tonight?” “Do I look unwell?” He smiled. “You are baiting me. It will not work tonight, Miss Erstwhile. I am completely at ease. I might even say, I am quite content.” Jane pushed the air out of her lungs. Part of her very much wanted to banter and play, to twirl and laugh, to be Miss Erstwhile and fall in love with Mr. Nobley (fall back in love?), but she felt herself on that razor’s edge, talking toe to heel like a gymnast, and when she fell this time, she wanted to be on the real world side, away from heartless fantasy, into the tangible. Then, with his hand on her waist to lead her through another figure, Mr. Nobley smiled at her again, and she clean forgot what she wanted. Him, him, him! she thought. I want him and this and everything, every flower, every strain of music. And I don’t want it wrapped up in a box--I want it living, around me, real. Why can’t I have that? I’m not ready to give it up. The first number ended, the group applauded the musicians. Mr. Nobley seemed to applaud Jane. “You look flushed,” he said. “I will get you a drink.” And he was gone. Jane smiled at his back. She liked a man in tails. Something bumped her elbow. “Excuse me…of, it is you, Jane, dear,” said Aunt Saffronia. She’d been watching Mr. Nobley as well, and her expression was still misty with contemplation. “Where is your partner off to?” “He is fetching me a drink,” said Jane. “I’ve never seen him so attentive. Or so at ease.” “Nor I, not in the four years I have known him. He is acting like a proper gentleman in love, is he not? I might almost say that he looks happy.” Aunt Saffronia was thoughtful, and while she stared, she idly bit her fingernail right through her glove. “Is he in love?” asked Jane. She was feeling bold in her bridal gown. “Hm, a question only hearts can answer.” She looked fully at Jane now and smiled approvingly. “Well, you are a confection tonight! And no wonder.” Aunt Saffronia leaned in to touch cheeks and kiss, and Jane caught a trace of cigarette smoke. Could the dear lady be the unseen smoker? What a lot of secrets in this place, thought Jane. She’d never before considered that Austen didn’t just write romances and comedies, but mysteries as well.

Dad had gone ballistic when Ruby got suspended from school for smoking, but not Nora. Her mother had picked Ruby up from the principal’s office and driven her to the state park at the tip of the island. She’d dragged Ruby down to the secluded patch of beach that overlooked Haro Strait and the distant glitter of downtown Victoria. It had been exactly three in the afternoon, and the gray whales had been migrating past them in a spouting, splashing row. Nora had been wearing her good dress, the one she saved for parent–teacher conferences, but she had plopped down cross-legged on the sand. Ruby had stood there, waiting to be bawled out, her chin stuck out, her arms crossed. Instead, Nora had reached into her pocket and pulled out the joint that had been found in Ruby’s locker. Amazingly, she had put it in her mouth and lit up, taking a deep toke, then she had held it out to Ruby. Stunned, Ruby had sat down by her mother and taken the joint. They’d smoked the whole damn thing together, and all the while, neither of them had spoken. Gradually, night had fallen; across the water, the sparkling white city lights had come on. Her mother had chosen that minute to say what she’d come to say. “Do you notice anything different about Victoria?” Ruby had found it difficult to focus. “It looks farther away,” she had said, giggling. “It is farther away. That’s the thing about drugs. When you use them, everything you want in life is farther away.” Nora had turned to her. “How cool is it to do something that anyone with a match can do? Cool is becoming an astronaut…or a comedian…or a scientist who cures cancer. Lopez Island is exactly what you think it is—a tiny blip on a map. But the world is out there, Ruby, even if you haven’t seen it. Don’t throw your chances away. We don’t get as many of them as we need. Right now you can go anywhere, be anyone, do anything. You can become so damned famous that they’ll have a parade for you when you come home for your high-school reunion…or you can keep screwing up and failing your classes and you can snip away the ends of your choices until finally you end up with that crowd who hangs out at Zeke’s Diner, smoking cigarettes and talking about high-school football games that ended twenty years ago.” She had stood up and brushed off her dress, then looked down at Ruby. “It’s your choice. Your life. I’m your mother, not your warden.” Ruby remembered that she’d been shaking as she’d stood up. That’s how deeply her mother’s words had reached. Very softly, she’d said, “I love you, Mom.

Dusty beer bottles on both sides of the squishy steps vibrated and danced every time anyone descended down them. There were bottles on various ledges and within cases that were stacked like totem poles. The kids used a large wooden spool as a table and sat on seats torn from junk cars. They told jokes that everyone knew by heart, or stories that they could recite verbatim. The top of the spool was littered with ashtrays, full of snuffed butts, as well as empty beer bottles, or “dead soldiers.” At the bottom of the bottles, engorged cigarette butts resembled leeches, having been drowned in a lethal cocktail of backwash and saliva. Half the cigarettes inside the ashtrays had white filters, lovingly imprinted with Gail’s pink lipstick that she’d rubbed out in the ashtray. Of late, I was smoking more, sucking on the cigarettes that I bummed off the girls. Sucking in their essence.

She took me to the pasture and let me milk a mammoth brown cow. She taught me how to drive a tractor. We rode horses through the woods. We smoked weed on the roof and pointed out clouds that looked like penises. We fed tiny chunks of raw chicken to her brother’s Venus flytrap. We fucked each other with fresh-picked ears of corn. We built a fire under a billion stars and told ghost stories. We took bets to see how many cigarette butts the rooster would eat. We let the goats hop on top of our backs and nibble our hair. We built an altar of stones, sticks and berries at the top of a hill, and when we hummed a family of deer came to us, licking our palms and nuzzling our cheeks. We bathed in streams and made bread from scratch. We pulled ticks and leeches off each other’s backs. We wrote rap songs about farm life and smoking meth. We stayed up a whole night watching movies about vampires and warlocks. We left clumps of hair, string and silver buttons for a family of crows. When it stormed for three days and we lost power, I rocked her gently in the dark and told her I loved her.

How many times have we said, “I won’t ever do that again!”? Then, before the day is up, we have the piece of cake, smoke the cigarettes, say hateful things to the ones we love, and so on. Then we compound the whole problem by angrily saying to ourselves, “Oh, you have no willpower, no discipline. You’re just weak.” This only adds to the load of guilt we already carry.

The first time I descend the staircase with the music I say to the camera or to anyone who'll listen I'll get him back I'll think about it later at Tara. The lighting is all from my eyes the eyes have it Later in the dressing room I chant my mantra to the mirror I must get him back I will get him back get him back I will I will I will The second time the music goes down without me I know it will be you at the door appearing in black & white and I say (lighting a long cigarette) what makes you think I'd take you back the words white and dry as smoke I'm sorry you say and I begin to soften the smoke goes out of my voice I say no it wasn't you it was the time our eyes are full as you turn fade I begin to see through you or rather I am seen through you the music starts slowly up the stairs The third time's the charm there is no music no staircase only this shallow stretch Of night we've been over it before the light yellow as an old bruise and you are saying I love you I'II always love you saying goodbye I'll always love you and you die you die in my arms but you die.

I loved Ted. Like a mouth could love a cigarette. The smoke poisoned me and I felt raw and wonderful, and at the same time traitorous, for what was I actually up to when I shrieked at night and burned up letters belonging to my husband … and smoked strong white cigarettes? But I made love with my cigarette, with my lungs. This was the force I had assumed all my life would appear: Yes, my God, it burns, I thought. Yes, my God, it burns so good.

I sit in the coffee shop waiting for night and I watch the same people scratch their asses at the same tables behind the same windows. I think of Camus, lovely and brittle, and the gunman on the sands and know I'll be here tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow with these lovely blue-gray sharks dwarfing the evening with their self-important air, looking into the murky bottoms of coffee cups and smoking my never-ending cigarettes.

I was thinking over this story, just lying in my bed, smoking a stupid cigarette—still pretending to, at least—when it happened. I swear it did. Jessica moved in my bed and I glanced at her and noticed for the first time how pretty her eyelashes were, and how her jet-black eyebrows seemed to sleep on her face. And I swear to God I heard what the hell Moeller talked about. I swear. It happened just like he said it did. One second, I was smoking cigarettes, thinking about something stupid—and thee next, I knew I was going to stop all of the stupid-think and marry this girl.

tennis phenoms Venus and Serena Williams have experienced losing to a male with not nearly as much notoriety as they have… in a blowout. In 1998, in a matchup against Karsten Braasch, the 203rd ranked male tennis player from Germany, Serena lost 6–1 and Venus lost 6–2. Keep in mind Serena is a 23-time Grand Champion and her sister a 7-time Grand Champion. Serena herself said, “I hit shots that would have been winners on the women’s Tour, and he got to them easily.” Is it a good time to mention at the time Braasch was smoking a pack of cigarettes a day, and smoked during changeovers the day of the match? He also admitted to playing a round of golf and drinking a few cocktails before facing the Williams sisters as well as performing like “a guy ranked 600th.” Thirteen years later, in an interview with David Letterman, Serena noted she would lose to Andy Murray 6–0 in just a matter of minutes. She went as far to say men and women’s tennis is a totally different sport. Serena told Letterman, “I love to play women’s tennis. I only want to play girls because I don’t want to be embarrassed.

I am the epitome of a walk of shame. I expect a trophy. If getting railed and smelling like sex was an Olympic sport, I’d get gold. Because there is no amount of cigarette smoke in this casino that could rid me of the smell of whore and unwanted pregnancy.

Don’t you think it’s a bit morose to be smoking on the steps of a church?” Henry flicked some of the ashes off the end of his cigarette before talking. “Yeah, well, seeing as how the world just buried one of my daughters, I think I can have a smoke on these steps and say, ‘Fuck you, world.’ At least for today.” I laughed, sarcasm filling every inch of my chuckle. “It seems a little bold for you to call us your daughters after eighteen years of only birthday calls and holiday gift cards.” Henry’s driving down here from Wisconsin was the first time I’d seen him in quite some time.

The company claimed to have interviewed some 2,210 “experts,” of whom it said 1,184 were exclusive Luckies smokers. Of these, federal investigators tracked down 440 and discovered that more than 100 denied smoking Luckies exclusively, 50 did not smoke at all, and some smoked other brands exclusively, some did not recall having ever been interviewed on the subject by American Tobacco, and some had no connection with the tobacco industry. Such details aside, the campaign and the company’s new media-buying strategy were hugely successful, and by 1941 Lucky Strike would narrowly reclaim the market share lead from Camel and widen it dramatically in ensuing years. “He was a dictator, of course,” Pat Weaver recalled of the newly triumphant George Hill of this period, but now he invited the input of others. “His strength,” said Weaver, “was his tremendous conviction about the importance of the business he was in. His weakness was tunnel vision—he was really obsessed with Lucky Strike, I’m afraid.” But not to such a degree that he failed to recognize the danger of his company’s dependence on a single brand amid the vicissitudes of a fickle marketplace. “One day, I came into his office,” Weaver remembered, “and I said, ‘Mr. Hill, I have a good idea.’ He said, ‘Great, what is it?’—he loved ideas.” Weaver’s was a not entirely harebrained scheme to get around the federal excise tax of six cents per pack of twenty cigarettes by putting out a brand in which each smoke was twice the normal length and the package would include a razor blade for slicing each one in two, thereby saving the customer the equivalent of three cents a pack. Hill listened and nodded,

I was one to one with a big nurse. Afraid to move and ask, ‘Whose blood is it so cold?’ … drop by drop … inside my small body. But the blood from the looks of these opposite men was not cold. It was hot, even very hot, pumping into my head. One man, another, and one more, some older than others, some even with temples of grey hair. But what united them all was the interest in a ten-year-old girl.” (-- Angelika Regossi, “Love in Communism. A Young Woman’s Adult Story”. Chapter 1: The Girl Felt a Woman) “We sat together, at the bottom of the trench, on the cold and dry ground. The sun slowly was going down, and the first signs of the cold September evening appeared. Tanya pulled out the matches and lit the cigarette butts, and we started to smoke; two small girls of seven and five. We thought that nobody was seeing us making the fumes. Suddenly, I saw Tanya’s sister go out to the balcony of their flat, looking around the yard. When she noticed the fumes from the trench, she screamed at the whole yard, ‘Tanya! Tanya! I see you. Come immediately home!’ ‘Why! Am I cold?’ shouted back Tanya, pressing the cigarette butt in the trench soil. ‘No! You want to eat!’ screamed her sister. They both imitated a joke about a caring mother. Tanya stood up, climbed out of the trench, and left. I remained sitting alone, and it was getting dark. I also wanted to go home, wash my hands and eat. When suddenly, I heard a soft man’s voice from the darkness, ‘Let me help you to get out of the trench, little girl.’” (-- Angelika Regossi, “Love in Communism. A Young Woman’s Adult Story”. Chapter 2: The Paedophile Play) “In the USSR, at schools, sometimes was carried a medical check-up for teenage girls from fourteen to seventeen years old, till the end of their school life. It was a very psychologically traumatic and humiliating experience because of the process itself, and because the results were reported to the school director, parents, and sometimes, even to the police. The girls were tested for virginity, but the boys were not.” (-- Angelika Regossi, “Love in Communism. A Young Woman’s Adult Story”. Chapter 3: Long Ten Years) “At that time, execution was allowed in the USSR, also for women. The maximum that prisoners could get was fifteen years. After that, capital punishment was the last measure. Mainly, the execution took place in the prison corridor by shooting the back of the inmate when he or she was taken to go somewhere, or in the prison yard. Executions were usually done by policemen.” (-- Angelika Regossi, “Love in Communism. A Young Woman’s Adult Story”. Chapter 4: Prison for Woman)

Very slowly, I stalk closer toward the large window, and all of a sudden, I see a small flicker of orange light in the distance. I quint my eyes as I move closer to the glass, and then two eyes crash with mine. “Ah!” I screech as I fall backward onto the ground. “Oh, God. Oh, no!” It’s him. I crawl backward on my hands, my shoulder busting against a piece of wooden furniture before I knock over a lamp. He’s closer to the window now, and I see that he’s smoking a cigarette, blowing out the smoke against the glass as he watches me. Fog forms on the window from his hot breath, and he writes something in it. A warning. Run. But I’m frozen in place on the ground like a fucking idiot. And when my eyes rove down as I see something move, I realize that his hand is down his pants. Oh my God. He’s stroking himself!

I picked the wrong time to quit smoking—only because Blaine wouldn’t stop bitching about it. I could really use a cigarette right about now. I don’t even have time to defend myself before

I SELF-CONSCIOUSLY TUG at my dress, for which Phoebe rewards me by slapping my hand. I give her a look. She gives me a look back, but she's smiling. “Stop messing with your dress. You look amazing.” “My ass is almost hanging out.” I point my leg out and look at my strappy three-inch silver open-toed heels. “Although, I really love these shoes and have been wanting to wear them for forever.” She draws on her cigarette and squints at me through the smoke. “Your ass looks hot. Trust me.” I sigh and nod. This is what I wanted, right? I just need to suck it up and not think about it. Have fun. But it’s hard not to be self-conscious when I feel like I’m baring all and I don’t like the feeling. This dress is like a second skin against my curves—and lack of. I added a wide black belt to feel not quite so naked, but you know what? For some reason, it didn’t help too much, probably because it’s a belt.

There is movement behind the window, and then a familiar redhead emerges and crowds under the awning with a glowing cigarette in her hand. Doesn’t she know that nicotine negatively affects fertility? “Keep smoking,” I whisper, narrowing my eyes.

I feared death and I loved life. I yearned to live long enough to smoke one more cigarette, drink one more drink, experience seven more seconds of obscene bliss, and then, perhaps, but most likely not, I could die. All

Many of the old taboos were about sex; many of the new ones are about the mother-child relationship, unfortunately for children and their mothers. For example, we use the word “vice” in a completely different way from our great-grandparents. Almost everything that was then considered a vice (drinking, smoking or gambling) is now treated as an illness (alcoholism, tobacco addiction, compulsive gambling), so that the sinner has become an innocent victim. Masturbation (the “solitary vice” that so concerned doctors and educators) is now thought of as normal. Homosexuality is simply a lifestyle. To speak of vice in any of these cases would be considered a serious insult. Today, only a few inoffensive habits of children are considered “vices”, and in English they are spoken of as nothing more than “bad” habits: “He has the ‘bad’ habit of biting his fingernails.” “He has got into the ‘bad’ habit of crying.” “If you pick him up, he will develop a ‘bad’ habit.” “He has got into the ‘bad’ habit of breastfeeding and won’t eat baby food.” If you still have any doubts about what our society’s real taboos are, imagine going to see your GP and describing one of the following scenarios: 1. “I have a little boy of three and I want to have an AIDS test because I had sex with several strangers this summer.” 2. “I have a little boy of three and I smoke twenty cigarettes a day.” 3. “I have a little boy of three; I breastfeed him and he sleeps in our bed.” Which of these three scenarios do you think would elicit a reproach from your GP? In