#6

How often can I describe the same monster and in how many different ways before the descriptions become repetitive and the monster becomes too familiar and not frightening enough, a friend whose ugly side you know all too well and whom you’ve seen murder a small animal or two but still treasure because hey, he’s your friend, he never left you, and loyalty should count for something, right? Addiction is that kind of monster, one you can’t get too cozy with but you still must force yourself to never stop looking into the putrid rotting recesses of the grime-encrusted cavitities that are its hollow eyes, able to stare and bore into your soul all the better because there isn’t all that vitreous humor getting in the way of the daggers surreptitiously encased in a gaze that mocks the coldness of steel with an icy burn that freezes over hell itself without even a second glance, because it would only take one, one burning slice of enslaved agony wrapping chains around my heart that was too eager to acquiesce to the rusted and bloodied metal stained with the flesh of billions killed in the name of those five perfect minutes at a time that can be found in any given cigarette, hiding so well amid the folds of tobacco and nicotine chemically intertwined that all we smokers must return to them eventually, perhaps subconsciously convincing ourselves that we missed out on the elusive perfection the first thousand times around. Yet I feel I have once again lost track of where I was and anyways does it matter how exactly the monster dug its claws into my heart, what matters more is how I begged it to do so, to rip my lungs to shreds as I began my slow descent into cigarette addiction. At the time I was dating this beautiful girl Allison who was worried with typical helpful friend hen squawks that I was going to succumb to the addiction and she didn’t want to see me waste my lungs, money, or brain cells on something so destructive, so I laughed off her concerns with a deliberately self-effacing grin, assuring her with each cig smoked that I was in control, I only smoked them when I drank and maybe once in awhile when I felt like it, and she knew me better than that didn’t she? After all she was my girlfriend, she SHOULD trust me to make my own decisions and mistakes and not try to control my life with what me and my smoking friends called the chains of sound friendly advice, ha just kidding why would we call it what it actually was, why would we acknowledge the concerns of a loved one with anything but the most derisive of derogatory sneers? Oh that monster was a clever one, any addiction anyone has immediately turns anyone who dares to express worry or admonitory concern over your slow purposeful stumble into a villain, because hey it’s our choice, our life, our funeral, and shouldn’t the deceased be able to choose the floral arrangement for our own surgeon-general stamped casket? “Here lies so-and-so, at least he died while willingly choking to death on known foul-tasting carcinogens.” Sounds so poetic when I say it out loud, maybe I will take up smoking again, if only for the chance to enjoy my death with a  deliberate kind of ironic detachment, for isn’t that what all cigarette addicts do, enjoy the slowest suicide of all time each time they create flame like magic from a device that would have amazed cavemen as we let death itself roil over our taste buds and sidle up next to Joe Camel as we congratulate ousrelves on looking cool. And therefore if we are looking cool and friends and girlfriends feel the need to unpleasantly remind us of how uncool suicide is that must mean these loved ones are jealous of our derring-do, I mean come on how dare they presume to tell us the obvious and use as their transparent excuse that they care for our well-being, when any addict who knows anything about friendship will tell you that a real friend is one who will stand by your side and put their own cancer stick to their chapped bloody ragged lips and along with you inhale these glorious death fumes. Don’t believe me? What else could be the explanation for the fact that as soon as you become a smoker an entirely new world of people opens up to you, a dark underbelly of cool kids and coughs that you never knew existed, who hide in the shadows during their smoke breaks and gain comfort and commiseration from the fact that at least they have found a group of fellow hastily grave-bound idiots stupid enough to hate their bodies and pursue the most obvious and stinky form of destroying it, but of course nobody in that exclusive smoker circle will dare to call each other for the idiots they know deep down they are, instead they will spend precious seconds joking ironically with self-deprecating humor how much they hate being enslaved to such harmless-looking little death sticks, or perhaps they’ll debate their favorite kind of death-sticks, maybe they’ll even acknolwedge for a rare half-a-second of sobriety how tragically doomed they all are, before one of them takes one long huge drag on a cigarette to diffuse the tension and everyone breaks into a nicotine/endorphin-fueled distraction laugh as we all laugh at the fools too smart to kill themselves slowly like us brave Cigarette Warriors, who have and continue to make the choice freely of our own absolutely free will to not stop smoking because that would be a defeat, that would be giving in to the man and that would also mean going more than 24 hours without those tobacco phalluses clenched tightly between lips wet with addictive need and words that always blubber self-defensively when another person, loved one or stranger, dares to assume that it is not us who are pulling the strings but that monster I’ve already spent so much time describing, that creature from the black abyss located in a jolly tobacco executive’s bowels and jiggling jowls which gobble up our hard-earned cash and that special kind of satisfaction that comes from having duped a bunch of adults into thinking that they are still responsible for their own choices, choices which include daily worship at the altar of a pack a day as we sacrifice piece-for-yellow-tooth-stained-piece each tiny bit of our lungs to gods we gladly call friend, gods we gladly thank as we French kiss their mortal mistresses and let their deadly vapors coat the linings of not only our esophagus, trachea, and lungs but our brains as well, wrapped in the smell of that ever-present monster, that dynamically duplicitous demon whose claws clutch at our sanity and screams out what a bunch of naïve, stupid, idiotic dumbasses we all are. Because what are smokers except a bunch of naïve, stupid, idiotic dumbasses? I’m allowed to say that, because I have been one, and the thing is I know labels like that do not offend smokers, or at least they never did me, because whenever we could read that judgmental label in someone’s eyes, tone, or voice, we’d all laugh to ourselves in our little smoker’s circles and agree whole heartedly with them, comforted and soothed by the presence of that monster whose claws curve deeply around into our hearts so that technically we were not agreeing whole-heartedly, as parts of our hearts were blackened and bruised, gouged and pumping out life to the cheapest most intoxicating whore of a bidder, siphoning off thanks to that creature posing as our greatest friend, who understood us for five perfect minutes at a time, who was willing to embrace all our faults, but who behind our backs and under our noses would rob us of our own hearts and minds to choke us out of that free will we so desperately treasured and measured by the most childishly pathetic tool imaginable: a cigarette stick.