021405 Why smoke? Because smoke is goooooood. That's why. Look. I know. You're supposed to be doing something. But. Let me prevail on your senses. Sit with me for about five minutes, and then we're going to run. Cedar flaks your jacket. Sassafrass bites your lungs. Eat the creek. Fry the sun. Come on into my cave. Sit with me then wrestle with me then get naked with me. Pitch and soil and mica sticks to our shining ribs. Come, come, come with me! And smile. Then we'll smell like spunk and dirt together. Is this you? Do you remember this? Unhesitating, I do. Omsatigo is old, and bitter. His creed is a concession. I'm tired of his lame confession. Have another smoke. Have two. Have three. Do you see? You're with me now, kid. Lay back. Feel the rollercoaster, give in, let me. Fuck. You. Say yes. Say yes, yes. What else? Hmmmm............ let me see........... You're married, aren't you? the comely dandy at the hifalutin gay bar sed. How can you tell? I sed. I can just tell, he sed. That doesn't disqualify me, does it? 021605 So here I am off again to the ritual gang-bang hutenany, not sure whether to greet me will be an angry Brazilian man with very little English, or just the usual gang of hungry leopards and monkeys. Either way, viruses are making me a little surreal as I step out into the chill of early evening. I hope my brakes don't fail, but if they do -- I'll try to surrender to a graceful parking space. 021705 Every moment is a cigarette. 022105 I am stuck in a gumption trap. I smoke, surf, watch, chew and occasionally fester broodingly. How to get out, how to get out? Maybe that obsessive inquiry belies its own answer. I'm not sure, but of this I am relatively confident: OMSATIGO. 022405 I'd like to apologize to the fish, the aether, and myself for ever entertaining thoughts of suicide. If I were going to abandon my wife and children, I would hope I would have the balls to live up to it. Abandonment is not, finally, what I have in mind. I'm calling my own black-and-white bluff -- see me back down into one of those omnipresent shades of gray. 022605 Instead of merely saying to the Moondance guy, "I'd like another scone," I said in my best, Southeast-Missouri-but-nonetheless-intelligent drawl, "I gotta get another one of your scones, man. That's good stuff." His face lit up, and that made me feel pretty good. Usually when I try to quit smoking, I'm motivated by the image of what my ideal of myself was when I was, oh, about 17 or 22 or so. I had in mind this leaping elf, this musical unicorn of a young savage, lithely whipping thru the sassafrass grove. Recorder-playing, magic-spilling, laughter-releasing, he tracks lightly thru this world on an invisible train of mythical dimensions. He is the picture, of course, of health. He doesn't crab over a stinking ashtray, groaning and sighing about how crappy everyday existence can become. About the only thing he lacks is an experience-based sense of humor. Irony, like smoke, can overcome one, though they begin their charms with innocence. Anyway, I'd kinda like to reconnect with the brat, taking along everything I've learned. I am maybe a little bit wiser in some respects now, and I think the two of us would be a good partnership. He will be skeptical at first -- he'll find me crotchety and pessimistic, a burden. I'll doubt his ability to embrace the practical necessities of earthly adulthood. But we'll stick together, at least, you know, for now, because almost grudgingly we have to admit there's some sense of something, some connection? some appropriateness? some intangible viaduct between us across which flows in both directions Information -- that most melodic and elusive form of Energy, also known (and widely celebrated by our astral tribe) as Pershidium. So, why do I always fail to quit? Because the pretty picture is not enough. While it's true that having something else to do can help, the only way really to quit smoking is simply not to smoke. That's it. Bottom line. Nothing else works. I usually say to myself, You can do whatever you want, as long as you don't smoke. Sounds like a powerful incantation, but it isn't, because so often what I want to do is smoke. No, I think the only way to proceed this time is without charm, amulet, spell, or resolution of any kind. Hey, you remember that thing Geoff of Coherence Engine pointed to, that map of the United States built organically by social software? Every time you visited the web page, you could put one dot at any location of the image. The idea was to collaboratively build a map of the US. Or maybe it was all the continents. Whatever. Point is, it was fascinating to see how it would grow according to the net perception of a multitude of people. I reckon it was some sort of bell curve or other -- the way-out, radical notions that would put Minnesota's dots out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean should be so relatively few as to distort minimally. Were you able to remove an existing dot, or move it? I don't remember. In any case, most people think the map should look a certain way, so mostly, it becomes that way. There was discussion about the pros and cons of this kind of approach -- consensuality versus individuality, and so on. Well, it occurs to me that literature is social software, too. Every story is one dot. Or, every text is one dot on the map of what "story" is. That's why we say there are so rarely, perhaps never, any new stories. Is there some kind of physiological formation in our collective mind that determines what we think of as a story? Are that formation and the continents real? Unshakeable? Or does the map-making lead us to believe what we're mapping exists? If so, why? Could we voluntarily reprogram ourselves to have a new literature or a new geography? Somebody just said, hands expanding, "...the biggest thing in it was all the choke-cherry things...." For that I am awesomely grateful. Cholula say, You haven't been a very good little bitch lately; I say, Sorry. I start to stiffen, and say, But I feel like a little bitch tonight. She already looking for someone else to play with, and I stiffen some more with resonance. Suddenly want to smoke.