What do you call a writer who never writes?
A waiter! Which is sad, since I'm not even that yet (damn outback, with your false promises).
Anyway, I felt the urge to write tonight for the first time in a while. Since I'm rusty, I'm posting the piece on LJ instead of Facebook, since I figure fewer ppl will read it here:
Christmas Cloves
Jeremy had taken to smoking cloves, and had several roundabout ways of concealing his new habit.
His chief reason for secrecy was the usual: he had no desire to hear lectures involving terms like "cancer-sticks" and "incremental suicide." As a man who had flirted with suicide on occasion, he had no qualms about this consequence, and besides found cloves to be a more pleasant method of killing himself than those he had previously tested.
There were other reasons he kept quiet. For one, he didn't much like being associated with the typical image of the clove-smoker as either a goth kid or a tortured artist. To be sure, he understood why cloves tended to appeal to that aesthetic - his favorite brand came in sleek black packaging that set it apart from the dull white cigarettes everyone else smoked.
Still, this image was completely dissonant from the one he had constructed around his cloves. Jeremy had once heard one of his coworkers distastefully say that cloves tasted like "smoking a christmas tree," and ever since had felt a little bit of holiday warmth anytime he took a puff.
Jeremy had one other reason for keeping mum, one he couldn't fully articulate.
He had begun to fear that if he told anybody about his cloves, he would become a social smoker. This, he felt, would make the meditative ritual he had built around his smoke somehow less sacred. The ritual went as follows: Between 1 and 3 am, Jeremy would slink downstairs, pick up his cloves from the hole under the rightmost cushion of his nana's old sofa, his special smoking jacket from the cubbyhole behind his dad's closet, and take a brisk walk to the prairie behind his house. Only when he'd made it to the prairie would he pull out a clove, and then only one for the night.
And then, all would be perfectly still and perfectly silent.
Jeremy had found just the right spot in the prairie so that he was far enough from his suburban subdivision to make out any distinct light or sound, but still close enough that the light pollution kept the sky free of stars on even the clearest nights. Jeremy knew that if he walked a few steps further from his spot, the sky would begin to gain the inky black of a country night, and a few steps beyond that would become complicated with constellations. Only in his spot was the dark warm.
In the daytime, Jeremy would be the first to agree with those decrying the ills of nicotine and light pollution, but in this his most private of hours, the two evils colluded to lend the night a certain elegant simplicity he found absolutely intoxicating.
Anyway, I felt the urge to write tonight for the first time in a while. Since I'm rusty, I'm posting the piece on LJ instead of Facebook, since I figure fewer ppl will read it here:
Christmas Cloves
Jeremy had taken to smoking cloves, and had several roundabout ways of concealing his new habit.
His chief reason for secrecy was the usual: he had no desire to hear lectures involving terms like "cancer-sticks" and "incremental suicide." As a man who had flirted with suicide on occasion, he had no qualms about this consequence, and besides found cloves to be a more pleasant method of killing himself than those he had previously tested.
There were other reasons he kept quiet. For one, he didn't much like being associated with the typical image of the clove-smoker as either a goth kid or a tortured artist. To be sure, he understood why cloves tended to appeal to that aesthetic - his favorite brand came in sleek black packaging that set it apart from the dull white cigarettes everyone else smoked.
Still, this image was completely dissonant from the one he had constructed around his cloves. Jeremy had once heard one of his coworkers distastefully say that cloves tasted like "smoking a christmas tree," and ever since had felt a little bit of holiday warmth anytime he took a puff.
Jeremy had one other reason for keeping mum, one he couldn't fully articulate.
He had begun to fear that if he told anybody about his cloves, he would become a social smoker. This, he felt, would make the meditative ritual he had built around his smoke somehow less sacred. The ritual went as follows: Between 1 and 3 am, Jeremy would slink downstairs, pick up his cloves from the hole under the rightmost cushion of his nana's old sofa, his special smoking jacket from the cubbyhole behind his dad's closet, and take a brisk walk to the prairie behind his house. Only when he'd made it to the prairie would he pull out a clove, and then only one for the night.
And then, all would be perfectly still and perfectly silent.
Jeremy had found just the right spot in the prairie so that he was far enough from his suburban subdivision to make out any distinct light or sound, but still close enough that the light pollution kept the sky free of stars on even the clearest nights. Jeremy knew that if he walked a few steps further from his spot, the sky would begin to gain the inky black of a country night, and a few steps beyond that would become complicated with constellations. Only in his spot was the dark warm.
In the daytime, Jeremy would be the first to agree with those decrying the ills of nicotine and light pollution, but in this his most private of hours, the two evils colluded to lend the night a certain elegant simplicity he found absolutely intoxicating.