Things like a monkey shirt. I prolly walked 2 or 3 miles and ran about 23 for that one. This chocolate chip cookie, although I knew even before I got it that the butter was really the ting in which I am interested. Had I been interested in chocolate, I would have gotten the brownie. Were it not available in my house, I’d walk a mile for a cup of coffee in the morning. If the iPod touch were in the village of the Suwaree and not in Mississippi, I’d walk over there to get it.
It used to be that I would walk a mile for a Camel Light in a Hard Pack. Didn’t have to be in a hard pack, I suppose, and in a pinch it did not have to be a Camel Light. Given my druthers, I’d have a Camel Light in a Hard Pack. I heard somewhere that, given everything we know about the hazards of smoking and the extent to which this has been publicized, psychiatrists now consider smoking a subtle form of suicide. But it was not a compulsion to spurn society that compelled me to smoke.
I loved pictures — photographs or the ones in my head — of jazz musicians and novelists smoking. Tortured souls like James Dean and great intellectual misfits like Thorstein Veblen were smokers. Smoking made me bohemian and deep. It was mine, all mine, my precious. As long as I smoked, I found it difficult to have relationships with the kind of girls I really liked. These were the kind of girls who have self-respect and want to be with a guy who does too.
And those head-shrinks were right. I knew I was killing myself. Cigarettes and cheap meat were making me slow and fat. For a night I could be Dean Moriarity, but in the morning I would have to find out by trial and error which coke can held coke and which one held ashes. That’s humiliating. It’s also hard to know that I would walk a mile for Camel instead of walking closer to someone who loves me.
So, even though it has been better than 10 years since I considered myself a “smoker” (and years since my last cigarette during the early Bush administration ) I am frustrated by the times that I still want tobacco to transform me into a Mad Man. It’s not enough, however, to not walk that way. I have to walk in the other direction. Sometimes I have to run.