I hid the the bathroom just off the slot machine floor in Bally’s, and decided to take a dump, which was like hitting the jackpot.

Give me back my cigarettes, my Marlboro Menthols, or Newports if you don’t have them, and I don’t care if they have fiberglass in the filter.  I want to be banished to the outside so I can light one with my blue Bic lighter, so I can take that first great puff, and then shuffle back and forth in bliss from the nicotine choking my bronchi and alveoli.  Give me back this heaven I paid seven dollars a pack to cause.

Give me back my Skoal, the cherry flavored plastic puck-like tub, or peppermint if you don’t have it, and I don’t care if I get a hole beneath my lip.  I want to be chained to an empty soda can, so I can dip a pinch and spit into the opening while the flood of nicotine numbs my lips and almost makes me dizzy, so that brown syrup forms and blitzes my gums.  Give me back this heaven where all the ballplayers go.

Give me back my cigars, my Don Diegos, or Partagas’s if you don’t have them, and I don’t care if my mouth rots off.  I want my being to be clouded like a barbecue pit, so I can hula hoop the rings of smoke that feature a nutty taste with leathery undertones, so I can repeat this pufferfish facial  impression that my cheeks make for the next hour or so.  Give me back this heaven that needs to be lit up by a sheet of cedar because I can’t afford to use a hundred dollar bill yet.

Let me chew my nicotine gum.

Let me repress the abuse of a decade’s worth of cigarettes, dip, and cigars.

Let me run and play basketball in order to lose my breath.

Let me chew on mint toothpicks.

Let me suck on Blow Pops and crack my tooth, impatient to get to the bubblegum center.

Let me forget how much I miss standing outside with the rest of the smokers, sharing a bond that only we know, so I can make this beer taste better.

Give me back my cigarettes, because I want a smoke.

“Plain cheese pizza.  Oh, that’s right, you’re not from New York, so you must be used to having salad and appetizers on your pizza.”

I am the king of ordinary.  As I walk through Union Square on a 65 degree day, in my wide horizontal striped golf shirt and wrinkle-free black Dockers, I cannot help but sense how plain I am, how I just blend in, and how I work it to my advantage to observe life and women’s breasts. It’s a skill, I feel, to be five years behind in fashion, in order to remain a wall flower.  No one looks in my direction here in New York, and it’s important to take comfort in the anonymity of the masses.  As I stroll with my hands in my pockets, I see maybe two thousand individuals, unique snowflakes that become a colorless mass when staked on top of one another, and I move like a free electron, joining to another person with every gaze that locks with mine.  I see the girl in big sunglasses sketching her own graphic designs, and the group of crack addicts sipping McDonald’s coffee, and the co-workers eating Whole Foods salad for lunch.

I come to the last page in my notepad, and I’ve decided to write my manifesto of ordinary so that I can look back at this point if I become unique just like the rest of them.  I remember always being so plain that all I could do to scratch my own pine box of banality was to smoke cigarettes in non-smoking areas and spit like the Staten Islander I am, and I’d have to do it in towns like Wildwood and Buffalo just to stand out, because I’d always keep my mouth shut long enough for everyone not to notice that I had an accent taught to me by pizza makers, mechanics, longshoremen, teachers, cops, and firemen who raised roofs in their spare time.  I stay silent to listen in case the guy or gal who knows the meaning of life whispers it to someone nearby on the train, at my office, in a bar, or in the park as I stroll by the benches and then the steps just below the general’s horse.  Everyone else listens to their iPods on their lunches breaks spent alone.

I’m on my way to DC, and I see crap for miles and miles.

I had no computer.  I had no TV.  I had no air conditioning in the dead of summer.  I had a CD cassette radio that I got for my 14th birthday.  I used this radio to listen to the Don and Mike Show on Thursday afternoons, and WZBZ and WGBZ, The Buzz, the local contempo-dance station trying hard to be South Jersey’s KTU.  I had no Opie and Anthony, no Ron and Fez late nights.  At night, I could tune into to 770 WABC for Yankee games, and 880 WCBS for the news in the Tri-State.  The sounds from home comforted me in times of solitude.

I scanned the USA Today I had picked up at McDonald’s and spent an hour staring at the baseball standings, seething at Boston for being in first while the Yanks sat mired in second.  I took bites out of garlic knots, and sips from a 3-liter of Coke.  Coke was all I drank except at work.  In fact, work was the only time I’d drink water, water that came out of the fire standpipe near the Giant Slide just behind Annie’s Pretzels, where we also picked up the ice to fill the yellow Igloo cooler jugs that we would scatter about the pier so as to keep our employees hydrated.

I started smoking right there in my room, instead of getting up everytime and going to the balcony to oogle big titted 19 year olds, I would dump my ashes and butts into an empty Coke bottle that I’d occasionally fill with soda to extinguish the Marlboro Menthols I was done with.  A bitter acrid smell emitted from the top as old nicotine mixed with flat cola, and I’ve known this smell for a year or two, when I had my own dorm room in Buffalo, and I would stay inside whenever I had free time, and I’d play Final Fantasy VIII, cook ramen noodles on the hot plate that I had won for 6,000 points in skee ball while I worked at South Beach Amusement Park, and I’d deposit my cigarette butts into 20 ounce Coke bottles or into Arctic Shatter Powerades.

Solitude helped when I got homesick.

I rolled off the bed, and crawled down the dark hallway. It was about 3:37 on a Sunday morning. The sounds of the bar closing up downstairs were the only other sounds to be heard, except for the thudding of my knees against the wood floor. I crawled into the bathroom and turned on the hot water in the tub. I then pulled myself onto my feet and walked out to the kitchen. I opened the fridge door, took out a block of sharp cheddar cheese, and cut off a couple slices and ate them. I then took out some microwavable bacon, and threw it in the microwave. As I heated it, I ate some peanut butter ice cream. Once the bacon was done, I devoured it in one gulp, and then opened up some apple cider and washed it all down. I then prepared myself a cup of ginseng tea with licorice, and walked back to the tub. I sat on the toiler, and rolled myself a joint in the candlelit bathroom. I lit up a stick of incense, the cheapest one in the supermarket, and then stripped off my clothing and got in the tub. I took out some Mr. Bubble and poured it in, then took out my cans of Seasame Street Soap Foam. I put a bubble beard and mustache , and then a bubble afro wig. I then sat back, lit up my joint, and sipped on my tea.

Once I awakened an hour later, I got out of the tub, and wrapped myself in my blue bathrobe. I wiped my face off with my blue towel, and then reached for my blue toothbrush. I reminded myself that I had flossed earlier. I put some sparkle toothpaste on my brush, and cleaned my teeth. I then gargled with some Floraid, spit out, and then went to have a cigarette.

I put on my glow in the dark skull pajamas, and my university shirt, and hopped into bed.

I am extraordinarily nervous. This is the second day of classes. I submitted my ballot earlier in the day, and I now await for the start of my next class. I have a need and a desire to prove myself, and to attain very high grades in order to truly satisfy myself. Perhaps a source of my nervousness is how others view me, people who have encountered me in the past, who generalize my entire demeanor. Do they automatically assume that I shall fail, stumble along the way, having no knowledge that as I have progressed in my pursuit I have become better? Even with that fact, my skin does not feel thicker. My blood remains warm, but only due to equilibrium caused by being icy cold half the time, and hot blooded the remainder. Only being at these extremes do I continue to function as if to be normal. To be calm and collected simply is not my thing. If I am not panicky, nervous, and on the verge of trembling, then I am totally sedate, slothful, and immobile. Such general malaise is the culprit behind many of my past friends undoing. A motivation drills through my stomach all the time, leaving me to writhe and twist in pain if I am to sit down or recline. God knows why he placed such a cruel device within my belly, while leaving so many others empty and and unfilled. It vibrates through my entire anatomy, sometimes leading to severe headaches, nausea, and sleeplessness. It is much like some new drug advertised on television, which has the power to solve one ailment, but whose side effects make the whole thing seem unappealing. The only hunger that remains is the one which cannot be treated with food or drink.

Is this what the risk is? To jump again into the deep black waters, not knowing what might drag me down? Perhaps to not jump is the most risky behavior. I think I believe that, yet any actions considered to be a part of a normal life are what I fear the most, and I stand in the headlights knowing that I will be killed, yet my legs do not wish to move. I am totally shy, and I fear that I have social anxiety. I know I am not agoraphobic, because my love for the outdoors eases any fear that I might have of being around complete strangers. Perhaps it is a fear of judgment. Do I judge? Perhaps. I see people in their outer coverings, and might begin to assume. I hear their voices, and I am overcome by a sense of disgust, possibly because I myself know not the variety of miscellaneous drivel that they speak of. When I do find someone I wish to speak to, the need to release my entire life experience fills my brain, as if this might be the last person I speak to, and I must impart my tale to this human vessel so that they might pass it on to others. But, if I look to others as they speak and think “Who cares?”, then logically they must think the same about me. I try to secure myself in the notion that everyone is the same as myself, and then I try to break free of that notion. Perhaps the former doesn’t even exist, and I am simply playing a cruel game with myself, a masochistic form of solitaire, where even if I win, my skin is torn, my blood is drawn, and my body and spirit are worn, leaving nothing but a 1 in the W column.

I can sense the fear that the old have of the young. There is an advantage that comes from being completely naive to the world, and of being so beautiful and full of potential. I felt the loathing that the youth have of those older than themselves, and the disgust and judgment that they possess on those who have not been a sucess, for their assumption is that if you are older, then you automatically succeed. It is a falsehood of which they will find out for themselves. It is why I stuck to certain standards when seeking a woman, that they had to simply be of a certain age. Yet the allure that the youth possess at 18, mmm, such fine specimens of women that want nothing to do with me because I am older. The 18 year olds now are five years my junior. It breaks a law that I held, and that is that a female had to be alive by the time I reached kindergarten. But I doubt I will be able to break that rule, since they have their own systems of rejection in place.

There are the ages of life that seem to go on forever, while others seem to fly by. I can vividly remember 5, 10, 12, 16, 18, and 20, but can hardly recall the rest. In fact, I have forgotten most of everything under the age of 4, and at the present I am beginning to forget anything that happened before age 7, when I first became self-aware. The things that last are the pain. I was made fun of a lot when I was young, and it carried its way up till the freshman year of college. That’s when the drill made itself known. The motivation carried me through, letting me know that there was more important stuff to take care of, more than the jabs, the quips, and the insults. Yet it hurts me, to this day, and made me very mindful of the assumption that everyone abhors my existence. The quagmire becomes evident; why should I strive to contribute something to society when they want nothing of me, and have not given me anything except pain and misery?

I lit a candle in my bathroom sink, so as to have a somewhat dim illumination in the room in order to provide enough light for the task of smoking a cigarette. The neon crimson light at the end of the tobacco is not enough to let me see the filter enter my lips. I saw a thing of beauty at one moment during my break. The light, emanating from the sink, was so wonderful. Unlike a beam of sunlight that breaks a dark room, unlike the one that burned the vampires as they sat trapped in a brick vault in “Interview with The Vampire”. The light flowed slowly out of the sink. When one put a piece of dry ice in a bowl of water, the gas sublimes from the solid, bubbles up, and then goes its own way, slowly. It hangs around the cool water, and gently dissipates. It is a soft action that takes place. This is a good analogy to what was happening in my sink. The light softly bubbled up from the candle, hung around the porcelain, and then just went away, absorbed into the invisible darkness.

Is this the reason I started smoking? To, one day, reach an epiphany such as this? What about the times I smoked packs of cigarettes in a matter of hours, with my heart racing, my mouth dry, sipping on Coca cola, mumbling about the meaning of The Matrix, or the hidden meaning behind the light sabers in Star Wars? The times when I was all alone, and had nothing but a pack of Marlboros and a radio, sitting in darkness, nothing to do, and no one to turn to, slowly killing myself with carcinogens; it was all to reach some conclusion regarding a small aspect of the world around us? Do I quit now, or do I smoke again, waiting for the next idea to happen?

This is where my mind goes, and it happens with more frequency now. I have been on the verge of tears for a few months now. I cannot keep my focus. Things pop in, pop out, and I have the need to remember as much as I can.

Fear and anxiety can go hand in hand, but fear is not necessary for anxiety. In fact, I’m probably as fearless as I’ve ever been, but the simple fact that there is so much going on around me, and I can see it all happening, and cannot figure out what to look at first. The carousel makes its revolutions, it will not stop, there’s all the horses to jump onto, and I can’t pick the best opportunity in which to engage the ride. It is sure to stop soon, and I better get on, but this has to be the longest ride I’ve seen yet, and it is well past two minutes. I can’t jump on. I need to jump on. Okay, I need to jump on now. I’m gonna jump on. Right now. Okay, I’m gonna jump on. I’m gonna jump on. Now, I’m gonna jump on now.

I’ll jump on. I will jump on. Okay, I’m gonna jump on. I’m gonna jump on.

That’s the general feeling I have all the time.

See? My heart is fucking beating hard right now, and I don’t know why. I’m just always nervous.

To be free, ah, to be out and about, with a cool summer breeze, and the scent of the low lying smog along the urban fabric of Manhattan.

Along the streets of the Island, zipping along in cars on the Gowanus, along West Street, and along Spring, and Sixth Avenue, people moved about, chatting, yelling, laughing, sitting quietly, and jumping around.  At Ear Bar, groups of scantily clad lookers, whores, and skanks, as well as ladies and fugly friends, stood, walked, ran, strolled along with counterparts who either matched them exactly, or were out of their league.  Men are feeble creatures, attracted to pussy scented heavily with perfume, or exhibiting the slightest bit of cleavage.

It was the end of June, the straight up beginning of the first weekend of summer.  This was life in the New York Metropolitan Area, unfurling its petals and opening its womb to the fateful few hoping to find love in the warm air.

“Yo, take this.”  Kris said with his breath held tight, and I looked down in the direction of the shifter, where Kris’s hand was cupped around the berry flavor Phillie blunt, rolled with the finest haze two swinging stoners like ourselves could muster on the streets of the island at 9:00 on a Friday evening.  As we rolled slowly through the tunnel, Kris made his move under the cover of the Brooklyn Battery, and rolled the blunt with no suspicion whatsoever.  We now smoked it with subterfuge, along the police controlled streets of downtown Manhattan.

We had exchanged the warm air of the summer for the grey, smokey haze which matched the interior of my 2003 Saturn Ion quite well.

“So, yo, you gonna chill for a bit?”
He said, as he pulled a Newport out of the community box we both chipped in the purchase.  I slapped his hand.

“You fiend!  Are we gonna have more to smoke later??”
“Yo, I got Waves at home.”
“Dude, Waves totally suck ass.  You can’t chip in to get a new box?”
“Yeah, I got some cash at home.”
“Then have a stog.”
“Don’t slap my hand again.”
“I’m sorry, dude, I had to.  It made it more dramatic.”

“Clip that, you gonna chill?”
“Ya, what you wanna do?”
“Open bar between 11 and 12 at this place my brother is DJing at.  It’s called the Shady Beaver. ”
“Shady Beaver, eh?  Well, I guess the best kept secrets are for the shady.”
“Aint nothing shadier than me.”

11:01pm. Friday.

“Yo, Jay.”

My mind had been focused on watching my favorite channel, Nickelodeon GAS.  Finders Keepers was on.

“Dude, this fat bitch is getting every fucking answer right.  The lil black kid just riding her coattails to that trip to Space Camp!”
“We gonna be out soon?”  he said as he finished up the blunt and put it into his mouth to ignite it.
“How long is your brother on for?”
“He’s on till 12.”
“And when’s open bar?”
“11 to 12.”
“Ah.”
“Yeah.”
“So, what if we get there at 12:30?”
“Then I guess we have to buy our beer and listen to shitty dance music.”

“There’s a difference, man. ” Joey sternly looks away, admonishing my statement. “How could there be a difference, between a girlfriend sucking someone else’s dick, and a girlfriend fucking someone else? It’s the same fucking thing, penis penis penis going into an orifice on her body. If he fucked her left nostril, it would be the same thing because she let him do it. She’s enjoying it.”
“No, stop right there. That’s the difference.”
“No difference. She gets pleasure out of sucking his dick. You don’t get pleasure out of eating pussy?”
“-Well, that’s different. I mean, some days that shit tastes like the dumpster behind an Italian restaurant, but most days, it can be like fresh morning dew, and even Mountain Dew , if you’re into that kind of thing-”
“And she likes the tastes of cock.”
“NO! Simply unfathomable. You know how guys store their junk. It’s a fucking swamp down there. The fucking jock itch, and fucking cheesy smell-”
“Hey, maybe to girls, that’s like pussy to us. Chemicals, man.”
I look away, breifly, and take a puff of my cigarette, and return fire.
“The difference between fucking and sucking is two fold. One, physical versus psychological. As animals, we have the desire to reproduce, and it is a physical requirement that we have sex on a regular basis. Intercourse, further defined, where a penis and a vagina meet. Physically, we have the need to fuck. But , there is no physical need to suck dick. In terms of reproduction, it’s useless! Swallowing a load is in fact anti-nature, to feed off of one’s living fluids. The desire to suck dick is a psychological need, that stems from the second part of my case.
She is choosing to give pleasure to a man. Acts of kindness have a response on the giver. Chemical reactions in the brain make the body feel good. And chicks want to feel good.
Fucking, on the other hand, can be the most selfish act one can engage in. It can be a total physical and emotonal need, and the other person simply needs to be there. She doesn’t want to give pleasure to the man. She wants to fuck, and fuck something hot. No need to suck his dick, just fuck him. “

End of summer in my opinion.  Last night of the season, we’ll be closing up shop and bringing it indoors, back to games of football on Xbox and PS2, and buying beer by the case every weekend for the game on Sunday.

Time to head back to my place. I’m feeling pretty tired, just want to take a break, nap for a while, and see what the day brings.

Sun’s starting to peak over the water, and starts to set fire to everything in sight.  The light wakes her up briefly, and she turns her body toward me and leans upon my shoulder as I hurtle us forward at 45 miles per hour at 6:02 am on an August Sunday morning, and we’re ready to hop into my blue sheets, and pull up the blue comforter, and recline back upon the blue pillows, looking up at the blue ceiling, and drifting off into those modest yet impossible dreams of ours, the ones that seem to be the closest to the reality we wish for ourselves.  We see ourselves as better people, more important people, more beautiful and adored, more evil, more mischievous, more pure and sterile, more cunning and stronger.  Out of nowhere huge slimy lizard creatures pop out of the ocean as I am taking a walk along the beach with her, and just as we are about to make love, one of their razor sharp tails swoops by and slices her body in half, leaving me sitting with my hard erect penis sticking out of my plaid Old Navy boxers, covered in the blood, guts, and miscellaneous internal matter that was once my girlfriend and potentially future wife.  Not knowing what to do, I pull my pants back up, and wipe the gore off of my glasses, and reach down upon the shoreline and find as many thin, round, smooth rocks that I could skip easily along the low tidal coastal water and attack the eyes and heads of these evil monsters.  They sprays water high into the air, and shot mussels and assorted shellfish in my general direction, but I dodged them with the agility of a Cheshire cat, and began to perform various flips and exercises that one might see in a Mel Gibson action movie, except I was not armed with a gun.  No, I was armed with a fierce collection of the hardest, sharpest, and most aerodynamic rocks this side of New Dorp.  Like an expert ninja with his ninja stars, I shot my rocks out toward the fleet of lizards that reclines and awaited my offensive so as to offer their counter offensive, which might include more razor sharp tails, yet this time might include a full course meal consisting of me, me, me, me, me, me, and me.  Fortune was on my side this day, and every rock struck their eyes, and blinded the creatures greatly, causing their saltwater tears to pollute the fresh saltwater of the Atlantic.  They wept, and flailed, and attempted to find some happy medium in between the pain I had placed them in, and the joy of having killed my human lover.  We found a truce with one another on that day, a truce which would live on even to this very day, as I write my tale of woe.  The lizards fell backwards, down into the cold, dark heart of the ocean floor.  There, a mighty crevice formed, causing a minor tsunami to flood the eastern seaboard for the next seven weeks.  This crevice opened up to Hell, and it is there where the evil lizards now reside.  The Dark Lord himself hath thrown thine creatures into thine furnace, where they forever wail, and grind their teeth.

Sitting on a rotten wood log in the woods along the beach is not my idea of a Saturday well spent.  The cold, damp mist hanging low from the fog clouds enveloped around the warm cigarette smoke which left our lungs through our mouths.  In the distance, the sound of the Atlantic water crashing upon the beaches, bringing with them collections of straw gathered from the wetlands, and old fishing piers smashed to pieces in a late summer storm.

“It feels like we do this every day, man.  How long we’ve been doing this for?”

I took a drag from my Newport, and exhaled, as I looked to the sky for an answer.

“Well, we haven’t been doing this for too long.  It was only a short while ago that all we did was hang out in your treehouse and play manhaunt.  ”

“That was a while ago dude.”
“Ya, 92 I guess.  Remember that?  Just before we built the treehouse, we carved the names in that tree in your yard.”

“We use to chill there for maaad long.  Didn’t we each have a branch?”
“Yep, and we had our initials on our branches, and then we had the ones of all the members of the group on the trunk, just as you step past the first niche.”

He inhaled some of the dank smoke.  “Yeah, that shit was great.  I mean, back then I didn’t think all this shit would be going down.  We’re the only three kids left that havent been fucked up some how?  Teej is in jail, Ronnie’s pregnant, and with Mario’s kid.  Mario is shooting heroin somewhere, Kathy’s blowing him, and lil Drew is robbing delis.  ”

Lissy chimes in.

“And what the fuck are we?  Kris, you aint graduated high school, and you don’t have no fucking job.  Jay, you fucking spent all that time in school, and now all you do is sit on the beach and write in that fuckin’ notebook, smoking this shit.”

Anne inhaled from the blunt.

“And me?  I don’t have a license, and I get laid off from every job I get.  What the fuck makes us this great chosen three?”

I quickly tried to mellow the situation.

“Baby, honey, look, that’s not what we meant.  We’re just trying to state the complexity that exists in real life, rather than the simplicity of our youths.  And sometimes, you know, it’s ok to wish for those days to return.
“When we were kids, babe, we had it all, and we didn’t even know it.  It was our ideas, our visions, that coulda changed the world, and yet we sat there blind to everything else.  We let those days slip away.  We have to remind ourselves that we can’t let anything slip away from us again.  ”

I took my last couple drags from the blunt, which had reached roach level.  I licked my finger, and put out the ember on the tip.  Anne stood there, with her head tilted, just kinda dumbfounded and such.  Murdazz had already begun spitting rhymes to himself as he sat upon the wood log.

I lifted my cigarette to my mouth, and took a drag, as I turned my head toward the small spot of blue that hung over the horizon as I looked toward the ocean.  For a moment in time, hope seemed possible, and I became determined to ensure that the sunny day ahead gets taken full advantage of.