Do we find happiness in our banal routines, or in the breaks we take from them?

Sitting. Drawing colored lines, reflecting on 1994. Everyone, at age 14, became animals, friendlies into aliens. I remember a kid that used to be on my old soccer team now made fun of my ears and took pleasure in it, and that concept changed my world view. EVERYONE was an enemy now, except my brothers-in-crime from the beach. I withdrew from them all, I was too young, not mentally tough enough.

Once a day, I stare briefly at a cylinder container of Lysol wipes, which I carry in my bag everyday, along with an empty pack of Marlboro Menthols. Occasionally, I’ll open the cylinder, and remove the clear jar with the purple lid with a butterfly on top, and observe the green contents. Sometimes, I’ll even steal away to open it up and take a smell, and I’m back for a second, in that glorious moment just before break up, when it seems you have all the trees you’ll ever need, and life just seems perfectly aligned to the righteous path.

Drawing. Staring blankly back at colored lines.

Writing is keeping me sane, healthy, even if it’s just these minuscule paragraphs and scraps that I compose on my graphed notepads while I ride the subway home, even if its about the people I observe, or my own reflections on how my life used to be, or how I might wish it would be, or how much I long for my addictions to wrap their cords around my neck once more.  I have to pass the test of temptation.  I am not lulled into the sense of safety provided by sobriety.  I crave it, but I see and hear my friends speak in tongues only the stoned can hear.

I  smell a tea, a strawberry tea.

Nothing spells relief better than that unwrapping of a strawberry phillie, or the opening of the tube of a strawberry White Owl; to has a reason to keep the right hand thumbnail a little longer than the rest, the crack of the cigar, the gutting, the licking of the leaf.  I miss trees.

I think about going back to it every day.  Several times, at that.  It’s my reason to leave, to run, my way of escape.  It makes me not want what I love.  It holds me back.

So I stare, and I long for it.

When I start thinking about trees, I try to meditate on just what do I desire them for?  What feeling do I feel now?  Perhaps it’s just the need to be alone?

It does require about 8 hours to one’s self.

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 gather that Mount Airy lodge has slowly degenerated into a series of decrepit 70’s deco-art rooms with hot tubs that have become discolored and encrusted by years of seminal and vaginal fluids, and its beautiful woodland trails have become a haven for the devil worshiping teenage Nazi youth of Generation Y to inseminate the uteri of GHB-laden 16 year old vixens in tight sweat pants with their pubescent semi rigid hard-ons, while they drink strange conconctions of 99 Bananas and winshield wiper fluid and listen to Eminem tell them to shoot every member of the Republican party.

Writing is re-writing.

My eyelids felt like sandpaper. I hadn’t slept in two days. Coffee only gets you so far. Sometimes you need a little cold air to keep you going, some frost against the skin to perk you up. Cigarettes come in handy in this instance. I had Sobo glue residue on my fingertips, bits of sawdust filling the fingerprint grooves, and ripped cardboard adhered to my palms. The lights of the studio were always on between August and May. My second-hand smoke was indistinguishable from my breathe in the Buffalo air. I’ve been out here for five minutes, and I’ve seen 17 students and two professors come and go.

Twitching. Nervous. Is he coming through, I thought. I had everything ready; my BBQ covered chicken fingers and side of onion rings from Jim’s, a bottle of Arizona Green Tea with Ginseng and Honey, a can of Red Bull, a bag of Chex Mix Bold, a five pack of Slim Jims, a pack of Dutch Master Corona Deluxe, a pack of Marlboro Menthols. I took one out, lit it, inhaled and let it out. Nervous as fuck, hoping he’d come through. I beeped him five minutes ago. Is he coming through? I tried to focus on my computer and went on checking all my sites for the zillionth time today; nothing new to take my mind off what I needed. I didn’t touch any of my food. I was hoping he’d come through.This was my life. Waiting for a phone call in order to move ahead with my life. What life is this? I secretly wanted to get away, to not be dependent on this phone call to ensure my happiness. I felt like a slave, no, I felt worse. I felt like a bullied child giving up his money because he couldn’t stand up for himself. I was a good customer, I was a rube and he was the carny. He’d call back. I knew it. He needed me. I was needed by someone. We had chats. He was my friend. I gave him money, but he was my friend. He’d come over. It would pick me up, get me out of this funk. I was in a funk. My mom said I was in a funk. Looked at every photo of me over the last two years. I was not happy. I had so little. I was dependent on so many things. I was a child. I hated myself. I hope he calls back. I hope he comes through.

The phone rang. I closed my eyes and felt the rush. I knew it was him. Let it ring once more to let me know that it’s real.

The phone rang again, and I picked up the cordless receiver.

“Hello?”

“Yoooo, what’s up dude?”

“Not much, Shaft, what’s good?”

“Nuttin’ . You want me to come through?”

“Yep.”

“Aight, dude. 40?”

“Yep.”

“Aight. Yo, you’re gonna be happy.”

“I already am.”

“Aha. Yo, you got a Dutch?”

“Yes, sir. You gonna chill?”

“No doubt, dude.”

“Aight.”

“Aight, I’ll see you in like, twenty minutes?”

“Aight.”

“Aight, peace.”

I hung up.

I got out of my papasan chair and started to clean up, picking up random crapI had strewn about the apartment in my last haze. I got out the ash trays, then sat on the futon, took out the pack of Dutch Masters, opened the pack, took out a wrapped cigar, unwrapped it, and began to lick the cigar up and down.

Ah, this is the life.

More coffee, less thinking. Stop retreating to the past, and getting scared of past experiences. People have tremendous passion to learn and to apply. I feel this is missing, so I rot away the more I remain normal. I want to run away and read.

How dumb are religious people, you might ask? Fifty Indian Catholics suffered permanent eye damage from staring into the sun, after following rumors that one could see a vision of the Virgin Mary.