Smoke and Smoke.

Got a little carried away today.
Cloudless skies. Temperature in the low 70's. A couple early afternoon drinks and a cute girl on a bike who's going my way. Anyone who hates autumn can fuck off right now. This is, hands down, the best time of year. Sure there's that twinge of regret that you didn't pack all of the your planned epicness into the summer. Yeah, all the beach trips are done for the year. On the other hand, your face doesn't look like a sweat waterfall, the brainless summer movie season is at an end and that person you've been flirting with for the past few months is ready to shack up for the winter. Complain all you want, but from where I'm sitting, pulling my hoodie and jean jacket out of the closet is like getting reacquainted with old friends.
Soon the leaves will be dropping and the air will be crisp. The only thing that's missing right now in NYC is the smell of wood smoke. See, in Portland, fireplaces are about as ubiquitous as air-conditioners are in the rest of the country. Every September, the air would be full of the smell of burning oak and the aroma of wet moss would roll down out of the hills and lumberjacks (or bike messenger that looked like lumberjacks) ruled the land. Fucking magical.

Jesus, what am I, Henry David Thoreau over here?
Back in pent-up angry rant-land, I've finally made the decision to quit smoking. This decision comes not as a response to the laughably aggressive NYC anti-smoking campaign,

So do car doors, box cutters and culinary career paths. What's your point?

nor is it due to the hip, neo-puritanism of truth.com. No this change of heart is due solely to the fact that smoking has given me a gift. And by "gift" I mean "chronic, wheezing cough". You know, the type you expect to hear from old men who get to their local bar at 9AM for their breakfast of hard boiled egg in a beer. So tomorrow I'm going to wake up bright and early and put a call into the NYC Quits hotline for my free $100 worth of nicotine patches, continue to smoke for another week and finally give smoking the hard goodbye.
In a perverse way, it feels like a betrayal. I've been a smoker for (wait for it!) 13 years, and I feel like cigarettes have been an integral part of each of those years. I think it's only fitting to have a brief retrospective of those dizzying highs and phlegmy lows that have been my love affair with carcinogens:

1988: I steal my first puff off one of my old man's unattended Camel straights. I subsequently swear off smoking for the rest of eternity.

1997: An eternity later, my friend's older brother charges me double for the service of buying me a pack of Camel Filters. With a staggering $5 price tag, I don't foresee myself doing this too often.

1998: When caught reeking of the menthol cigarettes I had been smoking on the train tracks (no joke. I'm just that classy), I tell my folks that I had not been smoking, but in fact someone must have had a campfire going. Somewhere. Or something. I am grounded when my parents somehow see through my brilliant lie.

1999: As a junior camp councilor(!) I am faced with the inexplicable unavailability of cigarettes at the camp canteen. I then follow through with the equally inexplicable plan of rolling up dried pine needles and smoking them as a substitute. Hilarity and bronchitis ensued.

2001: I make my first legal cigarette purchase and immediately launch on a year-long habit of two packs of Lucky Strike straights a day. Coolness and bronchitis ensued. That same year, Oregon decided to stop being trashy and banned smoking in restaurants, thereby cutting my all-night coffee binges at Denny's in half.

2002: I promise myself I'll quit smoking as cigarette prices skyrocket to an unheard of $5.50 a pack. Or at least I half-heartedly tell myself I'll start buying cartons.

2005: While living in Austin, TX I have my first of many encounters with a cigarette ban. In bars. In BARS for fuck's sake! Madness!

2007: Pretty much every city in America that I would consider living in has banned smoking in bars by this point. The end of an era.

2008: I move to NYC and learn to control my gag reflex when paying $10 for a pack of cigarettes. And then smoking them outside in 20 degree weather.

2010: Twelve. Fucking. Dollars. You couldn't even just bump it up ONE dollar and fucking ease us into it, could you?! NO! The first time I saw those prices, I actually almost physically assaulted a cashier at a certain notoriously over-priced natural food store in Bushwick, because I didn't know it was a tax and jumped to the conclusion that the man was a thief with a really novel M.O.

Dramatization

And so we come to the end of our strange odyssey. I must once more tell a former loved-one, "Baby it's not you it's me...see, I don't like you." I'm going to have to get rid of all my cool vintage ashtrays, scrub the nicotine stains off my fingers and Febreeze the couch. Oh, and I'm gonna have to get used to saving an extra $4,380 a year. I tell ya, it's not gonna be easy.