i heard a song...then saw an ad…
and it all brought me back…
december 2007…
gray, oppressive gray, and mist…
it seemed like twilight would last for centuries…
a song about a son who died too soon, and an ad about a father who died too soon as well…
the father was bowling in the ad…
he looked pretty healthy, actually…
he said he’d regret not being there for them when they needed him…
he rolled a strike, or at least, i think it was a strike…
and then there some text…
he died a few months after rolling that strike…
i remember my grandparents, my father’s parents…
they smoked day and fucking night…
they were maxed out…
every waking moment, they had a cigarette going…
my granddad with the filterless camels, and my grandma with the filterless pall malls…
my grandma would make us waffles...a pall mall dangling from her lips as he poured the liquid into the dry…or was it the dry into the liquid...
i can still hear her, forty years on, the middle of the night, coughing her lungs out...one night i snuck into her bedroom doorway…saw her sitting up, her hands holding onto the edge of her bed for dear life, her shoulders rising and falling violently as she reached into the night searching for one last clear breath…
i can still see her, thirty five years on, lying in a coffin, makeup and a wig, and my father holding onto my mother as she sobbed, it doesn’t even look like her, it doesn’t even look like her…
we all swore we’d never smoked...how fucking stupid could you be, i asked my sisters, the day of grandmother’s funeral...how could you piss away your life on something so stupid?
but for some fucking reason, slightly less than a decade later, i started up at the ripe old age of twenty six...grad school...i was on the wagon for a few years...i felt like i needed something…something to make me look cool while i wasn’t drinking…
&&&&&&&
i never been to chicago
i got nothing going on tomorrow
maybe we could stay here tonight
lose ourselves in the glass and light
craig finn, “god in chicago”
&&&&&&
the piano notes ring on, and the notes bring me back…
god, i can remember those mornings, those afternoons, those nights…
the sky, eternally gray...a fog, or a mist, or something in between, always seemed to hang in the air…
it seemed as though the whole world knew lauren had died, it seemed as though the whole world felt angry about it…
she still sang the harmonies
&&&&&
we drank in the taverns
we ate somewhere italian
and she’s on the sidewalk
trying to ask for a cigarette from oncoming traffic…
i’m trying to get the eldest to bed…
but she won’t go...
i’m fucking dying for a goddamn cigarette…
dying…
dying for one, just one…
yeah. i only smoke when i drink, i only smoke once or twice a week…
i don’t smoke the way grandmother did, i think…
i got filters, and the once-in-a-while defense…
we all want the same things
i finally get out there…
he’s in bed, they are all in bed…
i slip out the backdoor…
reach into the right hand pocket…
pick out the loaded rectangle…
i walk around the corner…
it’s the middle of the night…
i reach into the right hand pocket…
pull out a smoke…
light it up…hits me like a ton of bricks…
i feel myself relax, for the first time in a while…
i feel euphoria…
and i think of the price…
i try and talk myself out of it…
i work out hard, nearly every day…
surely, they won’t come for me, i lie…
but the price will be paid…
if not tonight, then soon…………………...