Autumn languor has taken hold.
There are more things in my life that either need work or need radical change than there are things I want to keep static and cozy through the long dark of the coming winter, and it depresses me to the point of apathy. To the point of forgetting why I bothered quitting smoking.
The last time I got good and drunk and had a real night on the town was so many years ago. I remember being out front of Union Street Bar in TC with my hosts and crowds of other drunk people, all sucking down tobacco like the coming sunrise would never show.
One thing they never tell you about smoking, though it was always implied back when it was legally advertised in movies and magazines, was that it does give you an immediate in with people. It’s a club, and members look out for their own. Advertisers told us it was the cool club- and it was, in a sense.
But the cool bad boy rebel is only as cool as he is healthy, and so it self defeats in relatively short order. Yet still there is no age (or minimum teeth) limit on membership, so even in my old age- long beyond any hopes of achieving any degree of “coolness,” there is still the allure of the ingroup. The dregs of the night crew.
It’s always the people in my life who pursue death the fastest and the hardest that seem to live the purest and the brightest. Even if their time is brief. I find myself drawn to their company. The ghosts of my father and uncles. I was never great at talking to my Dad, or people like my Dad when he was alive, but now that he’s gone I have no trouble making all kinds of friends with men from his age group.
These are long, long retired Bad Boys now. Men in their 70s who might still drink (probably couldn’t survive quitting at this point), but otherwise just sit around and complain about their health and compare doctors. They don’t make anything about it seem appealing, though I enjoy their company more than almost anyone else- even people I know and love.
Yet I find myself standing in the dark outside of the liquor store from time to time, listening to the sweet music wafting outside. I know if I offer the guy smoking on the stoop in a hoodie a buck for a smoke, he’ll refuse my dollar and give me 2 out of his box for free and immediately open a conversation with me as if we’d been war buddies.
And for just a few moments, for the small cost of 7 minutes of my life or so, I’d feel like part of a family.
Hart to resist with that autumn languor.
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