JSB

The first cigarette I ever smoked was in the short-stay car park of Stavanger airport. It was a Camel Blue. The sky was Norwegian. Overcast and grey. Since then I have smoked a lot of cigarettes, and will often claim that taking it up was the best decision I have made in a long time. A cigarette operates as a small stick of entropy; within that single gram lives an agent of motion, a compulsion exerting itself over soporific lives. The random conversations one has with strangers over a cigarette often carry an edge of meaning that is hard to find in an otherwise superficial world. Mutual participation in a self-destructive exercise. Common ground transcending language. Line cooks, security guards and executives, relegated to a huddle under an awning as the rain pours, sharing a lighter. Ritual. Much of what we have lost in the last two generations can be distilled to a neutering of our innate risk appetite. An unlanceable push towards comfort and safety, calcifying young minds and inculcating in them the belief that they are enough the way that they are. That to cast the runes is to err. Lost. You are not enough. To make it is to understand that you never will be — and then to try anyway. Smoke.