New Man - Under Construction

Hey... guess what!? Starting the ball rolling in your life once you've reached a complete stand-still is really difficult. Let's be clear, I'm not talking hitting rock bottom and going to rehab like some Lindsay Lohan crackhead. Her and the wild girls of Hollywood are still trapped in cycles of vigorous activity. They have careers to save and calendars that stretch far out into the future.

I'm talking freak yourself out, childhood into manhood, step off the cliff, jump the shark type crossroads that are usually faced in western society with a healthy dose of exploration and failure.

I'm not prepared for that failure. I'm not prepared for rejection. And up to this point I've been tailoring each and every encounter in my life so that I can control whether people even have the option to reject me. That's not the case any more. From here on out I have to give up that control if I'm ever going to get ahead.

I also have to give up the things that have control over me. Goodbye cigarettes. Oh charming, vile snakes of coiling carbon. How your slowly drifting rings gave me comfort when I had none. That nearly silent voice, flaming death on one end of a lonely night - and my bony fingers on the other. I clutched you for protection in crowds, distraction in conversations, recovery on clouded mornings - when my eyes may not have opened, but my lips could find their ways to you. Goodbye you charming devil cigarettes. Such a friendly offering between strangers, a simple way to charm the unfortunately unprepared. Goodbye to bringing along a friend wherever I travel. No tell-tale corners showing through my pocket... and no lighter either. No rings of sickly yellow on my nails, those were just starting to show... but they looked so foreign on me - I've decided they can't stay. Nor can all the other foreign entrants to my temple ushered in by the devil's weed. No more monoxide, di-droxide, polyfoxhide or other will tar the walls of my lungs from here on out. So, goodbye cigarettes. It's been a good run, the two of us... well, one of me and thousands of you. Just a string of my DNA flicked out the window, crushed on the bartop, left to decay where it falls.

Life. Is. So.... fucked up.