I snuck in a cig today coming back from the Presidio. I grabbed a flat white at Third Wheel Coffee and stood at the corner of Scott and Oak Street and sucked in a few poisoned breaths.
I'm still very self-conscious when smoking in San Francisco. Bicyclists and dog walkers and joggers past by. The sunlight is very beautify in the August morning - weaving through the tree branches. The city seems almost too beautiful to be marred by the acrid smoke.
I've gone cold turkey for years now, but somehow, now closing on my fifties, the habit has snuck its way into my life again. Perhaps I think I can get away with it. Candice would be enraged to learn that I'm endangering my health. So would my doctor. Don't I want to give myself the best shot to live as long as possible, if only for the people I love? What about my daughter?
I suppose it's a lot of things. Somehow I find that this low level masochism provides a small pathway to creativity, a familiar trigger to write again, to let my mind wander along unstructured and unobstructed roads. And in other ways, it's a nod towards this deep sadness, or perhaps fatalism, that comes with again; the recognition that somehow I find myself in this very comfortable and uneasy happiness of middle age, which means the start of the downwards.
I'd love to reinvent myself. Tony Bourdain published A Kitchen Confidential when he was 43, then became a completely new person until 61. Then he hung himself, leaving behind a daughter who really loved him, two wives, countless friends and strangers and experiences. Would I trade for his life vs what I have now, knowing how it ends? It's not a happy thought, but it's also not an unhappy thought.