Day Eighty-Five

Without getting into specifics - as this is a blog about ME, rather than the intimate details of my friends and colleagues - I found myself NOT driving home to my lovely wife and our breakfast-for-dinner consisting of free-range, organic eggs on whole wheat toast and hash browns; but driving downtown last night with a certain favorite person of mine after a long ten-and-a-half-hour monotonously mind-melting day of book contracts and FileMaker to a place neither myself nor my companion wished we would ever have to travel again. Hopefully, this time will be the last...

I was neither angry nor frustrated, but the confluence of the end of my work day with the beginning of this unexpected journey had both of us thinking, 'Cigarettes'! See, this other happens to also be in the process of quitting, so cram two former smoking buddies, a postponed dinner, and stressful situation into a Subaru Impreza, and nothing good can come out of it...

Unless no one has any fucking cigarettes! Fuck! I truly was a little pissed for a minute and thought, 'Oh shit. This would have been a great excuse. The wife wouldn't even be able to get mad!' My navigator would have been elated to find a half-crushed pack of Camel Lights in my center console, eagerly awaiting a moment like this one. We probably could have even smoked two on the ride down there because, shit, we would already have reeked; so what is one more cig, right?

But no. I am a good quitter. I have always been the reliable one when it came to cigarette supply, and, in this case, we both were happy for my failure. That's what friends are for, right? To not facilitate others' addictions. To break down the barriers to success like a...