“You can tell things about a person by the way they smoke, like what they do for a living, but that applies to women more than men.”
Marsha pauses that thought to seize her cigarette pack from the picnic table, against the green glass ashtray cradling a handful of lipstick stained butts from the five women of today’s chit-chat gathering. All four neighbors brought their lawn chairs to huddle under the shade of Marsha’s beach umbrella, pour cups of fresh-brewed Folgers and turn the ambience of the Clover Hill Trailer Park to a mid-morning backyard social.
Diane looked forward all week to this girls-night-out, specifically the 'casino' that would assemble after the party swelled and got noisy. She had already made her fashionable entrance to the party, which was rocking, but expecting the players to gather and make up the 'casino' at any moment, she fled outside to wait in a patio lawn chair. She drew thoughtfully, maybe desperately on her Eve 120 and in the twilight of this summer's star-flecked evening, her soothing cigarette glared out for as many seconds as her lips coaxed inward the stream of smoky flavor.
“But Denise, there IS a way to signal hotties if you can’t text’em,” Lauren said, laughing underneath the sun umbrella at the patio table. “You don’t hafta dial their cell if you know Crypton.” She flounced her platinum pixie cut in the breeze and plucked Denise’s smoldering cigarette right out from her slender fingers.
Her fingers are fatigued after hours of gripping the steering wheel; and at intervals, sporting a cigarette that glows like a smoldering spoke. A two-stemmed film of translucence unfurls up and away from the Winston’s constant ember as a reminder that it awaits another of her anxiety-tinged kisses. Weary from this night driving, she’s been fighting sleep by clouding her GMC Acadia with bored, mechanical chaining and singing smoke-blended ballads along with her CD companions Kenny Chesney and Taylor Swift.
This is a brief excerpt from the September–October 2010 issue of Smoke Signals magazine, and one of my first columns for the free/public version, "My First Decade at The Orgy":
Boardhost shut down my forum and multimedia archive near the end of March because they recently implemented a ban on smoking and fetish content. Way back in 2000 when I opened the first incarnation of "Sublime," I asked the then owner of Boardhost (who was pretty much a one man band at the time) if he had any problems with SF content. He told me flatly that he absolutely did not.
La petite mort is French for "the little death." The expression is most often used to describe the experience of having an orgasm, but is also used to describe the release of emotional energy (catharsis) that accompanies experiencing the climax of a creative expression, as well as the experience of going through a shocking life-changing event.
