magicbeans. nothing if not awkward.

The warming up of the weather and the attendant walking around as of late has stirred within me the desire to smoke. I haven't smoked, or as far as I can recall, even taken a drag off of a cigarette all winter. Not since the longer days of the early fall when I would come home from work and sit on my roof at sunset with a beer. But this afternoon, stepping into Central Park, I was overwhelmed to the point of going back to the deli I had passed two blocks down and buying a pack. Along with the warmer days, being in the park always makes me want to smoke. As if all the green scrubbing the pollution out of the air is too much for my city lungs to bear.

The reality of it is, I'm sure, my more prosaic. The first few cigarettes I ever smoked were in late spring, in the woods on the edges of my high school campus. The point in my life when I was smoking the most frequently was during the summer and early fall of 2002, and most of those cigarettes were in India Point Park or along the bank of the Providence River behind the architecture building at RISD. For better or worse (well, worse probably) nature and smoking share some neural pathways in my brain.

In any case, I walked up to Chris, Julia, Liz, and Liz's friend from high school, Kristi, all more or less non-smokers, somewhat self-conscious about the fact that I was smoking the first cigarette of the season. Actually, to be completely honest, the self-conscious bit came mainly from smoking the cigarette while being re-introduced to Kristi. (I think we met once last summer, probably at one of Adam's barbecues, certainly somewhere with lots of new people, plus drinking, so the details are a little fuzzy.) She's a structural engineer.

We sat around in the park for a good bit of the afternoon before heading off our separate ways, eventually all to find ourselves among a larger crowd at a party in Long Island City at the house of a bunch of kids who were at Brown while we were at RISD. Took some photos, had some drinks, handed out a bunch of cigarettes from the pack. 'Go for it, I pretty much sated my desire with the one I smoked this afternoon. Not sure when I'll want another, but the more I give away are that many less that I have the opportunity to smoke myself.' And latish, found my way back home.