Since I’m a character on the internet, we can all assume that I rarely change. Circumstances around me may evolve, or new plot complications and threads may arrive, but overall I’m not allowed to arc. That’s for movie people. I bring this up to gloss over the fact that I still smoke cigarettes. I still smoke, but the ground is shrinking beneath my feet. 

The Walls, too. 

My current smoking lounge is an alley a thousand feet from my house filled with cats, garbage, and the occasional hobo. It’s an unpleasant walk fraught with loathsome stares from neighbors. It sucks. At night, I can usually go in the backyard, particularly when it was 90 degrees and everybody shut their windows, but not no more. 

One of my new neighbors is my landlord, and man, does she hold sway. It’s like living in a fiefdom. Law comes down from on high, and the latest decree is that she smells those late night cigarettes.

I should have retorted that I hear her 5 dogs all throughout the night, but my wife was present at the Lawgiving Ceremony, and quickly backed Duchess Van Nuys. So that’s just fucking great: now I can’t smoke in my backyard. Now I get to walk 400 paces to a dark alley at 1 in the morning. Except, no. That’s bad, too. 

Last night a noted crazy alcoholic lady in the neighborhood walked out and stood a foot away from me while I tried to look busy in my phone. “Nice shoes!” she told me. I thanked her. Then it got weird. 

“Those shoes are cutesie whootsie, and I should know! It takes one to know one!" 

"You’re a cute shoe?”

“No, but I’m a cutesie whootsie!” She isn’t. It was at this point I decided to put a little distance between us, a distance she immediately closed by putting her hands on my shoulders in an attempt to massage them. I recoiled in horror. “Relax! You’re so tense!” she explained. I walked away briskly to the soundtrack of what could only be called a Witch’s cackle of a laugh. So…. that’s the end of the late night alley smoking. I guess I have to quit now, not because I want to, or because of health concerns, but because I simply have no place to smoke. What’s next? Exercising? Eee Gads!

I’m gonna be one cranky health nut for a while.