Smoking Past the Band

After an uncharacteristically early night after work, I decided that tonight I was going to indulge in some of my rare pleasures: a Romeo y Julieta cigar (Churchill) with a couple of ounces of 16 year old Lagavulin on the porch, while a gentle snow was falling and jazz rap playing. A true peace one can only find looking within oneself.

While on paper this should be the perfect end to a day - nodding my head to the beat while blowing sweet tobacco smoke into the night sky - I had a feeling that I didn’t expect.

Something was wrong.

All I could think about was my regrets, failures, shame, and yes, even some kind of guilt. I don’t know why it was weighing so heavily on my mind, but I couldn’t shift it.

Is this normal? Is this some prequel to a midlife crisis? I don’t know. But I don’t like it.

The night has two faces - when you’re younger, it’s as though there are endless possibilities out there. The worst thing you can say is “no”, because you literally never know where the night will take you. As you get older, though, the silence of solitude screams your shortcomings at you - especially with the insulation of fresh snow.

Maybe I’m irreparably broken and just don’t know it. If the things that give me the most joy (on a night off, no less) can’t centre me… Perhaps it’s just the moon or some other hippy dippy shit. But maybe I need to fix a leaky tap, and I only have a hammer in my tool belt.