When I began my first stab at writing a personal essay this month, it slowly became something unwieldy, thousands of words long, detailing a series of painful missteps taken by either myself or my parents. It was beginning to feel like more of a whiny diatribe than anything conducive to my article count. Wallowing in self-pity and other forms of selfish bullshit tends to bog down my point, and the act, in tandem with writing at obscene length, contrives myself further than I already have. It robs me of my purpose at Arthur. Personal mystique? In the age of oversharing? Please. I’m here to be earnest and make meagre money doing it, even though this article is paying my rent this month.

February tends to revolve around St. Valentine’s, a consumerist wash-out I’ve come to abhor in my later years. Mine would always be spent with people who gave less of a shit about me, and I would vie for their attention with gifts, presents, what-have-you. It always lacked meaning, shallow gestures in some overall futile attempt to feel whole. I thought I needed something external to make me feel better as seen through my many mistrials with bad men, drugs, horrific friendships, etc. Just a man and his myriad of bad decisions. It only goes to show you how absolutely psychotic this holiday is in its cultural position, solely due to the historical implication of being alone on “MARRY AND REPRODUCE” Day. 

Relationships were something I never really sought escape over. I blotted myself out over the permanent loneliness the quality of my life had, and relationships would end as a result of my closed-off nature, always having this magical talent for talking around my problems and issues. I would embellish anything negative under the guise of “radical optimism,” and effectively divorce myself from the reality I was living under by insane means. That was my problem. I never dated in a string, because my trust was hard to come by, and I was so up my own ass in this respect that I thought everyone else was the problem. They always left, so that makes me the victim. I wouldn’t allow any constants in.

The one consistency of my early life, throughout this weird little affair with a particularly interesting iteration of existence, was nicotine. It made me suave, unapproachable, untouchable. I was finally the cool guy. 

Oh, sweet temptress. The typing of this sentence makes me crave a death stick. I picked up the habit working in food service as a teen, bumming darts from boys I’d gone to school with. Never looked back. This was primarily how I learned to talk to people, approaching the social oasis that nicotine provideth and setting sail as soon as I lit the tip of a fag. Never would they have chatted with me in a normal setting, but with cigarettes, I was one of them. The social accreditation one has becomes far more palpable when they are holding a dart. You, in some careless Heideggerian fashion, have shown to whoever’s looking that you don’t give a rat’s ass about your life. You are only here, on God’s green earth, to do shitty James Dean cosplay.

I would leave any party drunk as a skunk in the throngs of a deathly addiction, and light up a crinkled cigarette from a crushed pack. With this vanishing act, my problems would visibly leave me, magically transforming a drunk mess into considerably less of a drunk mess and more of a guy that has definitely seen Fight Club. This would attract many interesting characters into my proximity, and as I grew older, smoke breaks provided a quiet escape from anything and everything. Jeff Rosenstock speaks to this best in “9/10” from his 2018 album POST: “Every cigarette you smoke ‘cause you’re addicted to a quiet source of company.” 

It became less of a social device when I suddenly found myself here, in old Peterborough, chain smoking the cheapest retail smokes I could find, living in a blurry haze, dishevelled and alone. Smoking became a life preserver when I stopped drinking, and subsequently got 100% sober. They’ve been a crutch for the longest period I’ve been wide awake to the existence of my life since I was a teen. 

Now, on the other side of that, I afford myself some chemicals as a treat, since nicotine and caffeine are my two baby girls, but they’re generally the ones that treat me a lot nicer than party drugs and alcohol ever did. This diatribe is not going to be an expansion upon the party stories for your transgender trauma porn fetish, because they will fundamentally change the way you look at me, but I did just write 800 words about Japanese gay porn, so think of me what you will.

It’s funny, considering the life-long proximity to death, that I would pick this habit up and later provide a rationale to you folk. My grandma died of lung cancer some years ago now, having been a pack-a-day smoker since my dad was a kid and she shrivelled up into a husk of a being in a matter of five years. Addiction has always been commonplace in the King family blood, yet knowing full well of what consequences laid ahead of me, this didn’t deter me one bit.

To this day, I cannot go a day without a fag hanging out of my mouth. I’ll get off the shit when it stops being so cool for me to die a little faster than usual. I sit, alone in my room, writing this, sick in my bed, absolutely yearning for nicotine. I allowed myself half of a smoke just this morning, but it clearly isn't enough for such a growing boy.