I’ve just returned from work and a quick trip to the supermarket for arugula and beers (awesome combo, you don’t have to tell me). As I was walking home from the store in my neighborhood (Prospect Heights, Brooklyn), I noticed by a woman walking her poodle down the street in the opposite direction from me.

As I came closer, I saw some small, stick-like thing hanging out of the dog’s mouth. From a distance, my first thought was, “That’s a cigarette!”, but I have shit vision, even with contacts. But, sure enough, as the dog came closer I distinctly saw an unlit cigarette poking out of it’s mouth. The death-stick was whole, slightly damp in some parts, but complete and smokable.

The owner, who was walking slightly ahead of the poodle, seemed wholly oblivious as I can only assume she wouldn’t condone her pet’s addictive habit. My guess is the dog picked it up off the street, managing by coincidence to get it oriented correctly, filter-first and at the perfect smoking angle. The poodle really looked like he was just trying to get a light for it’s smoke. I would have obliged, had I been packing matches.

I’ve been using the nicotine patch in yet another effort to quit smoking. For about a week now that I’ve worn it, my quality of sleep has been very fitful due to the fact that my body is getting nicotine pumped into it as I slumber (I normally don’t smoke while I’m asleep). The general feeling of being wired, coupled with vivid and usually lucid dreams have me feeling a serious deficit in quality rest.

So, I’ve taken to using over the counter sleeping pills to knock my ass out. I’ve gone for the non-habit forming ones. Specifically Unisom and a generic knockoff. I started off with the generics, which were these two little blue pills. They worked well enough. Instead of waking ten or twelve times a night, I’d only be awake once and then only for a few minutes. I arose feeling fine, with no after-effects and it seemed like a solution for the next two weeks till I downgrade to a patch of lesser potency.

Last night, I tried Unisom. You take this single blue pill, which I did before getting in bed. Again, as with the generics, I felt that my quality of sleep was improved, but my condition this morning, or more precisely, early afternoon is pretty different. I’ve felt like I’ve been a zombie-like, semi hypnotic state all morning. I occasionally snap out of it, sitting at a table, coffee in hand after having lost the past four minutes of my life to La-La Land.

Even now, as I write this, I keep drifting off and snapping back (or more descriptively, slogging back) to my laptop. The air in my apartment has a strong and pronounced odor of burning plastic that suggests the possibility of a fire somewhere in my building, but sheeeeeeeee-it.

Wait…huh?

See? That had to have been two to three minutes of disconnected, spaced-out shit. I have to read back through this paragraph to remember what I was writing about.

Burning plastic smell! What the hell?

I think I’m done with Unisom.

A few weeks ago, I fell off the wagon and started smoking again. As I sit here at my computer, a pack of American Spirits in my pocket and a fresh dose of nicotine pumping through my bloodstream, I realize that if i have any sense at all (which I often ponder), I’d best quit soon before it starts getting really difficult…again.

Prior to my starting back up again, I’d been having inexplicable cravings to smoke. After quitting for something over a year, I found myself resisting daily thoughts and urges to smoke, which caught me out of the blue. After several weeks of subconscious needling, I broke down and on a random impulse, telling myself it was the stress of the day, I smoked. Naturally, it all went downhill from that point.

Now I’m smoking about a half a pack a day, nervously contemplating my imminent and unavoidable millionth attempt at quitting. Will I cold-turkey it? The patch? Will I go postal, tear out my eyes and stuff the bleeding holes with loose tobacco and set myself aflame? I do not know.

What I do know is that smoking really fucks with my mood. Specifically, it makes me about ten times the asshole I normally am. Whether I’ve just smoked a cigarette or not, my temper becomes a bit trigger-happy, much to the displeasure of everyone who deals with me on a daily basis.

In the interest of peace, not to mention my health, I better quit again. Lying in the mud, looking up at the wagon I’ve fallen off of, I think…soon. Just let me smoke this butt real quick.

About ten years ago, I was living in a shitty little apartment in a drab, white-trash neighborhood. I was about twenty-one years old and my life revolved around getting fucked up, sleeping, puking and smoking. Sometimes I’d combine one or more together for kicks because I was an angry little fucker and I liked it that way.

One afternoon, after waking up naked and extremely hung-over, I scrounged around and discovered that I was completely out of cigarettes. I was chain-smoking bastard at that point in my life, so this simply would not do. I needed to run to the corner store to further martyr my lung cilia.

Bleary and with head a-throbbing, I still had the common sense to not run out the door completely naked. I threw on a T-shirt and slapped on a pair of these Armenian work pants that I’d found in some Army-Navy surplus store. I’ve no idea if real-life Armenians actually did any work in them, but I kind of liked them. They were dark blue pants that instead of having a zipper or button fly, they used an overlapping contraption that closest resembled how the crotches of tighty-whiteys are set up. It looked completely normal to me and for some reason, I was partial to them. Perhaps it was the drugs.

Since I planned on coming right back, I threw these pants on without bothering to put on anything underneath and hit the street, heading for the corner store.

Ahead of me was a family on their porch. Father and mother, sitting around while several children ran about, screeching and giggling as the fucked up little parasites are known to do. One of the children came running in my direction, chasing after an inflated rubber ball. When the ball neared me, I crouched down, picked it up and gently lobbed it back in the kid’s direction.

Suddenly, the kid starts bawling, turns tail and runs to her parents. The mother looks at me and offers up a “Oh Jesus fucking Christ” to the heavens and the father starts eyeing at me like he’s about to beat me half to death.

It was about that time that I began to notice a draft.

I glanced down and saw to my sheer fucking horror that a force beyond my control, be it fate, karma or physics had caused my dearest pieces to be exposed. I was hanging out. The flag wasn’t raised—thank whatever Gods responsible, but it was definitely flying in the wind.

Somehow in bending to get the ball, the fly-contraption on these Armenian work pants had managed to shift a little here, a little there and now here I was, standing in front of some white trash family on a Sunday afternoon, hung-over with my dick hanging out. The older children stood there, slack-jawed—the image of my face being burned into their brains as the role model to compare all future examples of “bad men” against. Score one for daveb.

I may have little or no redeeming qualities and I may just be an overall useless leech of an asshole but one thing I am most certainly not is a pervert that whips his junk out, especially in front of children. I was fully mortified.

As quick as I could I stuffed that shit back in and took off as fast as possible without actually breaking into a run. There was just no point in trying to explain myself and the curious contraption that made up the crotch of my Armenian work pants. I hit the store and chain-smoked my way home, taking care to walk a much longer and completely different route. I was to maintain this new route for the remainder of my time living in this neighborhood.

I have not worn Armenian work pants since that day.