“You can tell things about a person by the way they smoke, like what they do for a living, but that applies to women more than men.”
Marsha pauses that thought to seize her cigarette pack from the picnic table, against the green glass ashtray cradling a handful of lipstick stained butts from the five women of today’s chit-chat gathering. All four neighbors brought their lawn chairs to huddle under the shade of Marsha’s beach umbrella, pour cups of fresh-brewed Folgers and turn the ambience of the Clover Hill Trailer Park to a mid-morning backyard social.
Penny moaned. The red-haired business manager just calculated the time span of her enforced no-smoking for her spur-of-the-moment out-of-town conference. “Thursday I won’t be able to smoke for at least fourteen hours.” Depressed, she pondered, “That’s how long I’ll be in the air, in taxis and presenting our strategy to ‘corporate’ while conferring with our clients.”
Eleanor fled the great ball room of Stoppard Hall, parting the milling throng; jostling party goers as she escaped. That was, until she herself was brought up short by a familiar face.
He raised his gloved hand to hail her, “Eleanor, so glad I caught you!”
As Mark drove home, his work colleagues' comments were ringing in his ears. The subject at work had gotten around to second hand smoke and smoking in general, and everyone had voiced their opinions in one way or another. Most were negative as most of the people who worked with Mark didn't smoke at all or had quit a long time back. But Mark's manager's words were ringing in his ears the most, as he glanced at the road sign saying he was only three miles from home.. He though about the conversation as he stopped at the next light.
This is a brief excerpt from the September–October 2010 issue of Smoke Signals magazine, and one of my first columns for the free/public version, "My First Decade at The Orgy":
Boardhost shut down my forum and multimedia archive near the end of March because they recently implemented a ban on smoking and fetish content. Way back in 2000 when I opened the first incarnation of "Sublime," I asked the then owner of Boardhost (who was pretty much a one man band at the time) if he had any problems with SF content. He told me flatly that he absolutely did not.
La petite mort is French for "the little death." The expression is most often used to describe the experience of having an orgasm, but is also used to describe the release of emotional energy (catharsis) that accompanies experiencing the climax of a creative expression, as well as the experience of going through a shocking life-changing event.
