Vices by Jordan Brunswick (year 2 reading books txt) 📖

Too many pitches. Too many blinding flashes of flint bathing a stream of sublimating butane, igniting in a perfect one-inch flame to be cradled from the wind as a pair of pursed, chapped and faded lips suspend a cylinder of relief in the dancing flicker. His cheeks pulse like bellows drawing the flame towards the cylinder’s end with a force unseen. His eyes illuminate as the tip ignites in glowing embers reflecting off his hands onto his focused face. His hands slink to his sides, slipping the lighter into his front pocket in one, cool, well-­rehearsed motion. Inhaling deeply, his chest expands and the first tingling sensation of his actions begin to lurk. Quickly, he reaches up to his face and snares the cigarette between his index and middle finger, pulling it from his lips in one fell swoop. He arcs his neck backward expelling a plume of smog into the crisp night air. The nicotine is flowing now. An intricate network of pipes, membranes, and chambers lead to a familiar home. In fact, the only home that matters when all is said and done. The muse for which all this effort attempts to appease. The pleasure center of the brain, the nucleus accumbens.

Now bathing in nicotine it rewards its obedient young cadet with a fleeting sprinkle of dopamine.

He turns chuckling to his neighbor the caudate nucleus with a menacing grin, “he’ll be back”.

A host of comorbidities to say the least. 6, 8, 10 life threatening conditions all tracing back to a common thread. Smoking. Emphysema, bronchitis, coronary artery disease, atherosclerosis, peripheral vascular disease, stroke, renal failure, macular degeneration and periodontitis to name a few. And now… a cerebral aneurysm.

Ex-heroin addicts who travel the country regaling gymnasiums full of malleable high-schoolers on smart life choices… shamefully admit that there’s one crutch they haven’t been able to kick. Now free of alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, ecstasy, coffee, gluten, red meat, GMO’s, doing yoga six times a day and buying into any and every overnight health craze any twat has tweeted in the last decade, his dark passenger still clings on tight. A voice from the crowd in that gymnasium timidly asked in the question and answer session (why): “if you have come this far, why do you think you still need cigarettes”. I didn’t have an answer for him. I feel like we had at least that in common.

Publication Date: 11-28-2017

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