EDMONTON EXISTENTIAL

Of Cigarettes and Polar Vortexes

I’ve lived most of my life in less delicate times. Hypersensitivity was the result of an injury. Actual nerve damage. Real pain. School and work were unavoidable obligations unless my excuse involved severe physical trauma. A cold or flu merely meant switching to menthol cigarettes for a week or so. They seemed to work as well as cough drops. I’ve missed them from time to time since Health Canada banned them – I can’t remember when. I’ve always managed a cigarette whatever the conditions. 

I imagine Canadian Hell to be so liquid nitrogen cold that sinners burn anyway. Last week Edmonton dipped beyond that closing time seductiveness when Celsius and Fahrenheit flirt about hooking up over a cold one at 40-below. I hope they don’t fall in love because a dirty weekend fling puts enough strain on the electrical grid. Besides, there’s no arguing with a child like El Nino whose ferret fingers also disrupt every other established climate pattern. It’s similar to toddler grandchildren messing with your audio equipment. Volume knobs are meant to be eaten because they taste better than Goldfish snack crackers which are meant to be spun around in a CD player. Not that I would know. A diminished jet stream cannot keep arctic weather in its place, neither contain nor filter its chill.

It's still too soon to notice any change in the low light this new year side of the winter solstice up in Edmonton. The mornings are as black as my coffee, the ink of the newspaper, my prune lungs. Dawn arrives diamond blue, hard and clear. Distant cirrus clouds glow appliance filament orange. Freezing, still air is as good a conductor as any metal. The snap of my Zippo lighter’s lid could be the retort of a hunting rifle. The tobacco smoke, a hotter gas, congeals enough to cast its own shadow.

Savvy smokers understand that cigarettes can burn stuff: beds, housing, tracts of land; genitalia too, as multi-tasking on a toilet seat is best left to gathering one’s thoughts or perusing an out-of-date magazine. Live and learn, once bitten, twice shy. The discount cigarettes I buy burn like high school joints, unevenly. Their embers can be freakishly long and the paper turns brown. The seasonal mats I lay on the slate of the front porch of the Crooked 9 have burns in them. My seat cushion on the tete-a-tete has burns in it. My Neil Young flannel shirts and jackets which I layer on in extreme weather have burns in them. There are burns between the index and middle fingers of my winter gloves - both hands. Sometimes, I think none of this will end well.

Inclement weather cigarette burns whose frequency varies follow a relatively standard pattern. Once Fahrenheit and Celsius decide to conjugate my eyes and nose run like fugitives. Health Canada has yet to ban snot tipped cigarettes. There’s no such thing as a dry cold in my head. I do the wrist-to-elbow flannel wipe even as I lick my cracking lips. Saliva becomes Elmer’s Glue when a cigarette’s filter is involved. There’s no friction between slick insulated nylon gloves and smooth cigarette paper. The hot ash needs flicking. So begins the sticky-lipped slide to the orange ember. The fingers of my glove begin to smoulder and melt. I rip it off and then rip the cigarette from my mouth. Enough! Time to go back inside. My exposed palm is damp. I reach for the metal handle on the front door.                    

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. My companion site www.megeoff.com is awake and alive. Watch and listen to some of the songs I co-wrote with The Muster Point Project or buy 5 KG, the complete EP. Of course, you can still purchase my latest book Of Course You Did in your preferred format from your preferred e-retailer.