plunger coffee and cigarettes

Belvedere Jehosophat - Tuesday, June 14, 2005 - 01:43:47 - print it raw

“My friend smokes cigarettes. He shows up at my house at three in the morning most nights with a fresh pack, ready to go. Camels, no-filter. I don’t smoke.
“I have the coffee brewing by the time he shows up. I grind the coffee beans manually in a little wooden grinder. It was a birthday gift. It takes about an hour to grind enough beans to make enough coffee for the both of us.
“I grind the beans in complete silence, no music, no television, and desperately try to think of things I can say to my friend. Once or twice I’ve panicked because I haven’t been able to come up with anything to talk about, and I’ve almost called my friend to tell him to not bother showing up. I’ve never had the courage, though.
“He has a routine for his late night visits: he cracks open his new packet of cigarettes and meticulously smokes every single cigarette down to his fingertips. Then, when he is out of cigarettes and I think he might be getting ready to leave, he starts to carefully slice up every butt and salvage whatever smokeable tobacco is left. This he rolls into smoking papers or, if he doesn’t have any, whatever spare paper I happen to have lying around. He smokes his cigarettes quickly and angrily.
“We don’t talk very much and we laugh even less. Last night we talked though. He’d been reading Kafka and a particular story caught his attention. It was called, “The Sudden Walk,” and it is about a man, the narrator, suddenly and inexplicably going for a walk after having had prepared himself and resigned himself to a night in. My friend said he wishes he could go for a sudden walk.
“I don’t really know what’s going on.”

how [does one] move in a world of fog?

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