A Coffee and Cigarettes Kind of Guy
“Here. To smoke and have coffee - and if you do it together, it's fantastic.”
-Peter Falk
We’ve been dreaming together for a long time now,
so I feel comfortable enough
around these cowboys and this Frenchman
to admit that I’m never going to give up coffee and
cigarettes.
Never. Ever.
It just ain’t happening this week
or in 2035, if I can help it.
Cigarettes aren’t just ridiculously addictive,
they’re also pretty fantastic,
and I tell the Frenchman that it was more or less destiny
that I was going to get into David Lynch movies
the way some faded, miserable elementary school guidance
counselor
always knew I would.
The Frenchman nods, understanding everything
but also everything about nothing,
because you can only expect so much from a dream.
Even a long one. Even a peaceful one.
Even one of a reoccurring nature.
With the kind of overwhelming melancholy and unrestrained
joy
from knowing these dreams will always be infrequent
and far too brief.
I don’t say all of this,
but I turn to Harry Dean Stanton,
and give him one of the unfiltered smokes
I bring for just such an occasion.
Harry nods, understanding everything,
but also…..
yeah,
I don’t want to admit the ground isn’t all it seems either.
The sky will follow you long after you’re gone,
and that’s especially true of the skies
above and below
the great plains and fields of wherever the hell we are.
Near a home with a field.
A campfire that anticipates the nighttime.
I don’t want to wake up.
I don’t want the next trip to Los Angles,
3 AM, alone, to be the last.
Every dream may be the last,
and that’s open to equal parts interpretation,
fascination, and light ridicule.
But simply put,
but from behind a nervous wall of cigarette smoke,
I don’t want to leave the cowboys behind.
Or the Frenchman.
Or the coffee and cigarettes.
Or the Pacific Northwest
that hides the nightmares,
the starting points for the next five surreal road trips,
and the kindly old timers
all in plain sight.
So I won’t.
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