At the end of my lunch break, I call Dell Computer to get spare parts for my laptop. I call a local repair shop first, and they say I need a new motherboard. I look on dell.com first, and I find the right one, but there is no price and no way to order, so I call in. I spend 45 minutes on the phone with their salesperson, who sounds like they are in India, to order a new motherboard, new keyboard, new CD/DVD drive, and a carrying case. During one of our hold sessions, in which she is researching the carrying case, I wait for a while, then I go on to dell.com and find the right case. I wait again. Finally, she returns, and is still looking for the case. I give her the part number. This is better than last time, i think, when I spent $50 for their support people to ask me the service key five times ("j23k... what was that?..." "j23k45... what came after that?" "j23k7..." etc.) and refer me around in circles, for about 45 minutes to an hour, at the end of which they only told me what I already knew, or could have guessed, or wasn't true at all...

At the end of the day, I go straight home. I have brough my gym clothes, but I don't go, because, before I leave, I check my amazon.com orders on a hunch. Funny, i think, that none of them have arrived when there were four shipments and I ordered them last Friday. So I look, and it turns out that one of them has been delivered on Tuesday. Tuesday! It is now Thursday. I haven't seen it. I go straight home. One by one, I poll my housemates and the landlord who lives there too. She sends her cheeky daughter out to talk to me. She says they haven't seen it, and asks that I find out who signed for it. I explain that it was sent with delivery confirmation, not signature verification. No one has seen the package that was delivered two days before.

The halls are filled with smoke, I think cigarette smoke, while I am asking around. I have my painter's mask off, so that I can talk, and so I don't look like I'm from Mars, and I can't help but inhale it. I feel its stimulating effect. It enters my legs. Always my legs, I think. I feel like I want to go out and run around the block, I am so suddenly restless. Damn! It takes so little, now.

I remember how it was when I was first getting "smoked" like this. It was so painful. A prickly sensation would spread throughout my body, especially my legs. It felt like my capillaries were exploding. --- oh my, there is that black guy singing that song again. --- It felt like my capillaries were exploding. Then, as I got more acclimated (addicted), the feeling became less and less. Now, I don't feel it at all. At the gym, I used to experience it especially painfully. I could tell I'd been smoked, for example, by someone walking in from outside with smoke all over their clothes, without even smelling it. I think it is harder to smell it when you are breathing hard. Now, I don't feel it at all, and I can't tell if a funny smell is nicotine smoke or not.

J. sent the money I requested. No note, just a check. She had scribbled out her address so that it appears as two solid black lines. I knew her and worked with her for three years. I think we both know exactly what is going on. I am going to try and break out. She opposes it.

That night, I swat my bed some more. Hardly any smoke at all, this time. Just a couple of puffs come out of my top sheet and my comforter, each. I read some and go to sleep.

One of my dreams is that I am trapped in an abandoned house. I am holding my breath, trying to find a smoke-free room. They are all filled with smoke. I wake up, and my left arm is completely numb. It feels like one of those foam rubber severed forearms with a hand attached that you buy for Halloween. I change my position and brace myself for what usually is unbearable pain as the nerve cells wake up to their first supply of oxygen in who knows how long. Then I recall that the past several times I have done this, I haven't felt much pain at all. And this time, disappointing my expectation, I feel nothing other than the blood flowing into my arm, like water into a glass. Not even a tickle. So this is what it is like, I think, to be addicted to nicotine. My body is narcotized. My nerves toxified. Did they want me to take up smoking, now, or just keep me in a state where I can be easily medicated?

I get up and go to work the next morning. Accross from me, on the train, sits down a man in dark glasses. Is this the same man who was there last Tuesday? Last Tuesday, a man sitting bolt upright on the train, big shaded glasses. Rock star glasses. Looked like an idiot. I sat directly in front of him so I wouldn't have to see him. A man sits down behind me, coughing loudly all the way until he gets off, somewhere before Civic Center.

At work, still a strange smell from the heater. What is it? I still can't place it. Cedar?

After work, I see a film on Hoelderlin. I meet a film group there. They invite me out with them. We go to a cafe and sit outside. I smell cigarette smoke from one party, then another. My body is responding. I feel giddy and faint, jazzed like I'm on coffee. I don't want this. I don't want to feel this way. I can't help it.

I go to the pharmacy. I ask about the new anti-smoking medication that blocks nicotine receptors. The woman tells me to come back in a minute and ask for the pharmacist. A man is standing in front of the drugs, looking like he is not looking for anything. I can smell cigarette smoke on his jacket. As I walk past him, I look at him and ask, "got that?" He looks at me, and, like I've caught him at a childhood prank, he laughs.

I come back and talk to the pharmacist. I describe the drug to him and he says, "Oh!" and he laughs. He won't tell me what the drug is. He just says I have to have a prescription.