Coffee and Cigarettes

I don't know where my romantic view of coffee and cigarettes have developed but I do have a deep-seeded love of the idea. I must profess that I am not a huge smoker or coffee drinker. I think I love the idea of them both for what they symbolize. Their symbolism is iconic for many reasons, one being intimate conversation about the deepest secrets of life. I think it possesses that romantic luster also as well because I think of every drug-addicted rock star after a ten day bender will shakily sit down while they're recovering with a cigarette in hand with a pair of shades on as they stare blankly into the Los Angeles skyline. Always with this view they have coffee sitting in front of them as this is their magical way, their elixir to fixing years worth of self-abuse with drugs. I think of a Nikki Sixx in 1987 in his Hollywood Hills mansion, smoking a cigarette and sipping Joe. I also think of artists with a cigarette in hand, paint all over their person in a mad art frenzy creating million dollar pieces in their New York lofts. And lastly, when I think of coffee and cigarettes I think of some young intellectual type, sitting in a cafe in Paris or some city, reading Dostoyevsky for hours on end with endless coffee refills and packs of smokes because they will sit there reading all 900 pages. I am sure all these images were acquired in my head because of endless hours of film.

As I said I have never been a huge smoker, but always have a pack of smokes in my car, because I know my friends will always smoke em' and that give me about one out of a pack to smoke a halfseys. It was always a tradition when I was working one of my terrible jobs to get a coffee-ish drink and a pack of smokes to smoke together, just always made my two weeks of work seem worthwhile. These days as I said I don't smoke and I know the repercussions of smoking but will always have that romantic view in my head of the two together.

Jeannine