“Look at this! My invitation’s arrived,” Eleanor chirped, tearing open the stylish lavender envelope addressed in elegant script. She reads, “Mlle. Leslie Stoppard requests the honor of your presence and a companion of your choice at 8:00 pm the Eighteenth of November at her residence on Olde Poste Road, Fairfield, Connecticut on the occasion of celebrating 2014’s ‘Great American Smokeout’.”
Eleanor fled the great ball room of Stoppard Hall, parting the milling throng; jostling party goers as she escaped. That was, until she herself was brought up short by a familiar face.
He raised his gloved hand to hail her, “Eleanor, so glad I caught you!”
That first day of vacation at the beach and Rachel wears her promiscuously tight bikini in this intense sunlight. The solar glare favors her medium-length blond hair as it glints golden-accent-streaked in caramel brown.
Her skin: urban-pasty-white: she will use more sunscreen than the others. Rachel brought three bottles of tanning oil in the canvas gym bag which she flung on the sand just before snapping open the rented beach umbrella and spreading out her just-bought-for-this-day over-sized beach towel. Within her gym bag she stores her cigarettes, lighter and keys and she also packs a cooler loaded with ice and cold sodas so that into that first hour, when the heat of the sun and the drying of the beach breeze creates a thirst that demands a drink, Rachel can tear off the tab and slug down her first gulps on-demand. That’s followed by the overwhelming urge to accompany it with a cigarette.
“I carry twenty Class A BFF’s in my pack and each has its place in my routine. I could open the pack in the morning, pull ’em out and write labels on each; knowing that it would accurately schedule my day’s cigarette use,” Toni asserts, placing her slowly staining filter of this smoldering cigarette between her lips to punctuate her message with a glow-tipped pull.
This is a brief excerpt from the September–October 2010 issue of Smoke Signals magazine, and one of my first columns for the free/public version, "My First Decade at The Orgy":
Boardhost shut down my forum and multimedia archive near the end of March because they recently implemented a ban on smoking and fetish content. Way back in 2000 when I opened the first incarnation of "Sublime," I asked the then owner of Boardhost (who was pretty much a one man band at the time) if he had any problems with SF content. He told me flatly that he absolutely did not.
La petite mort is French for "the little death." The expression is most often used to describe the experience of having an orgasm, but is also used to describe the release of emotional energy (catharsis) that accompanies experiencing the climax of a creative expression, as well as the experience of going through a shocking life-changing event.
