For some time now, I have been playing chicken with cigarettes. Every now and then – maybe once a week, usually not even that often – I’ll smoke one or two, enjoy them, and then be done for awhile. It’s the only way to prove I’m not addicted, you see. If I never smoke, that’s giving them some kind of power over me. Like how living in fear is letting the terrorists win. That is my (Healthy? Sane? No.) rationalization. I’ve been lucky so far, in that I still have never felt the need for a cigarette. Mostly I enjoy having an apparent reason to be somewhere – I am outside because I am smoking, not merely hovering at the fringes of other people’s conversations like the big bundle of social retardedness that I am. Other times I just feel lamely self-destructive.

I was in more or less the later mood a couple of nights ago, as a friend was driving me home.

“Do you care if I smoke?” I asked, implying with my world-weary tone that this was a ledge she should talk me down from.

“Sure, whatever,” she said, “Just close the vents first.”

So I did, and I smoked, and pretended I was someone cooler, maybe someone in a band, who could transform this emotional rut into a stunning artistic breakthrough. And when the cigarette was spent, I tossed it out the window.

The wind tossed it back. It was not as dead as I’d thought, because from the backseat wafted what smelled like a bonfire with a couch in it. Quick thinking super-genius that I am, I unbuckled my seatbelt, lunged into the back of the car, and crushed the glowing ember out with my fingers, thereby burning the shit out of them. The seat of the car was, amazingly, unblemished. Not so for my hand. Blisters formed on the tips of my thumb and first two fingers, and I had to pop a couple of ibuprofen so that the pain would subside enough that I could fall asleep.

All I could think was that I deserved this. This was the universe punishing me for smoking, for wallowing and being self-absorbed, for not being able to get over things and move on with my life like everyone else in the world. For littering.

Earlier in the week, the world’s shyest evangelist had approached me.

“Do, um. Have you. Do you know . . . who Jesus is?” she mumbled, fidgeting with her stack of pamphlets.

“I think so,” I said. She glanced up at me from behind her hair, with something in her eyes like panic, but more sad – like a puppy tied to a tree by the side of the road as its owner drives away.

“Oh,” she said. “Uh. Good. Um, I mean that’s, he died for you and, um. Um.” She was wringing the pamphlets now, face red, voice quavering with barely restrained tears. Usually people trying to sell Jesus annoyed me, but by now I was kind of rooting for her.

“Did you want to give me one of those?” I asked. She blinked, and followed my gaze to the now mangled pamphlets clenched in her fists.

“Oh! Yeah!” She thrust one at me and I took it. “You should read that,” she said, and fled down the street.

In a fit of boredom, I had read it. Now, lying in bed, waiting for the ibuprofen to kick in, its contents came back to me with new relevance – Hell was a very real place, its fires smoldering at the tip of an errant cigarette butt. With that image in mind, I fell asleep.

Days have passed, my fingers have stopped hurting, and I no longer feel that the universe is shaking its metaphorical head at me in disappointment. If anything, I figure if there is a God, he let me evolve a brain for better reasons than contemplating all the ways in which I’m inadequate. At least, I hope so.