It's afternoon and I’m standing outside in a towel. I’m smoking a menthol cigarette, or rather the ****, one of four collected from the ash tray on the brick ledge sitting in the window by my screen door. I’m surrounded by dead plants, it was too cold in the storage room for them to make it, no heat goes there. The thing about dead plants, you can never tell if they’re truly dead. There might be a spark of life hidden somewhere. Sure the leaves yellow, become brittle, while others maintain a shade of green. I’m smoking this menthol down to the filter, my skin has the watery remains of a two hour bath beading in the late winter air. It's St. Patrick’s day, and the town will be filled with drunks, I aspire to be one of them. Yet my face is dead, I don’t know how to wink. The bar tender gave me a cigarette last night, in appreciation, I blew her a kiss, our eyes met, and in both of our faces, dead plants. I watched a gaggle of muscle bound monkeys in tight shirts pounding the hardwood of the bar, hollering in tones only achieved by men watching sports together. Not the birth of a boy, not the heat of ******, can match the sound of men reveling in someone else’s athletic accomplishment. I used to sit on the bench of my middle school basketball team, we only ever lost one game, it was a catholic school hit job, the referees in the hometown pocket, it was probably the first mugging I ever witnessed in real time. If you’re enthusiastic enough, people will keep you around, the key is to never let on that you’re faking it. That’s the art of social life, that veneer that only the true actor can achieve, being so deep in character, that you believe it as your self. This smile, take it or leave it, but if you walk around smiling long enough, people will wonder what’s wrong with you. I’m smiling, I enjoy absurdity, feigned or otherwise, just yell in my face a little less, or start throwing glass and make a real horror show of it.