On Cigars, Sacraments, and Simple Pleasures

(This is a short excerpt from my forthcoming novel, That’s Me in the Corner, spoken in the voice of the book’s protagonist, Brody Graham.)

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“So Brody, what is it with you and all your little rituals?” Caleb asked. “You prepare your coffee and smoke your cigar like you’re a priest presiding over some kind of sacred rite.”

“I don’t know, really,” I answered. “I think it’s just that I tend to value seemingly insignificant things.”

“Like what, besides coffee and cigars?”

“Oh, like all kinds of things,” I said. “It’s just that the smallest little things are what give me the most pleasure. Like sitting in the sun with a beer and a book, or finding a cool new band that no one else knows about, or those wrought iron lanterns that stick out of the sides of European buildings—”

“You find pleasure in lanterns? That’s a new one.”

“Dude, I get more pleasure out of cool scenery and stuff like that than I would if you bought me a new car.”

“But you know you’re, like, totally weird, right? Give me the car any day.”

“Here’s the thing,” I began. “I think the more complex one’s pleasures are, the shallower the person is. For example, if you need a hundred-thousand dollar car to be happy with driving, there’s just something wrong with you.”

“But you always do this, Brody. You always put your bizarre value system on everybody else.”

“I’m not doing that at all,” I responded, even though I kind of was. “OK, let me put it this way: It is my subjective opinion that people who need elaborate pleasures are objectively shallow. There, better?”

“But you’re still saying they’re objectively shallow.”

“Yes. In my subjective opinion,” I replied, grinning. 

“But I guess my problem is that I don’t really have any simple pleasures I enjoy that I can invest with all that significance like you do,” Caleb admitted.

“That’s true, huh?” I said. “You’re a pretty deliberate guy.”

“Yeah, I guess. Most everything I do is for a reason.”

“That’s definitely where we differ,” I suggested. “I love doing things for their own sake, for no reason whatsoever. For example, I don’t drink coffee because it has some effect on me, which is why I can drink it at night and sleep fine. When I drink alcohol, I don’t do it to get drunk. I just do these things for their own sake, despite there being no tangible benefit. In fact, even though I can’t explain it, the pointlessness of much of what I do is precisely why I like doing it so much.”

Caleb laughed and rolled his eyes. “Brody, you are just living in your own little world, aren’t you?”

“That’s my goal,” I chuckled. “I mean, the alternative to living in my own world is living in the one someone else creates for me. Plus, I’d rather be a baptized pagan than a teetotaling Puritan any day.”

(About the whole smoking thing, I realize I probably come off sounding like a pretentious twat with all the sacramental talk. And to be honest, I do kind of hate that sort of thing. Like, if I ever go to a winetasting where people are all, “Ooh, what a buttery and aggressive vintage! I detect asphalt, liquorice, and tobacco over a confused bed of summer squash,” I’d want to say, “Hmm, I can taste notes of grape and a tinge of juice, both of which positively disarm me.”

It’s not about the superlative blend of the cigar or the nutty notes of the espresso, is what I’m saying. In fact, I probably couldn’t distinguish a Cuban from a Dominican or Vivace from Starbucks. It’s not about snobbishness or pretence, it’s about feeling human.

There’s just something powerful, to me anyway, about finding satisfaction in unmistakably earthy things, like a cigar hand-rolled from specially-grown leaves and water filtered through beans roasted and ground the same way they were in Ethiopia a thousand years ago. This appreciation for expertise and lore and ancient craft, which has been greatly heightened by living in Europe, is probably what makes me so dismissive of strip malls and suburbia and evangelicalism. It all just smacks of inauthenticity and farce, as though the faux brickwork on an Irish pub in Orange County can mask the fact that it’s sandwiched between a Jamba Juice and a Bed Bath and Beyond.)