Watching the Fire as We Grow Old

Across the street is a man picking garbage out of a trash can. After looking for nothing in particular, he is now stomping on something.
The weather here is gray, as is the mood. Elliott Smith is playing and I'm watching the end of my summer vacation drive by too fast, or blow its nose in the back of the coffee shop, or pick garbage out of a can. I am at work, which means I am sending e-mails that don't particularly need to be sent, reading a book between customers, and constantly planning for the rest of the night which will, with great consistency, turn out to be mediocre.
But everything's okay. School starts on Monday and I finally have a desk. When the weather gets bad, I won't have a car (if someone will buy it). Seeing my girlfriend will be difficult but not impossible. Maybe I'll be forced to get straight A's? Maybe.
Just give me a motorcycle and a guitar and a pen and paper and a pack of cigarettes and some bourbon. I don't think I'd need much else. I won't need an audience and I won't need any food. My cash wouldn't have nowhere to go and I'd quit my job first chance I got. I'd take a little less and I'd make it into some more.
My mother told me that people get sad when they turn 18, and that their sadness only gets worse until their fifties or sixties, when they're happy again... or dead. I think it's a fear of death, or of how to make ends meet until the end. I'm not afraid of death. Every movie and every album and every life is a different length. Some end before they should. Some sequels and some kids should never have been made. I won't anticipate the end if the rest of the movie is good, but I'll know it shouldn't go on forever. I'm just worried that my story won't develop the right characters, or that meaningful scenes will be cut short. And I don't want my song to have too many choruses, either. Summer is usually the chorus, but this summer was the bridge. Maybe tomorrow night can be a brief chorus before the verse of school kicks in. Maybe cigarettes as a theme is simply a narrative tool that illustrates how easily I can be defeated, or how well I can do when I apply myself. Maybe it's trying to show that my natural inclination is toward smelling bad. Or maybe it's because, when I smoke, I isolate myself from close relationships while indulging myself in good times