I shocked my daughter and my wife at dinner the other night when I announced that, at the age of sixty, I was thinking of taking up smoking cigarettes. Carbon-green and healthy to the core, they looked at me like I was nuts.
“I dunno,” I said, “people have been smoking tobacco for hundreds, probably thousands of years. Every society that encounters it seems to love it… they can’t get enough of it. It always becomes spiritual, almost transcendental.”
They didn’t say a word.
“Plus,” I continued, “it takes years of smoking to kill you – the better portion of a lifetime. If smoking ever kills me it will be masked in all of the other things that kill me too.”
“But Dad…!”
And out poured the usual litany of anti-smoking philosophy: wheezing, yellow finger nails, bad breath, smoker’s cough, expense, oily residue, cigarette butts, lung cancer, etc. All of the bad stuff… none of the good stuff.
Now I’ve never smoked an entire tobacco cigarette in my life. In fact, if you don’t consider second-hand smoke, no more than a puff or two from two different cigarettes has ever entered my lungs. My parents never smoked, my high school buddies never smoked and, until now, I’ve never had the desire or inclination.
This is not to say that my lungs are virgins when it comes to sticky blue-grey smoke. Cigarettes aren’t the only things that sixty year-olds inhale, and I’ve smoked enough other things to float a fleet of dirigibles. And therein lies the magic because there is magic in other smoke and a long history of human magic in tobacco as well.
Hell, at sixty years of age, I figure I have a good twenty years of tar and nicotine before it ever catches up with me. By then I’ll be eighty years old and if I’m not dead by then, I probably should be.
This is like a freebie.
I’m still weighing my options.
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jmac1949
Lisa Scroggins
jlsathre
toritto
Deborah Young
I am Stretch
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Comments
Manufacturer's treat tobacco to make it more addictive. It's delicious, these cigarettes. They are so addictive, there are people even with lung related disease who will puff on a cigarette while lugging around a portable oxygen tank.
You must know about the "nicotine delivery system" cigarettes are. It all came out in congressional hearings and then on "60 Minutes" and then in the movie, "The Insider". How tobacco remains in business is a mystery, but they do. And they continue to deliver their ramped up product.
He was such a stupid get"
Cigarette companies are evil
they profit from pain
every breath they take away
is a dollar gained