Later that Sunday…

Who is this crazy smoking insomniac that I’ve become in the past few days?

Cigarettellos = bittersweet chocolate, even after Cocoa Puffs.

A cigarette is a PROP! for chrissakes. Smoking is a RITUAL.

Now for dessert: gingerbread, a.k.a. Dark Classics.

I think I am freaking the cats out—not to mention Greg.

Besides it being a children’s book, why does no one in Harry Potter smoke?

Being a complete novice, I had to be tutored in the art of smoking, starting with how to light the thing. I also had to be schooled in smoking an unfiltered cigarette—avoid moisture, lest you a mouthful of tobacco, and hold your lips like this (demo of lipless pucker). I still can’t flick the ash off properly. I look like I’m beating a drum with one stick.

Sunday night’s poison: 2 Cigarettellos, 1 Dark Classics, 1 Sampoerna X-tra.

Maybe the Promethian thing has some merit? I do love the crackle of the cloves.

Addiction in the Making?

Oddly enough, I find myself wanting to smoke. I kind of feel like smoking without inhaling is akin to wine-tasting. It also gives me the opportunity to write—and something to write about. And the weather is perfect for smoking: it’s overcast, gloomy, threatening rain, and best of all, windy as hell. I’ve got great cross-ventilation—all the smoke goes right out the window.

Then there’s the appeal of, for once in my life, being a lemming.

And what pretty, wispy patterns the smoke makes as it rushes through the window screen. With every new cigarette, it becomes less nasty. Is this addiction in the making? I’m down to two poisons of choice: Nat Sherman’s Queen Size Cigarettellos and Sampoerna Dark Classics. Both are rolled in brown paper, and I wonder if this has more to do with my choice than any other factor. True, the Cigarettellos taste like dark chocolate and the Dark Classics like spicy coffee or strong chai. And the Cigarettellos have the added appeal of smelling like real cigarettes, thus irritating Greg as much as his smoking irritates me.

After two Cigarettellos, my mouth feels somewhat anesticized. Smoking is a distraction. I already feel calmer than I have at any time in the past 24 hours (all of which were spent wide awake). And, it’s like eating chocolate minus the calories. Part of what makes me want to smoke them is their nifty, fancy packaging. (Note to cigarette manufacturers: your marketing is working remarkably well.)

What is this magic spell that cigarette design and packaging have put on me? I’m a college-educated, marketing-savvy, 32-year-old antismoker! I even want one of those groovy, long ’60’s cigarette holders now.

Today’s smoke: 2 Cigarettellos with a Dark Classics chaser.

And who would have known that the best protection from smokers was smoking?

My New Hero: Fernando Pessoa

From The Book of Disquiet:

All literature is an attempt to make life real. As all of us know, life is absolutely unreal in its directly real form; the country, the city and all of our ideas are all absolutely fictitious things, the offspring of our complex sensation of our own selves. Impressions are incommunicable unless we make them literary.
–Fernando Pessoa

Smoking as Meditation

I’ve always wondered why it is that, while nicotine is a stimulant, smokers are always wanting a cigarette when stressed out, to calm them down. I think I may get it now. Right now I’m upset about something pointless. I’m trying to go to sleep, but can’t because I can’t get this crap out of my mind, and suddenly I realize that I want to smoke.

I’m not craving a cigarette, but rather the meditative experience that I have discovered smoking to be. It’s just enough activity to require attention, but not enough to require real thought, hence the perfect meditative experience. It clears the mind of worries, bringing you back to the here and now. The past fades away behind a cloud of smoke. The future is not important. Perspective is achieved.

Cigarettes as Food

Maybe I’m on to something with this food connection. Last night I smoked five cigarettes after Greg went to bed as I was making the Lucky Strike book, and it seemed to me like the cigarettes were a calorie-less replacement for my usual non-stop drinking (of very sweet tea or orange juice or coke). I realized this towards the end of the last cigarette, when I kept dragging off of it and was actually thinking about lighting another, a desire which left me as soon as I had finished the book. It was really quite weird.

Smoking as Texture

I found myself becoming so fascinated with all these new smells and textures and tastes that I actually wanted to smoke. I love nifty things, and it seems that cigarettes are all about image and making the completely unnecessary desirable. I admit, I’m hooked, addicted—hooked on the novelty, addicted to the illusion.

But as soon as I light up, the reality of so nasty a habit slams me full in the face as the acrid smoke envelopes my head. The mystique stinks. Once the novelty wears off, once you find “your” brand, why continue? Do you even still taste it when there is no foil to offset the taste? Doesn’t it get boring?

Branding is about image. Brands that I don’t mind being associated with me are few and far between, Apple™ being one. What is it about smoking that makes people, especially young adults, want to do it in spite of its nastiness? Is it a branding issue?

To me, smoking is a lot like thinking you’re about to eat candy, but when you put it in your mouth, it turns to ashes. My smoker boyfriend gagged on most of the cigarettes that I tried. Even he has realized that he is not really a smoker.

Smoking Experiment #2

Sampoerna X-tra

This is the one that smells like gingerbread—makes you want to eat it. Snap, crackle, pop when you drag. Leaves a sweet taste on the lips. None of the stinging that the 555 left in the mouth. Tastes almost, but not quite, pleasant. The smoke has a slightly perfumed smell, which makes the experience somewhat less obnoxious. (But, again, why? This cigarette is certainly the lesser of many evils, but why smoke in the first place? The big question seems to be, still, why start smoking, why continue?) Bluish smoke as opposed to grey of the 555. Taste becoming not unpleasant…. Seems to be lasting longer than the 555—have actually been smoking, not just holding, and there’s about half left.

I think that maybe the taste of the smoke (the smoker’s experience) is actually much milder and more pleasant/less obnoxious than the smell of it (everyone else’s experience). In fact, I think non-smokers inhale much more smoke than do the smokers themselves.

Afterthoughts

Taste of cloves + tobacco is left in the mouth. The tobacco of the clove cigarette doesn’t seem to be as high in quality as that of the 555, but probably equal to or better than most regular cigarettes. Smell lingers in the nose and mouth—drowns out all other smells. (Note: Ashtrays are good depository for pencil shavings.)

Smoking Experiment #1

555 International

Is smoking part of the texture of life? Is it one of those things we do to make ourselves feel real, feel alive? An assault on the senses to make sure we’re not dead? Fiery, pungent smell, god-awful taste—not to mention annoying/assaulting the senses of everyone around you. It’s not really so bad if you don’t actually smoke it—just hold it for show—especially if you’re surrounded by smokers anyway. The more expensive the cigarette, the less obnoxious the smell. Burns/stings the tongue upon “drag” into the mouth, but certainly does choke you if you accidentally inhale even a little bit. The 555 seems to smoke itself. I lit one up as I started writing this, and it has nearly expired. I’ve taken only 4 or so drags off of it and now I need to put it out because it has almost reached the filter. 555 kind of tastes like espresso-roast coffee (black, with no sugar, of course)—very bitter, but smooth. Nasty taste in mouth afterwards.

555 Afterthoughts

And the odd thing is, having the cigarette in hand does somehow help the writing process—either by helping focus (by providing one distraction to block out others) or by providing a sense of immediacy (which the burning, the consumption of the tobacco and paper accomplishes somehow). But, why do it? Why smoke, if you don’t inhale? It seems pointless, other than creating a visual vignette in which you are the Bogart-like star.

Preliminary Notes on Smoking

Strange little paper tubes (particularly odd are the black ones) filled with aromatic leaves that, while unlit, smell so wonderful, but when lit, produce a noxious stink and stinging greyish smoke.

One is gingerbread, another spicy chai, the next like the finest pile of fallen leaves you ever jumped into.

Smokers are apparently quite cultish, with their secret lives and shared rituals. They romanticize the nastiest of habits and inject mystery into the quotidian.

Beautiful boxes made of card-stock paper symbolize the art of smoking (or is it the art of being a Smoker?). All about the image, not the content. Lovely packets with which the smoker identifies because smoking is part of their own identity, crushed and left behind on tables and in trash bins. Yummy on the outside, but bitter and acrid once you get close enough to taste.

Mmmmm…they smell so good, so yummy. I want to smoke them. I want that smell to translate into taste in my mouth. I want to be enveloped in the smell of autumn leaves and buy into the mystque of writers and coffee shops and English gentlemen having highballs and heady conversation and Bogart and Bacall, but the reality of smoking kills the romance. The stench and the acrid smoke getting into my eyes extinguish my misguided desire…(morbid facination with the picturesque).

I love coffee. I love tea. I love brown leaves that smell wonderful and stain the lips (and teeth for that matter), so why does the great cash crop of the South repel me?

Just like alcohol, tobacco has to be laced with goodies to make something so fundamentally nasty palatable. There are even perfumed cigarettes–cigarettes that are “flavored” with mint, menthol, and spices like cloves–analagous to the candied liqueurs such as amaretto and vermouth.

So much of smoking is posing. I have been watching my boyfriend smoke for over a year now, the reach, the positioning at the lips, the drag, the pause, the exhalation.

Then there is the issue of the “faux” smokers….

Smoking is something you have to practice doing in private before making a debut performance in front of others–this is not true of, for instance, drinking a latte for the first time–you may have trouble ordering, but downing its frothy goodness comes completely naturally.

As one allergic to tobacco smoke, I would have to be willing to live my life with a hacking cough (like my older sister) and a persistent sore throat.