Learning to Smoke

[The Jays]

http://www.esquire.com/print-this/features/learning-to-smoke-0308

This guy, 46 years old, decides to take up smoking for 31 days, to see what it's all about.

I have been smoking for almost 10 years, and I basically quit for the New Year, I've had I believe 2 since, but, everything this guy discovers, it hits right into me. Specifically, the concept that smoking is sort of a club. When I was in school for architecture, the most memorable times, most cherished, is the smoke break, because we had so many great conversations, so many smart students and even teachers smoked, and I struck up so many friendships over smoking, it's the icebreaker into so many thoughts that people have about the world. And, it's almost a blessing in disguise for smokers when they passed laws forcing smokers outside or into special smoking areas, you end up bonding with total strangers over this silly horrible fun addiction. Yes, it will kill you, yes, they are cancer sticks, and all these surgeon general warning's are jokes thrown about as we all kill ourselves with cigarettes, but, god damn, a smoker will always tell you how much fun it is to smoke.

I loved this article. It's long, but worth the read.

[ToddEVF]

dammit, now i need a smoke. what a thread

[SatCam]

good read :smoke:

[KC2OSO]

Yeah, good read. Thanks. Gotta love Esquire for that. Well written too. Good writing reads easy.

Meantime, this guy is fucking with disaster. A month is way more time than you need to get hooked. He went at it balls out though I guess. I hope he was able to quit. I got hooked real early since my dad smoked.

I smoke about three to five a day. I like/hate the habit for all of the reasons cited in the article. It's a daring, sexy habit as advertisers would have you believe.

Dad smoked Multifilters:
http://www.cigars-and-cigarettes.com/images/Multifilter-King.jpg
He truly was daring and sexy.
They were always around. His mom smoked them too. I guess PM still makes them. He died of a plain old heart attack. It was his choice to smoke tho. Everyone dies.

It's a good thing that things are changing with smoking. I like that you can't smoke in bars/restaurants/work. Hell, at my first job, there were burn marks on the desk and I can still remember people smoking at their desks at work. That's unreal now.

[Mike Teacher]

Morgan Spurlock v2.0

[The Jays]

I remember people smoking in banks and in malls, in Kmart when I was a kid, simply because I remember the look of a cigarette butt flattened on the floors. I don't even remember when it all stopped, I just remember that the mall started smelling less of cigarettes and more like Yankee Candle. And one of the fondest smells I have of my youth was at my aunt's after dinner, the smell of coffee brewing and cigarettes being smoked. There was only two places where people never smoked, school and church.

[conman823]

A smoker uses cigarettes at particular times during the day to produce dopamine as a means of self-medicating."


Great line, and its soooo true.

[AF Mike]

Great link. I’m 3 months into my latest quitting attempt and this guys essay rang truer than anything I’ve ever read about smoking.

“I missed the weight of a full pack and the airy tension of an empty one.
I missed my new chums, street-bound and unrepentant.
Most of all, I missed the propulsion a cigarette lent me,
the daylong momentum of one cigarette to the next. You sail by them,
like polestars. I missed that. Still do.”

Brilliant. TheJays thanks, and keep at it. I’m not sure it gets easier but at some point quitting has to suck less.