My freshman English professor blew out a huge cloud of blue smoke and said, "I won't say anything if you elect to smoke in my class, but keep in mind that it is not, strictly speaking, allowed, and some self-righteous ..... may elect to report you." His tobacco was allegedly cherry scented, but it bore little if any resemblance to the smell of cherries. It' didn't smell like tobacco, or anything else for that matter. I think they just picked "cherry" at random, because the cough syrup guys got away with it.
When he wasn't smoking his pipe, the room smelled like a great vat of .......s and pencil shavings. I had come to think of this as the smell of adult academia. I was already smoking myself, and had been for quite some time. The year before, the school had banned smoking in the hallways, and now the Calvinists had invaded the classrooms; the faculty was furious. By my junior year, smoking was relegated to a designated area out by the AV department building. I hung out there with the other AV geeks and senior faculty where I smoked at least two of my customary five daily packs, even though I was not, strictly speaking, enrolled. The most helpful part of my secondary ecucation came from these gatherings. You may think this is a sad commentary on my education, but my time at Amarillo College was not, strictly speaking, wasted because I did manage to pick up a few handy phrases from Mr Hueber, my English professor.
Back to my rant. When I tell young people how the world used to be run by smokers, they simply cannot believe it. (I think being able to tell young people .... they simply cannot believe is one of the few real pleasures of getting old.) It's true though. Smokers were in the majority and non-smokers didn't say squat about it. My dad used to smoke in restaurants after meals. He would walk in smoking, light up another after he ordered, and sometimes, take a break for a mid-meal smoke. I don't remember ever seeing him not smoke except for in church. We were Baptists, and Baptists didn't smoke in Church.
I remember going to an indoor movie theater and my eyes burning from all the smoke. I told my dad about it and he assured me that I would outgrow it. What he meant was that I would start smoking myself and that going an hour and fifty minutes without a cigarette would be so uncomfortable that I'd just tell my eyes to shut the hell up. My mom said the only people who didn't smoke were either too sick or too poor to afford cigarettes. By age 17, my eyes had been put in their place. They still watered and burned, but they knew better than to say anything about it.
We had a leper in the family. Severe asthma had earned my little-sister a place on the too-sick bench in the extremely small non-smokers wing of our family asylum. I felt sorry for her because of all the wheezing, and not breathing, and all the midnight trips to the emergency room, so I would always try to hold my smoke in if she was in the room. If I just could not manage that, I would be careful to blow my smoke to either side of her face as opposed to directly into it like the rest of the family did.
My mom drove a truck for a tobacco wholesaler, and a surprising number of cases (twenty cartons each) managed to fall off the truck and wind up in our freezer. The freezer was one of those huge console affairs and about half of it was kept stocked with a vast assortment of fresh Marlboros. Until the mid eighties, I really thought of cigarettes as food, and it seemed like most everybody else did too.
I think smoking was almost universal for a hundred years between the time Bonsack invented the cigarette rolling machine in 1880 to sometime in the in the early 1980's. The current status is the result of a relatively short war. The anti-smoking crusade had started in the mid-seventies, and was pretty much over by the turn of the century. It seems like around that point, we hit the "hundredth monkey" and now nobody argues for smoking. Lot's of people still do it, but I give it another fifty years before it's universally viewed as a completely insane thing to do if you can still get them.
The first time I tried to put my "can quit anytime I want" theory to the test, I was shocked. I didn't make it a week! I promptly made a vow to never try that again. It was a vow I could not keep, because I started finding myself in the "too sick" category my mom had told me about. Even then, I would return to smoking when my health improved. I smoked pipes (not cherry flavor, blech!) cigarettes, and cigars. I dipped snuff, chewed chewing tobacco, and wore patches and chewed nicotine gum even when I wasn't trying to quit. I'm like the Will Rogers of Nicotine; I never met a nicotine delivery method I didn't like.
I never actually quit nicotine, I just discovered electronic cigarettes and they work for me. I actually like it more than I ever liked combustible tobacco. It's cheaper, more satisfying, doesn't stink ,there's no .... ends, and I have yet to set myself on fire with an e-cig. I don't use the wimpy ones that look like cigarettes. I have these huge over-amped contraptions that look like science-fiction movie props, and I mix my own juice so it costs me about the price of one modern pack per month. The second-hand vapor is about as dangerous as a tea-kettle, and doesn't even test for trace nicotine, which brings me to my point.
I just learned that the people I called *Calvinist earlier (sorry, that's an insult to Calvinists) are at it again. They are trying to ban e-gigs because they don't like the way it looks or something. My theory is that they are worried about being outmoded. Think about it. These are the same shock-troops that have been successfully waging the war on cigarettes for the past fifty years, and now they are virtually unemployed. They have worked hard to develop a set of highly specialized skills in the areas of manipulation and social influence and now, having largely won the war, they are at idle and their skills are unneeded. Like Warren Zevon's Headless Thompson Gunner, they fight on in spite of facts, reason, and common sense.
Don't get me wrong. If you are an anti-smoking crusader, I personally owe you a huge debt of gratitude and I want to offer a sincere apology for each and every time I mocked and ridiculed your efforts. But the war is over, and if you come after my e-cig, I promise you I will poke my thumb so deep in your eye that it will kill you and then I will leave your carcase in a dry South-Texas river bed where the buzzards will make it impossible for anyone to ever find you. Ever.
Love,
A. Jackson
*I actually AM a Calvinist in so far as that means accepting the teaching of the French theologian. I'm just using the term "Calvinist" here in its modern derogatory sense of "busy-body Puritan self-righteous buzz-kills," or like "narcissistic self-appointed control-freak saviors of the universe," because I don't want to over-use those terms.
When he wasn't smoking his pipe, the room smelled like a great vat of .......s and pencil shavings. I had come to think of this as the smell of adult academia. I was already smoking myself, and had been for quite some time. The year before, the school had banned smoking in the hallways, and now the Calvinists had invaded the classrooms; the faculty was furious. By my junior year, smoking was relegated to a designated area out by the AV department building. I hung out there with the other AV geeks and senior faculty where I smoked at least two of my customary five daily packs, even though I was not, strictly speaking, enrolled. The most helpful part of my secondary ecucation came from these gatherings. You may think this is a sad commentary on my education, but my time at Amarillo College was not, strictly speaking, wasted because I did manage to pick up a few handy phrases from Mr Hueber, my English professor.
Back to my rant. When I tell young people how the world used to be run by smokers, they simply cannot believe it. (I think being able to tell young people .... they simply cannot believe is one of the few real pleasures of getting old.) It's true though. Smokers were in the majority and non-smokers didn't say squat about it. My dad used to smoke in restaurants after meals. He would walk in smoking, light up another after he ordered, and sometimes, take a break for a mid-meal smoke. I don't remember ever seeing him not smoke except for in church. We were Baptists, and Baptists didn't smoke in Church.
I remember going to an indoor movie theater and my eyes burning from all the smoke. I told my dad about it and he assured me that I would outgrow it. What he meant was that I would start smoking myself and that going an hour and fifty minutes without a cigarette would be so uncomfortable that I'd just tell my eyes to shut the hell up. My mom said the only people who didn't smoke were either too sick or too poor to afford cigarettes. By age 17, my eyes had been put in their place. They still watered and burned, but they knew better than to say anything about it.
We had a leper in the family. Severe asthma had earned my little-sister a place on the too-sick bench in the extremely small non-smokers wing of our family asylum. I felt sorry for her because of all the wheezing, and not breathing, and all the midnight trips to the emergency room, so I would always try to hold my smoke in if she was in the room. If I just could not manage that, I would be careful to blow my smoke to either side of her face as opposed to directly into it like the rest of the family did.
My mom drove a truck for a tobacco wholesaler, and a surprising number of cases (twenty cartons each) managed to fall off the truck and wind up in our freezer. The freezer was one of those huge console affairs and about half of it was kept stocked with a vast assortment of fresh Marlboros. Until the mid eighties, I really thought of cigarettes as food, and it seemed like most everybody else did too.
I think smoking was almost universal for a hundred years between the time Bonsack invented the cigarette rolling machine in 1880 to sometime in the in the early 1980's. The current status is the result of a relatively short war. The anti-smoking crusade had started in the mid-seventies, and was pretty much over by the turn of the century. It seems like around that point, we hit the "hundredth monkey" and now nobody argues for smoking. Lot's of people still do it, but I give it another fifty years before it's universally viewed as a completely insane thing to do if you can still get them.
The first time I tried to put my "can quit anytime I want" theory to the test, I was shocked. I didn't make it a week! I promptly made a vow to never try that again. It was a vow I could not keep, because I started finding myself in the "too sick" category my mom had told me about. Even then, I would return to smoking when my health improved. I smoked pipes (not cherry flavor, blech!) cigarettes, and cigars. I dipped snuff, chewed chewing tobacco, and wore patches and chewed nicotine gum even when I wasn't trying to quit. I'm like the Will Rogers of Nicotine; I never met a nicotine delivery method I didn't like.
I never actually quit nicotine, I just discovered electronic cigarettes and they work for me. I actually like it more than I ever liked combustible tobacco. It's cheaper, more satisfying, doesn't stink ,there's no .... ends, and I have yet to set myself on fire with an e-cig. I don't use the wimpy ones that look like cigarettes. I have these huge over-amped contraptions that look like science-fiction movie props, and I mix my own juice so it costs me about the price of one modern pack per month. The second-hand vapor is about as dangerous as a tea-kettle, and doesn't even test for trace nicotine, which brings me to my point.
I just learned that the people I called *Calvinist earlier (sorry, that's an insult to Calvinists) are at it again. They are trying to ban e-gigs because they don't like the way it looks or something. My theory is that they are worried about being outmoded. Think about it. These are the same shock-troops that have been successfully waging the war on cigarettes for the past fifty years, and now they are virtually unemployed. They have worked hard to develop a set of highly specialized skills in the areas of manipulation and social influence and now, having largely won the war, they are at idle and their skills are unneeded. Like Warren Zevon's Headless Thompson Gunner, they fight on in spite of facts, reason, and common sense.
Don't get me wrong. If you are an anti-smoking crusader, I personally owe you a huge debt of gratitude and I want to offer a sincere apology for each and every time I mocked and ridiculed your efforts. But the war is over, and if you come after my e-cig, I promise you I will poke my thumb so deep in your eye that it will kill you and then I will leave your carcase in a dry South-Texas river bed where the buzzards will make it impossible for anyone to ever find you. Ever.
Love,
A. Jackson
*I actually AM a Calvinist in so far as that means accepting the teaching of the French theologian. I'm just using the term "Calvinist" here in its modern derogatory sense of "busy-body Puritan self-righteous buzz-kills," or like "narcissistic self-appointed control-freak saviors of the universe," because I don't want to over-use those terms.
