The Intermediate Class blogrant is still on the way, still pending to-be-appended new course material. Thank you for your patience. In the meantime, this one has been committed as an interim measure in case anyone might find it useful.
Like Mark Twain, who said it much better, some of us know it's easy to stop smoking because we've done it a bazillion times.
Our cold turkey spoiled before we even had time to make a sandwich, the hypnotists and acupuncturists threw their aprons over their heads and their hands in the air, admitted defeat and ran screaming from the building. Our nicotine replacements didn't have the capacity to replace 90 odd percent of the stuff we needed replaced, and didn't even do a good job of replacing the nicotine, and the pills that were supposed to magically cause us to cease wanting to smoke, or at least ceasing to want it as much, either did nothing or turned us into werePanthers from Hotshot.
There's no shortage of theories about why those things don't work for us, but if we give it a quick shave with Occam's razor, what we'll probably see tattooed on the underlying skin is that no matter how much we might hate inhaling toxic fumes and carcinogenic flecks, we like smoking and we don't want to quit.
Until very recently, that was variously considered an oxymoron, an existential impossibility, or proof that we were evil sociopaths who spit on rainbows and want to hurt puppies.
Our "choices" consisted of serial acts of ineffective self-torment in a never-ending battle to "quit," continue to inhale the fumes and flecks till they slapped an oxygen mask and a DNR order on us, or repair to a far-flung valley time forgot and grow, dry and cure our own subsistence tobacco plants just like people did in ancient times - and live in a stick and leaf house without lights just like people did in ancient times. No trashy reality shows or running water for us!
Now, we have a real choice. We can upgrade to e-cigarettes!
e-cigarettes aren't magic. They can't do it for us, like those cron computers run jobs for people. They do, however, give us a choice and a fighting chance to phase out tobacco cigarettes. If we're willing to do the work, yesterday's impossible dream is today's attainable - and sustainable - goal.
They're not for everybody. Some people have belief-based objections to e-cigarettes. "It's an easy way out," is one that never fails to make me smile.
As if that would be a bad thing!
Though it's unlikely that people who believe, as a matter of principle, that quitting should be hard and unpleasant would appreciate the irony, changing to e-cigarettes isn't at variance with that belief at all - because as much as I like to joke about it, e-cigarettes are so not an "easy way out."
An upgrade requires just as much commitment, just as much determination, as a "quit." (Even though "upgrade" has always been a noun, and didn't have to be named an honorary one for specific doctrinal purposes, like an Acting Master of The Bedspread in a tiny kingdom during an epidemic of mumps).
Like my cherished dream of a lighter-than-air electric hookah-doodle made of Genuine Styrofoam, the discovery of a bona fide "easy way out" can be located in the Future section of your local time-space continuum.
For us, e-cigarettes are a way out. It brings the grand total of our realistic choices up to one (1) and while it won't provide the same levels of misery and suffering as those other methods, it does require us to do some work, and though the technology is still very new, initial figures indicate that "work" is also something e-cigarettes do, which, as we know, those other methods don't.
