Strange day. Tired too. Roj, who is so manic in his preparations for taking over Los Angeles that he is always begging off of having a drink with me sent me a long e-mail. With his characteristically questionable judgment, he praised the looks of the current Lobster Land, the one I’m trying to remodel with a bulldozer. Plus, he said he’s been reading my blog, which is a shocker. My web site doesn’t get visitors, who the hell is reading my blog?
Okay, I know Mitch does, because she replied to a post, and I think my wife checks on what I’ve been up to from time to time by reading it. But really, I write this shit with the assumption that no one is reading it. It probably aids in me being candid.
So I arrive at the office late, which isn’t a big deal right now. We’re slow as hell and people are encouraged to work undertime. A job I’d done had, on first appearance, blown up like a loaded cigarette. Turns out the die cutter just needed to turn the stack of paper over, but there was that period of worry/panic that I’d really fucked the dog.
After my exoneration, I asked my boss for a cigarette. I’ve been off them for a decade, and my boss is a non-smoker, so the request was made in jest.
“Do you really want one?” he asked me.
Okay, yeah, I did. Not to relieve stress or anything, but it’s been so long, I’ve been intensely curious for weeks now. Being a heart attack survivor, I have an even better than usual reason to stay the hell away from them. Which is why I wouldn’t buy a pack, or more in character for me, a roller and papers and loose tobacco. Time was, I could get good Turkish tobacco cut for rolling bulk at Cigar & Tobac. The best flavor, as well as a good nicotine hit.
But I knew if I bought a pack, it would be psychologically difficult to throw away 19 cigarettes after I’d settled the curiosity. And if I had a bag of high grade Turkish (the Yenidje I loved best, the makings of Balkan Sobranies, is apparently no longer available in the states), flushing or trashing the remainder of that bag would seem a gross waste.
So it’d be a slippery slope. Maybe it would take me a month to use up that pack, but there’d be another, and another, and it wouldn’t be long before I once again structured my life around cancerettes.
But my boss, he’s a freak for the unusual. Need some pickled ginger only available through some Tibetan coop? He’s your man. If you’ve got a hankering for some wasabi-seasoned soy nuts, look on his desk. But like I say, a non-smoker, so imagine my surprise when he pulls a square box of Indian cigarettes from his desk drawer. Red-dot Indian, not Iron Eyes Cody Indian.
100% organic tobacco wrapped in an ebony leaf, tied at the skinny end with string. I smoked pretty much any tobacco that didn’t have a filter before I quit, and this guy pulls the one cigarette unlike anything I’ve ever seen.
Yeah, I smoked it, sort of.
I’m hairy, growing my hair to donate to ‘Locks of Love,’ and I also have an extravagant beard. It was windy out, and these days apparently, all smoking occurs outdoors. When I smoked, I smoked everywhere, but times have changed.
That ebony leaf, it burned for shit. I couldn’t shelter a match well enough to light the thing, so I lit it off the cherry of a coworker’s cigarette. It was the only way to light it at all without pulling a Michael Jackson Pepsi Commercial.
And it went out after a couple of puffs, so I had to relight it. Twice. And even then, I smoked maybe half of the thing.
I remember when I quit, one of the hardest things to get over was missing the sensation of smoke entering my lungs. It’s no longer a pleasurable thing, it feels like a violation.
The smell and flavor, I’d say those India folks are buying some Turkish tobacco, but then maybe any tobacco would smell and taste sweet and strong with my taste buds and nasal passages innocent of their former coating of tar. The head rush, well, those neuro-receptors are still there, and they like the nicotine. And when you’re smoking out of curiosity instead of as a way to forestall withdrawals, you can enjoy that. Still, for a drug as addictive as heroin, it’s got a terrible reward to risk ratio.
So the experiment did all the right things. It got the notion out of my head, and it did not make me want to start back up with the habit. And I doubt the three or so good drags I took made any actual impact on my longevity.
In other weird news, my wife and I went to another informational meeting on adopting a kiddo out of China. They ran long, and our babysitting was turning into a pumpkin so we had to scram before the breakout groups, but it’s something we’re still looking to figure a way to do. Not that we can really handle the two we’ve got, but explaining why you’d trade your retirement savings for an additional parenting responsibility, that’s harder than explaining a heart attack survivor having a cigarette...
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