Smoking

A good friend of mine recently had a cancer scare. Now this is a normal part of life, it seems that in this day and age anything can give you cancer; but this friend was nineteen years old and he had only been smoking for about a year. That’s one of nature’s cruelest pranks, you had people who start smoking at fifteen and keep going until their on their deathbed without the slightest hint of asthma much less cancer. Then you have people like my friend who start smoking at eighteen and a year later find themselves in a doctors office being told they might have lung cancer, all the while struggling to not light up right then and there just to take the edge off the whole ordeal.

What is the allure of smoking? Everyone who smokes knows it’s bad for you. Nobody tries to say that the ads and the D.A.R.E. programs are exaggerating; nobody glorifies the big fuck you they’re giving to the surgeon general. From my observation, smoking is just a form of stimulation. You see people go on smoke breaks just so they have a reason to go on a break. At the same time, while smoking can be this melodramatic crutch to get you through tough times, it also allows the creative spark to be stimulated as well. I myself have spent many a day, sitting in front of my computer puffing on a Marlboro Red and sipping on coffee just praying to motivate my fingertips to dance around the keyboard and provide me with something substantial to show the world.

From Tom Waits, to Bukowski, to Palahniuk, these icons of the dejected and the disdainful can be found with two things: a pen in their hand and a cig in their mouth; Inhaling all the corporate marketing and death and despair that can come with a pile of tar tightly wrapped in cheap papers and exhaling it in the same breath. And that’s what’s addicting. Smoking isn’t like alcohol or any other conventional drug. Your judgment isn't compromised - it's bloodied with brass knuckles, curbed and left on a sewer grate for dead. The destruction of the survival mechanism deeply ingrained in us, the one thought that keeps us from running into traffic. We don’t smoke because we don’t care about getting cancer, we smoke because we want to think that we’re standing strong against all life has to bring against us. To do something we know will kill us and survive.

My friend had a cancer scare, but it was just that, a scare. Calcium deposits found it’s way on to his lungs and while we both shared a moment of consolation, the hugging and crying that two men do when nobody is watching and we just want to act upon the impulses of brotherhood that we tend to ignore for social graces. He had won. He had stared death in the eye and punched it right in the face. I was celebrating with him much like he was the winning team at the superbowl and I was his coach. And as we stopped for gas on our way home and approached the cash register, he looked up at me and then behind the cashier where all the ads that tricked us everyday lied there waiting for us. He stared at them and then back at me before speaking up in a voice that resembled a kid at Christmas…

“Chad! They have a two for one special on Camel Regulars, think you can spot me for a pack?!”