At 46, he started smoking
Friday November 21, 2008
Categories: Varia
At 46, Tom Chiarella took up smoking, just to see what it was like. Excerpt: As a nonsmoker, I always figured cigarettes were an indulgence run amok. But there is something tangible about need, even when it's self-created. It feels...
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Rod Dreher is an editorial columnist for the Dallas Morning News, and author of "Crunchy Cons" (Crown Forum), a nonfiction book about conservatives, most of them religious, whose faith and political convictions sometimes put them at odds with mainstream conservatives. The views expressed in this blog are his own.
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I know exactly how he feels......only its about COFFEE!
The undiscovered land is premature death.
Let's hope he sends a post card, perhaps we'll all learn something.
I could have done without the scrotal description.
"This reads like a travelogue of a journey through an undiscovered land."
I know Hamlet was talking of suicide and not smoking, and why the risky opacity of the unknown keeps almost all of us from its fugitive temptations, but after over a decade off the smokes I've suddenly come down with the Shakes this evening:
The undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveler returns
Puzzles the will, and makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of.
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklie'd o'er with the pale cast of thought
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action.
Scott: I had the same experience. I haven't _really_ wanted one in a long time, until reading this article.
I envy the phenomenology of starting at age 46, too.
I TOLD you Esquire magazine was the most engaging, entertaining, well-crafted magazine in print, and Tom Chiarella is one of the main reasons why.
I started smoking at the age of 42. I had been a rabid nonsmoker my entire life and absolutely understand that they, like I used to, find it absolutely disgusting. Of course, disgust for the habit has evolved in these times to a disgust for smokers that I and the nonsmokers I knew back in the day did not have.
I started smoking for a couple of reasons. First, I had a fairly serious bicycle accident on the Mockingbird Bridge over White Rock Lake. I have always had a low tolerance for pain medication, although I was in horrendous pain. Also, I've always been a highly energetic person who found biking the perfect way of blowing off a hard day's tension after a day at the office. I spent several months at varying levels of mobility with no way to blow off the steam (and many years thereafter breaking out in a cold sweat everytime I looked at a bicycle).
About this same time I became involved in what I'll describe as a matter of litigation with my ex husband (an attorney). Life became a pressure cooker with no release valve.
I decided to see if a cigarette would help, and it did. Perhaps if my fear of biking hadn't kept me away after my wounds had healed, I would have traded the cigarettes for the bike, but it took MANY years for me to get over that fear. By then I was addicted.
The thing is, I enjoy smoking; and I enjoy people who smoke. My experience is that smokers laugh more and are far less judgmental than those who don't. Also, it's a real treat when someone points out that my doughnut, hamburger, or Mexican meal will kill me. I just say, what do I care? I smoke!
I'm 56 years old and look younger than my years. Maybe smoking will kill me, and maybe it won't. Something will, that's for sure, but for now I'm quite healthy and liberated from what seems to be society's obsession with perfect health. Some will say, "Yeah, but I'm not liberated for paying your medical bills...", to which I say BS.
Anyway, you won't be paying my medical bills because I intend to live the rest of my life, however short or long it might be, free from worrying about my health, and I won't be burdening the health care system with my problems because I have no intention of finding out about them.
I've watched too many of my nonsmoking friends die, from my first husband killed in a motorcycle accident in 1975, a friend in the 90's who was caught in the double bind of heart disease and cancer (what would help one would exacerbate the other, so he was doomed), to the most recent - a diabetic who spent years in blindness and kidney failure before finally stroking out.
I've opted to live until I die without benefit of the medical middleman.
I had my first cigarettes in fifth grade. My heart raced on my way home and I told my RN mother what I'd done. Then I smoked in middle school and ninth grade. But all this time, I didn't realize how to inhale. Besides, it wasn't like I was smoking more than a few cigarettes a day.
In my sophomore year of high school I excelled in cross country and track. I had prospects of scholarship money, so I gave up any notions of dragging on a smoke.
Towards the end of college, when I gave up my athletic pursuits I started going to a greasy spoon with an old high school buddy who smoked Newport menthols. He taught me to inhale with his Newports and and enjoy a mutual caffine & nicotine buzz. I never really smoked unless I was with him.
A few years later I discovered the joys of cannabis. Just two drags for me packed a buzz better than a whole night of drinking, with no hangover the next morning. Cigarettes could certainly accentuate the experience.
I think my real appreciation for the experience of smoking began with cannabis. Upon smoking the really good stuff, you could feel results of a gas exchange in the lungs nearly instantaneously.
Now I really only enjoy cigarettes when I haven't smoked more than one or two a day. When I've really avoided or rationed out smokes, I do enjoy the nicotine buzz from the initial one.
Chain smoking or smoking compulsively is what dulls the experience. Maybe there is an oral fixation that's being satisfied.
Luckily I've been able to avoid smoking as a habit. With all the mental maladies that run in my family, addictive behaviors passed me over.
I go for months without ever touching a smoke and prefer to bum them off of others.
Rachel's hardy mix of stoicism and *joie de vivre et joie de mort* sent me back to Michael Kinsley's column from yesterday on the president-elect's brushes with nicotine, The Other N-Word (tm):
"...as presidential vices go, this one is not near the top. As for being a role model for youths, Obama's good habits outweigh this single bad one. He's great on hydration, apparently.
"Obama is 47. A recent Journal of the National Cancer Institute study determined that 49 out of 1,000 American male former smokers age 45 (close enough) will die of all causes over the next decade, compared with 91 out of 1,000 who are still smoking. If he is still smoking, Obama is doubling his chance of an early death. Of course, he increases that risk by becoming president as well. But we allow candidates to take that second risk. Whether he takes the first one is his business, too.
"Another question is what effect a president desperate for a cigarette and trying to quit might have on your life expectancy and mine. Obama's steely calm is now one of our country's major assets. If he needs an occasional cigarette to preserve it, let's hand him an ashtray, offer him a light and look the other way."
In 1964, I got it into my head that smoking would somehow lead to coolness: The unlocking of my creativity, the entry into a special coterie of rebellious, interesting individuals who would have been right at home in Greenwich Village, except we were all born on the East side of San Antonio, Texas. One night, during a Little League baseball game, I and my best friend (now 46 years' duration) slipped off into some adjoining fields and tackled a pack of cigarettes. Briefly: I got horribly, green-faced nauseated. My friend got a vicious headache. I don't remember if I actually threw up, but I do recall this quote and the 14-year-old sincerity of it: "God, why would anybody want to actually do this?"
That sounds like a good night, Irene...
Scott, I read with enjoyment the WSJ piece you described. I, too, hope Obama will do what he needs to do, even if it means picking up a cigarette, when the stress of the times threaten to overwhelm his interior and exterior calm.
Many years ago there was a story in the news about the world's then oldest person, a French woman, who at 126 was asked the secret to her longevity. Her response: "I quit smoking at 118."
I laughed at the irony while wondering why she quit. Maybe the convenience store closed...
Words can barely describe the feeling of a pipe full of good leaf stuck firmly between my teeth, and a chill wind tautening the sack restraining my two ponderous testicles.
When they printed this, tney left off my last 2 paragraphs. Skipping pot experiences -- My last line was, Thank you God!
Jaunty JohnT, B Goode - restraining order, ponderous verbiage and all...
And speaking of testicles [John 8:04], where's our good friend, commenter Ossicle, when you need him?
No doubt with his brother, "Ice", and father, "Pop", aka The Frostburn Trio, in the back of the freezer...
And for those of you above who have chronicled your pasts as deep-lunged sidemen-and-women with the Doobie Siblings, and are hoping to go from being at one with your smokes to being *a deux* within the Partnership for a Free Drug America, then, for those for whom the blue sky filled with bosom buddies courtesy of eHarmony's fabled "29 Dimensions of Compatibility" stopped short of floating you up to Cloud #30 before soft-landing you within a budding grove, we have just the dating service for you:
aleksandreia.wordpress.com/2008/11/21/bong-bud-dies-or-joint-at-the-hip-or-marry-ju-wanna/
Mine too.
All my friends in college and law school were smokers. For some reason, I wasn't: I have smoked cigarettes but have never been able to get addicted to them. Married now and with kids, this time of year reminds me of drinking and smoking on the porch after dinner, coffee in hand, surrounded by friends ....
What ex-smokers miss is not the nicotine but the memories.
who the heck has a 'girlfriend' at 46?
I'm sorry, I just can't get into this one.
I grew up in a house with two chain smokers and have never touched cigarettes -- with the sole exception of single drag in 7th grade.
Frankly, everything about cigarette smoking is repulsive. I found my nauseated just trying to read the article. Do you smokers realize how foul you stink? You can't, or you wouldn't do it.
Worst of all is the filthy practice (now thankfully gone with bans on indoor smoking) of smoking in the john. As if adding one stench to another somehow helped?
And then there's the appearance of smoking -- the expresslane to looking low class. Have you ever seen yourself with a cigarette hanging out of your lips? There's a reason TV shows and movies (more the former than the latter) always portray white-trash characters with a pack a cigs.
Yuck.
stari_momak, what do you think he should call the woman he is in a romantic and sexual relationship with who is not his wife? Serious question -- I, too, think "girlfriend" and "boyfriend" sound silly for anyone over 40, but what's the alternative?
Mrs. T
My grandmother--God rest her--would have been 105 this year if she were alive. Her doctor ordered her to take up smoking when she was in her forties to "calm her nerves." (Twenty years later, doctors were prescribing valium for the same reason: monopause.) Anyway, Granny died at 72 of a smoking-related illness. I was only nine, and I still miss her.
Oh, and speaking of smoking. I smoked all through college and a couple of years after. I love smoking. If it weren't so unhealthy (and so expensive) I'd still be doing it. Coffee and cigarettes, booze and cigarettes, sex and cigarettes, late nights and cigarettes, oh yeah. (Though I admit I might be conflating memories of cigs with memories of college in general).
Mrs. T
I start choking driving down the highway if the car in front of me going 60 mph has people smoking in it!!!
The stuff is downright lethal to me in terms of misery, and my wife has a deadly allergy to it, it causes her athsma to go out of control.
The idea of taking it up seems beyond unimaginably stupid, to me.
Y'all might enjoy this memoir of smoking. Wish I had an unfiltered Kool.
Bud: Do you smoke after sex?
Dud: I don't know - I never checked...
Baldy
If you start choking because people are smoking in the car in front of you, then you are proof that humans have beaten natural selection once and for all.
Once again, I don't recall all that laughter and good times involving watching my stepmom dig through ashtrays, or that guy who smoked through the hole in his neck. But maybe that's just me. I never hounded either about their smoking. Hell, everyone in my family but me smokes. I figure, their lungs, their cash.
I can sit on the porch too, you know, talk with friends, those who smoke and those who don't, with a cup of coffee, or a glass of water. Oddly, don't find the lack of booze, nicotine, or even caffeine to be a bar to good times, or good conversation.
Smoking is indeed terrible, but there is something elemental about the act. Killing yourself little-by-little, oh and we know it, a smoker's body in no uncertain terms tells you that smoking is death by a thousand cuts, the rise in blood pressure, the aching throat, the buzzing chest - and the subtle elation, as if the body itself is thrilled by the knowledge of its own mortality. The effects of tobacco on body and mind serve to briefly unite the two, its a good way to slam today's over-abstracted mind firmly into the flesh of its actual existence.
I think smoking attracts personalities that bear a certain streak of existential awareness and black romanticism. Thats why we tend to cluster.
stari_momak, what do you think he should call the woman he is in a romantic and sexual relationship with who is not his wife?
Ideally they should be married. Failing that, the British use the term 'partner' for this sort of situation. Common-law spouse, 'the old woman', just about anything is preferable to 'girlfriend'.
I never smoked. I just inhaled second-hand.
James P: Her doctor ordered her to take up smoking when she was in her forties to "calm her nerves." (Twenty years later, doctors were prescribing valium for the same reason: monopause.)
Valium for mono-pause, nicotine for die-o-pause. (I'll never be a Scott Lahti, but I can aspire (and not smoking, to respire, not expire ;-))
stari_momak: ... the British use the term 'partner' for this sort of situation. Common-law spouse, 'the old woman', just about anything is preferable to 'girlfriend'.
"Mistress". It has old-world cachet. And it sounds more expensive (it is). By the way, is your nom de combox Serbian? (i.e. old bachelor?)
Actually as a stress reliever I have always found a glass of red wine and a brief period of navel contemplation is ideal. Works even better when the navel in question is owned by my mistress.
All this talk of smoking and not a single mention of cigars? I know, I know. Different club. A single smoke lasts at least a half hour, stinks up an entire building -- and, most unfathomably to buttsters, you don't inhale. But I love 'em. (I'm talking about the beauties you lay out some real cash for and store in a humidor, not the El Cheapo turdlings you can buy at any supermarket, drugstore or convenience store.) The dense taste of cured tobacco in your mouth, the thick plume you emit, the complaints of the people around you, even when you're outside in the open air. Just beautiful. And then there's the unspoken pleasure of sharing one with a non-cigar person and watching them accidentally get a lungful. Cough. Sweat. Green face. "Wait a couple minutes before your next pull. Then do this." Making converts. What's better'n that?
The undiscovered land is premature death.
Yeah, I've always thought that the states should have given money to the tobacco companies, for keeping off the Medicare rolls all those people who otherwise would have lived a lot longer -- and been on Medicare for two or three decades -- if they weren't smoking. I think the states are soon going to realize that all the money they thought they were going to save by not having to treat so many tobacco-related illness is going to be sucked up by treating people who otherwise would have been dead by now, and who have lived long enough to get other health problems.
***
Sheesh, stari_momak. I'm 46 and bachelor. I don't know all the details of the author's romantic situation, and I don't want to; but if I were to start dating a woman whom I saw once or twice a week but with whom I wasn't living, what would you suggest I call her other than "girlfriend"?
***
I've never been a cigarette smoker (tobacco or otherwise). But I used to smoke a pipe and cigars quite a lot when I was younger. I miss it sometimes. I still have a cigar or two once or twice a year with friends. In my case, I stopped because I didn't like what it was doing to my singing voice.
Given my own health problems (diabetes, high blood pressure, some extra weight, general inactivity), I sometimes wonder whether taking up smoking again would really add that much to my problems. On the practical side, though, I'm glad that my clothes and hair don't smell like tobacco, and I'm glad not to be spending the money for it.
Having said that, I have to admit that, like other posters, I do have the same sort of addiction to coffee.
***
I don't remember if I actually threw up, but I do recall this quote and the 14-year-old sincerity of it: "God, why would anybody want to actually do this?"
Of course, when you're 14, that can apply to a lot of other adult activities besides smoking. I think I had that reaction to eating liver when I was younger. I still don't understand the supposed attraction of caviar. Or Scotch, for that matter.
PS -- or exercise. ;-)
Mrs. Toad- me too. So, I told myself when I quit about 10 years ago that I could start again when I'm 75 if I want to. At that point, it probably won't matter much from a health standpoint and it gives me something to look forward to.
Probably, by then they will be illegal and that will make it even more enjoyable.
If anyone knows of a smoking addiction study they may wish to alert them to my existence as I appear to immune to nicotine's addictive effects. I smoked as a teenager to be cool but quit (without any trouble) at 18. At 27 I had my first cigarette in over nine years at a Christmas party. And since then have smoked the occasional cigarette, but never started smoking habitually. The most I ever smoked, during a fairly Bohemian phase of my life when I was hanging out with lots of smokers, was two or three a week (I bummed them from my friends, and occasionally bought them packs as recompense). Nowadays it's more like two or three a year, mainly when I am with my younger step-sister who's a smoker. Apparently there's more to addiction that the chemistry of the drug itself.
As for a name other than girlfriend, how about lover.
As a substitute for boyfriend/girlfriend for people living together, we could always revive the Census Bureau's POSSLQ. ;-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POSSLQ
I still think "boyfriend/girlfriend" are appropriate for a person with whom one has an ongoing social/romantic relationship but with whom one isn't living; I really can't think of a good alternative. I suppose as one gets older, "gentleman friend" and "lady friend" start to sound more appropriate, but to my ears they have a ring of, well, too much propriety or demureness. My "lady friend" is someone I might take dancing every Sat. night, but not someone whom I might kiss goodnight or to whom I might say "I love you." But, maybe that's a function of my background and/or age.
As for "lover" -- sorry, but when I hear a person refer to another person as his or her "lover", my immediate reaction is, "Eww! TMI!"
Of course, another complication with the term "lover" is the tradition of using it to refer to the person, other than one's spouse, with whom a married man or woman is having an ongoing romantic/sexual affair, such as, in literature, the lovers of Madame Bovary and Lady Chatterly.
In other words, your "lover" is your bit of stuff on the side, not the person with whom you are principally linked socially and/or legally.
If people are living together and function socially as a couple, I suppose "partner" has emerged and the most value-neutral yet descriptive term.
David J. White: "As for 'lover' -- sorry, but when I hear a person refer to another person as his or her 'lover', my immediate reaction is, 'Eww! TMI!'"
Then I gather, from chaps dating divorcées named Barbara, calling her "My MILFy Way Bar" is out of the question...
"...in literature, the lovers of Madame Bovary and Lady Chatterly."
Mme. B. might have lived to an age as ripe and as old as Roquefort had she had the B'ovarian fortitude to hold out for her true car[nal]mic soulmate, Monsieur t'Esticle...
And as for La Chatterley, her problem, as you might have guessed, was not knowing when to keep her *mouth* shut...the adultery was one thing, the infernal all-hours yapping something else entirely...
He describes his scrotum, but "lover" is too much information?
David J. White: "...we could always revive the Census Bureau's POSSLQ. ;-)"
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POSSLQ
And here I had always thought a POSSLQ was the celebrity-recognition rating assigned to the Disciples. e.g., "On a scale from 1 to 12, where would you put Bartholomew?" Of course, as the son of Zebedee, James gets legacy points for recalling Porky Pig and *Song of the South*...
"...my immediate reaction is, 'Eww! TMI!'"
So *that's* what that 'Special' kid on *South Park* is always trying to say with 'TMI'!
If anyone knows of a smoking addiction study they may wish to alert them to my existence as I appear to immune to nicotine's addictive effects.
I read somewhere that about 20% of us aren't susceptible to nicotine addiction. I'm one of them -- after smoking 1 to 2 packs a day for about 6 years, I just decided to stop. No cravings, nothing.
I'm 50, and if I weren't married but had a regular steady fella, I'm pretty sure I'd just give in and call him my boyfriend. Or manfriend. Yeah, manfriend. That sounds a little less stilted than gentleman friend.
Mrs. T
Or maybe I'd just call him Mr. Jones. And he could call me Mrs. Toad. He'd say, "Can you put that cigarette out please? It's bothering Mrs. Toad."
Mrs. T
David J. White: As a substitute for boyfriend/girlfriend for people living together, we could always revive the Census Bureau's POSSLQ.
When you wrote that, I recalled hearing that term from someone at a party once, but I had to look it up. Good one! bien divertissant!
Scott Lahti: B'ovarian
(to cite only one of a plenitude of witticisms) -- LOL! You are not playing with a full deck, but I love it! Keep up the good work!
Mrs. Toad: I'm 50, and if I weren't married but had a regular steady fella, I'm pretty sure I'd just give in and call him my boyfriend. Or manfriend. Yeah, manfriend. That sounds a little less stilted than gentleman friend.
Mrs. Toad,
It seems to me that you contemplate de temps en temps a picayune divertissement. If that is the case then you, being still a young woman, should not demur from a revitalising affaire du coeur. It can inject vitality into your life and into your domestic love as well, provided only your mari is, how shall I say, complaisant, obliging, non? As in the old adage, omnia vincit amor (Tout est vaincu par l'amour, i.e. littéralement: l'amour vainc tout.) Do not deny to yourself this impulse to bonheur (happiness). We will all be dead a very long time and as a great poet once said "there is no love within the grave."
Je vous prie d'agréer, chère Madame, mes très respectueuses salutations.
Mr. Frog
It seems to me that you contemplate de temps en temps a picayune divertissement.
Oh dear; mon cher petit rêve est découvert. But it's only an occasional rêve. I indulge in it when Mr. Toad has been particularly trying, or when for some reason I'm contemplating de temps perdu (as for example smoking cigarettes, and all its concomitant pleasures, in college). And anyway, M. Toad is not in the least complaisant.
But merci du compliment. You know, M. Grenouille, the ability to pay attention is a most attractive trait in a man.
Mrs. Toad
I started smoking a pipe at age 40. It is incredibly relaxing, and since you don't inhale, health risks are only a fraction of the risks associated with cigarettes. In addition, a pipe can be a beautiful work of handmade art, and there is a strong online community of people who smoke and collect pipes.
Stuart Goddard, better known as Adam Ant, apparently started smoking at 40 on a whim. But then, he was bipolar, and refused to take his meds because he said thay stifled his creativity, so make of that what you will.
One more reason to hate Beliefnet software: seeing a typo in your post in the hours between hitting "Post" and the screen refreshing, and not being able to do a damn thing about it. "Thay" should, of course, read "they". Not sure how I managed that, since a is not that near e on the keyboard, unless the part of my brain that regulates typing has suddenly decided to adopt phonetic spelling.
Good to see some others taking up the pipe-smoking advocacy I tried to start on the Old Gold Post.
Samuel Gawith best Virginia flake in Bjarne stubby Bulldog / Rhodesian, for those of you who follow such things.
I once read in a magazine article that Adam Ant took up smoking because "He felt like it".
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