How I Started Smoking
I am not a trend-setter. I am more of an inventive imposture who follows the wrong details.
(evious improviser.) (I am more of a jealous immigrant from the imaginal zone).
And, so I started smoking.
We've all been there. The group pressure. The room is packed with so many stripes of cool and I feel awkward, as though even the way I hold a glass of Guiness shows I am a poser, as though everybody else is weaving notes into their memories: "Alert! Alert! Dork drinking from a pint glass like it's some sort of trough of butter, thumb and fingers all up at the ceiling. Do American's really have no education system at all?"
And, so, one night in a crowded room around a glass coffee table littered with deep red Marboro triangles and flat red Lucky Strike dots and the tiny promises made by Hope boxes and bags of roll-your-own streaded leaves and a famously phallic Cuaba Generosos smouldering on a $80.00 ash tray, I decided to start smoking. I saw into the rhythmic beauty of hands performing intricate simplicities of work and gesture. The way the flame is cherished. The way delicate paper is held and moved. The way the embers glow more faintly than candle light. These were the pressures that got me to start smoking. But, I should clarify that I smoke incense sticks.
I'm no idiot. I'm not going to suck the stuff into my body. I have enough trouble with alcohol and starchy carbohydrates. I don't need to add nicotine. I just want to join in the ritual of timing. And, so, I started. Of course, in bars and other public places where the priests of the personality cult gather, there are pauses and some looks weighing me for mockery when I slide a very thin steel case from my pocket, open it like a book and carefully remove a stick of incense. I can almost hear people think, "What the . . . ?" I hold the stick just below my face and carefully light the tip with an expensive micro-lighter. A tiny flame burns silently for a moment before I calmly wave the stick through the air to out the flame and start the thin and constant line of white smoke into its life of ephemeral calligraphy. (its calligraphic life.).
At this point, my smoking and others' is hard to find difference in. I tend and care for the stick throughout its burning, making sure to not let the accumulated ash fall anywhere but in an ash tray. To do otherwise would be uncouth. I usually hold the stick between my fingers, but, of course, I never put it in my mouth. Beyond not sucking on it, I can find almost no difference. Well, that and the smell. But, do any two tobacco's really smell the same? Cigar smokers speak of the aroma being one of the ritual pleasures and give it as a reason why they won't smoke cigarettes. Clove cigarettes. Pipe tobacco. Within the intricate subtlties of culture, to define oneself as unique without becoming a dick, is the basic requirement, to know where interesting transforms into freak.
(evious improviser.) (I am more of a jealous immigrant from the imaginal zone).
And, so I started smoking.
We've all been there. The group pressure. The room is packed with so many stripes of cool and I feel awkward, as though even the way I hold a glass of Guiness shows I am a poser, as though everybody else is weaving notes into their memories: "Alert! Alert! Dork drinking from a pint glass like it's some sort of trough of butter, thumb and fingers all up at the ceiling. Do American's really have no education system at all?"
And, so, one night in a crowded room around a glass coffee table littered with deep red Marboro triangles and flat red Lucky Strike dots and the tiny promises made by Hope boxes and bags of roll-your-own streaded leaves and a famously phallic Cuaba Generosos smouldering on a $80.00 ash tray, I decided to start smoking. I saw into the rhythmic beauty of hands performing intricate simplicities of work and gesture. The way the flame is cherished. The way delicate paper is held and moved. The way the embers glow more faintly than candle light. These were the pressures that got me to start smoking. But, I should clarify that I smoke incense sticks.
I'm no idiot. I'm not going to suck the stuff into my body. I have enough trouble with alcohol and starchy carbohydrates. I don't need to add nicotine. I just want to join in the ritual of timing. And, so, I started. Of course, in bars and other public places where the priests of the personality cult gather, there are pauses and some looks weighing me for mockery when I slide a very thin steel case from my pocket, open it like a book and carefully remove a stick of incense. I can almost hear people think, "What the . . . ?" I hold the stick just below my face and carefully light the tip with an expensive micro-lighter. A tiny flame burns silently for a moment before I calmly wave the stick through the air to out the flame and start the thin and constant line of white smoke into its life of ephemeral calligraphy. (its calligraphic life.).
At this point, my smoking and others' is hard to find difference in. I tend and care for the stick throughout its burning, making sure to not let the accumulated ash fall anywhere but in an ash tray. To do otherwise would be uncouth. I usually hold the stick between my fingers, but, of course, I never put it in my mouth. Beyond not sucking on it, I can find almost no difference. Well, that and the smell. But, do any two tobacco's really smell the same? Cigar smokers speak of the aroma being one of the ritual pleasures and give it as a reason why they won't smoke cigarettes. Clove cigarettes. Pipe tobacco. Within the intricate subtlties of culture, to define oneself as unique without becoming a dick, is the basic requirement, to know where interesting transforms into freak.
posted by jerry at 11:22 PM
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