[ Post a Response | The Sublime Desire of Cigarette Smoking ]
Posted by bella on May 23, 2009, 3:03 pm
I don't smoke regularly and up until three weeks ago I never permitted myself to smoke in my apartment, because I didn't want it to smell smokey. I would always go outside, but felt weirdly self-conscious whenever anyone walked by so didn't really enjoy it as much as I might have.
Then it occurred to me that I could probably get away with smoking in the bathtub every now and then. Not much carpet or fabric to worry about there, and the overhead fan and a little air freshener would keep the room smelling fine.
This opened up a whole new world of possibilities. My first bubble bath in years. I needed mood lighting though, so I turned off the main lights and set up this little frosted Ikea lamp on the floor. That's when I discovered that smoke makes interesting shadows. Not always. Only when it's concentrated enough. Like curling up from the lit end of the cigarette right after I took a drag, or if my exhales were thick enough. This definitely prompted me to inhale more smoke at a time than I would have otherwise, because I wanted to see how dark I could make the shadows on the wall.
After a while I decided to change up the lighting even more. This time I kept all lights off except for a little flashlight in my hand. It was totally dark because my bathroom doesn't have any windows. Holding the flashlight right under the burning cigarette was actually a huge surprise, because it illuminated way more smoke than I'd ever suspected was there before. It seemed to come off the sides of the cigarette, not just the lighted end. And of course out of the filtered end too. Just really sensuously thick.
Exhaling across the top of the flashlight made the exhales look incredibly dense, but even more interesting was the residual smoke that I was completely not expecting in the next exhale or two. At first I didn't believe it, because I had taken just a normal sized drag and never seen that kind of residual smoke from a normal sized drag before. So I spent about thirty seconds inhaling normal air as deeply as I could and blowing over the top of the flashlight, trying to figure out if it was some kind of optical trick or something normal breath did, like freezing in air when it's cold out. Nope, it was definitely smoke. I guess it's always there, even in drags where you wouldn't expect it, and it's just hard to see in normal light.
Try these effects if you're bored sometime, they're a lot of fun!
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