[ Post a Response | The Sublime Desire of Cigarette Smoking ]
Posted by JJ on May 29, 2009, 7:24 pm
I have two disparate but I supposed related thoughts that I'd love to get a little feedback on.
First, a little background about me. I'm 25, first tried smoking when I was 11 and have been smoking at least a pack a day since I was 17. The Risk, as it were, is a source of tremendous, for lack of a better word, sexual pleasure for me. But that aside, I truly love and adore smoking. With that background:
1) I am friends with a 40 (approx) year old woman who thoroughly enjoys the habit and though I'm not sure how much she smokes, it's certainly a lot. Yesterday, she, in the context of lamenting the increasingly negative societal views against smoking, said, "I like my smoking, I don't want a lung disease, but at this point in my life it's right for me." My immediate response, though I kept it to myself, is that this is something you say when you're 20, not 40, and I wonder if she still views the danger zone, as it were, to be many years off. The second thing that really stayed with me is that I don't want lung cancer either, for her or for me, but I like the idea that it's a possibility for both of us. Seriously bizarre, probably, but what do you all think?
2) I am a heavy smoker and have been smoking regularly for over a decade. Relative to your average smoker, I take long, deep drags, and hold the smoke in my lungs for a significant period of time before exhaling. The volume of smoke that I exhale hardly betrays the deep drags that I take in that it is relatively light, something that indicates to me that my lungs absorb a lot of smoke (which I like). That said, I'm still probably a good number of years away from being in the category of smokers where a serious disease is a significant possibility. Not so with many, for example, of the smokers I take cigarette breaks with at work who are in their 50's and 60's and by all accounts have been heavy, committed smokers all of their lives and are unlikely to ever quit.
Just today I enjoyed a cigarette with a woman, mid-50's, very successful and enjoying a great life, extremely warm and friendly, still very attractive. In short, a woman who seems to have everything going for her, but who hasn't given up the taboo habit that is now so uncommon for such straight-arrowed women like herself. She loves her cigarettes. Point being, this woman and those like her are in much different position vis-a-vis The Risk than I am. They are staring it in the face, even if they don't know or acknowledge that fact - any day they could wake up to a horrible diagnosis. I can’t say why, but that absolute intoxicates me. And I adore them for it.
??
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