This will end year four.<\/p>\n
I don’t carry cash, ever, and for a very long time, I went to the gas station every monday and bought my usual carton of Benson&Hedges box. I smoked about a carton a week, toward the end of my smoking career, at the very beginning I smoked a lot more.<\/p>\n
Anyway, four years ago, this new year, I had been given a wad of cash by family members. I had part of that wad in my pocket, the monday right after new years, and on my way to work, rather than pull out the AMEX card to buy my smokes, I went in and used the cash.<\/p>\n
I walked up to the register with a coffee and a copy of the Shotgun News, and put them on the counter with a fifty, asked for a carton of smokes. <\/p>\n
I got change back. No, not lots of change, I mean change as in silver change, and not very damned much of it. I stood aghast and asked the counter girl to check – “I gave you a 50, I’m pretty sure, not a 20.” <\/p>\n
“yeah”, she said “The smokes are 44.75, the coffee is 1.35, the Shotgun News is 3.75, that’s $49.85”<\/p>\n
The stunned look on my face must have given me away. “You haven’t paid cash for smokes for a long time, have you?”<\/p>\n
No, I hadn’t. <\/p>\n
I smoked that carton like every butt was made of gold. I treated them like little white friends, each sacrificing himself for my happiness. I didn’t waste a shred of tobacco, I saved the empty packs and shook out the shavings and smoked them in a pipe. (I packed my smokes, usually a carton at a time, to get the draw right- Phillip Morris invariably left them too loosely filled for me, and I would pack the entire carton on the armrest of the truck to get them juuust right.)<\/p>\n
I worshipped at the altar of every smoke, every burnt offering to my addiction. I smoked even the very last Benson&Hedges down to the filter. <\/p>\n
And then I quit. No, I didn’t buckle, or get weak, nor did I make everyone else’s life hell, I just quit. It wasn’t because it was becoming increasingly difficult to find a place to smoke, although in the People’s Republic of Chicago it’s almost unheard of, it wasn’t because of what I feared it was doing to my health, because at this point, any damage has already been done, it wasn’t because of the eeeevil corporations, the tobacco companies have a right to sell a legal product.<\/p>\n
I quit because I’m a cheap bastard. I was not going to continue to spend over 40 bucks on a carton of smokes, and I was not going to smoke cheap crap just so I could keep smoking. It’s like fireworks: each person has a limit to what he’ll spend just to burn it up.<\/p>\n
I’m not a rabid ex-smoker. I go out of my way to allow people to smoke around me, and I don’t do anything to mess with their lives. I am for smoker’s rights, and the local smoker’s rights organization is the ONLY non humanitarian organization i regularly contribute to. I’m extremely unhappy about the junk science used to discriminate against smokers, and the naked lunch is this: It is possible to install a ventilation system in any building which makes secondhand cigarette smoke a total non issue, end of question. There are hundreds of manufacturers of fume removal equipment that remove genuinely toxic (and, I mean IMMMEDIATELY toxic) materials from work areas. This technology exists and is adequate to shield a non smoker from a smoker sitting immedialtely next to them. Separating a restaurant, or airport, into smoking and non smoking areas is a piece of cake.<\/p>\n
Atlanta airport springs to mind in this; there are “smoking aquariums” in areas of Hartsfeld. they put one small single-kitchen-sized ventilator fan in an area which requires a jet engine. Duh. Do the math folks, the air in the room requires a higher exchange rate than non smoking areas. <\/p>\n
So: I’m here, clean and clear, for four years, and the bottom line is this: I miss smoking. I liked smoking. I hate not smoking. I hate that it’s such a social leprosy. I have no respect for people who believe the junk science. I hate that it’s something that’s lost to me. I’m not gonna re-develop the habit because I won’t subject myself to another car payment worth of expense, it’s flatly not worth it. <\/p>\n
Smoke if you got’em folks. I respect that, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I used to. If you think about it sometime, smoke one for me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This will end year four. I don’t carry cash, ever, and for a very long time, I went to the gas station every monday and bought my usual carton of Benson&Hedges box. I smoked about a carton a week, toward the end of my smoking career, at the very beginning I smoked a lot more. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-221","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=221"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=221"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=221"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=221"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}