Perhaps this will serve as a warning to any young people who are thinking about having a smoke. I started when I was 16. I remember buying my first pack because A) I looked old enough to pass for “legal” and buy some and B) all the older and presumably cooler kids where doing it at the grocery store where I worked. The funny thing is it never dawned on me that these guys I looked up to where 18-22 and still, for the most part, lived with their parents and bagged groceries for a living. Hardly role models, but in your teens you don’t always look up to the best people.
So I smoked, a lot. I smoked when the teachers were not looking, and I even smoked when I was playing golf on my highschool team. I smoked on field trips and I even went out to my car and hotboxed a Marlboro or two between classes. I thought I was cool.
Somewhere around 22, the world turned on me. Smoking was pretty much banned everywhere and cigarettes where approaching $3 a pack. So I spent the next 5 years quitting on and off until a couple of months before I turned 27. Then I quit and I’m proud to say I have had maybe 2 cigarettes since then and I regretted them both. Yet here I sit, two years smoke free, wanting a cigarette. Today has been a rough day. I’m Neurotic By nature (You Down With OCD? Yeah, You Know ME) and today has been one of those days where I would like nothing better than to go down to the 7-11, by a pack of Reds and chew the damn filter off ever one of the 20 cigarettes in the pack and smoke them real slow.
Ok, I’m smart enough to know they would taste like the sweaty ass of a marathon runner, but the fantasy is so ingrained in my head how fantastic that first blast of nicotine would feel as it courses through my veins. I would be light headed and maybe a little winded, but it would be worth it. Worth it that is for the 30 seconds before regret kicked in. Not only regret, but disappointment and an outright sense of worthlessness. If I wanted that, I’d go buy a bear claw from the vending machine right now and engulf it. In fact, that’s what I’ll go do. These days it seems to be more socially acceptable to weight 300 lbs than it is to smoke within 500 feet of any pinks lungs.
So I smoked, a lot. I smoked when the teachers were not looking, and I even smoked when I was playing golf on my highschool team. I smoked on field trips and I even went out to my car and hotboxed a Marlboro or two between classes. I thought I was cool.
Somewhere around 22, the world turned on me. Smoking was pretty much banned everywhere and cigarettes where approaching $3 a pack. So I spent the next 5 years quitting on and off until a couple of months before I turned 27. Then I quit and I’m proud to say I have had maybe 2 cigarettes since then and I regretted them both. Yet here I sit, two years smoke free, wanting a cigarette. Today has been a rough day. I’m Neurotic By nature (You Down With OCD? Yeah, You Know ME) and today has been one of those days where I would like nothing better than to go down to the 7-11, by a pack of Reds and chew the damn filter off ever one of the 20 cigarettes in the pack and smoke them real slow.
Ok, I’m smart enough to know they would taste like the sweaty ass of a marathon runner, but the fantasy is so ingrained in my head how fantastic that first blast of nicotine would feel as it courses through my veins. I would be light headed and maybe a little winded, but it would be worth it. Worth it that is for the 30 seconds before regret kicked in. Not only regret, but disappointment and an outright sense of worthlessness. If I wanted that, I’d go buy a bear claw from the vending machine right now and engulf it. In fact, that’s what I’ll go do. These days it seems to be more socially acceptable to weight 300 lbs than it is to smoke within 500 feet of any pinks lungs.
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