Cigar

Yes, yes, yes… Smok­ing is a ter­ri­ble, dis­gust­ing, stinky habit. I know. As a for­mer pack-a-day Camel smok­er, I’m the last one you need to tell. Yet some­how, I end­ed up in the fol­low­ing picture:

How did this happen?

Well, I don’t rec­om­mend this to oth­er nico­tine addicts, as it is cer­tain­ly «slip­pery ground». I have been known, since quit­ting smok­ing three
years ago to par­take in the occa­sion­al cig­ar dur­ing spe­cial events. In the time since I quit, I’ve
smoked sev­en cig­ars, which com­pares rather favor­ably to the twen­ty thou­sand cig­a­rettes I would have smoked instead had I not quit.

But enough ratio­nal­iza­tion. What’s smoked is smoked, and I got some good self-por­traits out of it.

The cig­ar makes an excel­lent prop.

While it was enjoy­able, the damn thing did get to be over­pow­er­ing after a while. It was pret­ty clear to
me why I don’t do this every day. I start­ed ask­ing myself the big ques­tions, like, «did I real­ly have that thing in my mouth?» No won­der the human bite is con­sid­ered more dan­ger­ous than a dog’s.

The next morn­ing I was giv­en fur­ther reminders that inhal­ing the smoke from burn­ing tobac­co is not a par­tic­u­lar­ly healthy endeav­or. I under­stand that burn­ing smoke in gen­er­al is not rec­om­mend­ed and in fact active­ly dis­cour­aged by your local fire­fight­ers. The tobac­co hang­over was as bad as many I’ve had from alco­hol. Nau­sea, sen­si­tiv­i­ty to bright light and loud noise, a killer headache that would­n’t go away. I’ve had this reac­tion to smoky social gath­er­ings of what­ev­er sort, but nev­er before quite that strong.

The things I’ll do to make an inter­est­ing web page…

Hon­est­ly, though. I did­n’t inhale.