Man and ma’am and the rest of y’all, if I believed in jinxes and stuff I would have sworn I done jinxed me last night. A jinx is a juvenile minx, right? That whole business about dreaming and sleeping and shit; I woke up shortly before midnight, don’t remember the dream, but it was one of those where you’re trying to tell someone something and you can’t get any power to your voice and I woke up drooling on my pillow. Not trying to remember or read anything into it, just saying, a dream has to be pretty powerful to wake me from my drug induced sleep.
I’m sure I’m not a very good reporter on the state of the dawg. If I were a methodical chronicler of my own, um, shit, stuff, whatever, there might be a pattern of one sort or the other. I’m sensitive enough to patterns not to go looking for trouble. I’ve given myself some considerable leeway with the whole no analog cigarette thing that I may be missing certain odd effects from the e-juice stuff. I mean leeway in behavior. Though I started this e-stuff about a month ago I had an analog almost daily during the power outage, haven’t had, or wanted one during 2014. I’m not a New Year’s resolution kind of guy; down that path leads red meat, indiscriminate sex, chain smoking, and whatever sort of drunken promises people make on the first or during lent.
I’m just saying as much as the e-cig is like an analog cig it’s also not like one at all. What they share is one singular “drug” although I’m not sure nicotine is really, or should be if it isn’t, classified as a drug, though it operates like one as does alcohol, and along with guns they do have their own government enforcement squad (ATF, well, it’s true, you don’t have a GLSK (dept. of Ganga, Ludes and Stabby Knives) or EKBC (dept. of Ecstasy, Ketamine and Box Cutters)) and the sort of smoke thing, though e-cigs could do the same, I’m sure, without smoke at all.
The smoke thing is attractive to me. The fascination with smoking has always been exhaling the billowing cloud; it’s like taking an element into you, making it your own, and releasing it back into the wild. Granted we all have to do that with water and air and I forgot the name for it but some folks (especially pregnant women) have this urge to eat dirt, but the water and air stuff is an automatic response and a condition of living, the dirt eating is a little weird, smoking, though, the ritual of fire breathing, you elect to do at some personal risk.
I have so many very deep seated associations and personal identifiers entwined in smoking, the season, the quality of air, wind, rain, snow, stink and hue and keen and mew and unlike other things that change the smoking delivery system this one satisfies that need to breathe fire. Also the patch never worked for me and by this time on the gum I would be stealing smokes, cranky, and tired of the fucking gum.
Sorry, off track. I mean I haven’t been keeping a very good record of my vaping habits. I think it wouldn’t work well if I did. When Zyban (wellburtin (sp?) repackaged) came out as a smoking cessation drug the miracle cure of it was that you took it and smoked however you wanted to and within in a few weeks you wouldn’t want to anymore. To be fair they never suggested that it would work on more than thirty percent of the population, which sort of makes you wonder why docs were handing out wellburtin as a wonder anti-depressant too. In some respects that’s how I’m expecting this to work. I’m not craving a cigarette and I expect some day not to be craving the juice.
I think if I were systematic about it the second there was a deviation I’d figure it was all fucked up and I might as well smoke. Although one of my careers was Addiction counselor I’m beginning to suspect all the platitudes and chants and bumper-stickers were all wrong. If I knew how to take two days at a time I think I would try. If I knew how to give myself over to a lower power, I’d give it a shot. AA works because it’s a spiritual program, that’s why it’s for them what’s hit rock bottom, you have to have your spirit deflated, drawn, gone. Smoking cessation has to take a different approach; tobacco doesn’t do that kind of destruction.
I am, of course, just talking about me. If I set a goal, take systematic daily steps towards meeting it, the smallest failure brings down the whole house of cards. I prefer the zyban mythos; do it the way it feels right and wake up one day (perhaps while you’re already awake) to find neither the urge nor the anxiety present.
The juice comes in different strengths. As a practical thing for quitting analog cigs it’s pure genius; you can have different carts at different levels. As a legal thing it sure will help in the most emotional plea the opponents of vaping will make; candy flavors to entice kids (there’s some half ass study about the rise in vaping among high school students, I say half ass because the details are sketchy and there isn’t a component about whether there is a decline in analog smoking among the same population --- just a conclusion and some bad deduction that this means tobacco has found a new way to be “cool”). Out of all the weird shit your kids could be doing, smoking zero nic blueberry Vegetable Glycerin seems awfully damn mild.
Christ if I were in Portland I’d be testing out the ‘Smoke anywhere!’ theory. Here not so much. I could handle outraged, I could handle a nod and a wink, I could handle the turn and fake cough, it’s the slightly wounded as a point of civil discourse that’d disturb me. I kind of liked the whole smoking outside thing, quick way to separate the chaff from the wheat. I don’t know how to phrase this nicely so I won’t; smokers are more interesting than non-smokers, the coolest place at any bar or party is outside with the smokers. Yes, I know, there are some very interesting non-smokers, most of the people I love are non-smokers, but, given a room full of strangers, the odds lean heavy towards the most interesting one’s going outside. If nothing else the tension pre smoke and the ease post smoke gives them social topography.
I have, however, smoked e-cigs in public rest-rooms. Nobody spazzed. I did it for a couple of reasons; even more so than coffee or alcohol, the bathroom makes me want to smoke. The other reason was to see if the molecule was large enough to set off smoke alarms. I forget all my alarm shit (shut up, I sold home security for a while) but there’s the kind that reads heat and the kind that reads the size of the air particles (if you are in a lab, for instance, dangerous shit could be floating around that is not hot, and things can smoke without much heat, not enough to set off an alarm, the idea being you want an early warning).
Yeah, ok, I’m boring myself, but this is a marker. I did find around when I started doing this by looking at this fucking journal, so I reckon I should leave a few other mile markers along the way, right? Yes? No?
Oh please unwad your panties about how cool you are but aren’t a smoker. Try it for yourself; follow the smokers out, especially if you’re in a place where you don’t know most of the people, like a seminar or something. There is an instant rapport and, once lit, a friendly instant rapport. Smoking doesn’t mean they aren’t assholes, but neither does non-smoking, but they become gregarious assholes (also they haven’t been paying attention for the last forty five minutes, and outside their focus snaps back into place).
Right after writing this I checked my email. I had one of the bazillion "Free" e-cig mails with the fine print that afterwards you pay an extrordinary high amount. Here is a quote from that ad, it's funny how anti-smoking and pro-smoking lobbys just make up whatever numbers they want; the real studies are very long, detailed and have caveats and explain what 'smoking related diseases mean' --- here ya go
We decided to see what expert medical doctors and product users had to say about electronic cigarettes, and the results were surprising. In fact, Joel Niztkin, Chair of the Tobacco Control Task Force for the American Association of Public Health Physicians concluded that "...if we get all tobacco smokers to switch from regular cigarettes to electronic cigarettes, we would eventually reduce the US death toll from more than 400,000 a year to less than 4,000, maybe as low as 400."
See? If read literally e-cigs will reduce the number of car accidents and just plain old cancer and GSW's.
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