The question of why I don’t smoke cigarettes is both an easy and a complicated question to answer. Simply, I never had an interest in smoking cigarettes. My parents smoked unfiltered cigarettes when I was growing up, and I detested that smell that continuously permeated the air. And my fetish from pretty early on focused solely on cigars, and watching women smoke cigarettes did not have the same arousing effect on me.
But when I was growing up in the 1970s, cigarette smoking was ubiquitous. You could smoke anywhere. People commonly smoked in the movies, on tv, and on television, and not just criminals and low characters, but also the heroes and heroines. By the age of fourteen or fifteen, most of the pretty girls I knew smoked cigarettes, and also most of my male friends as well smoked marijuana as well as cigarettes.
Cigars, on the other hand, were not very commonly smoked. It was hard to find good cigars. What you could find, in drug stores, convenience stores and super markets, was cheap machine-made cigars, especially filter-tipped ones. At the end of the 60s, it had become very hip to smoke cigars with a tip, and in the 70s, all the cigar brands had at least one line of filter-tips.
When I was in high school, every morning, before the first period bell rang, a crowd of people would congregate out in front of all the entrances to smoke before they went in to begin the school day. All students, no teachers. Groups of friends would meet there to have a cigarette and catch up on the gossip of who was dating who and such. I always felt myself an outsider looking in on the cool kids, the kids who smoked.
I had had my chance to be part of that group. When I was twelve, a group of about 5 boys my age, which included two of my best friends, invited me to go with them to hang out in an underpass under the new highway and smoke. I went with them because I didn’t want to be left out, but I didn’t really want to smoke. I did hang out with them all day, and other than making a couple of lame excuses why I didn’t want to smoke that day, I didn’t bring it up.
But in the years thereafter, I was very glad that I didn’t join in with them. My friends and I throughout the lower grades had been the best students, not only getting the best grades, but also being the most active in things like the class plays. But not long after my friends started smoking, and then drinking, our paths diverged. I continued to be a good student and an active one, and school was very enjoyable for me, while they spent more and more of their time drinking and smoking, and misbehaving. When they got together to talk, the main topic of conversation was how much they had drunk the night before, or what kind of drugs they had gotten high on. Then the next matter for concern was when they would be able to sneak away to smoke their next cigarette, and maybe to drink some liquor they had smuggled into school. That all seemed like such a waste of time to me, a manner of existence completely bereft of imagination and humor, something I did not want for myself in the slightest.
I still know and see many people who smoke cigarettes as some mark of rebelling against the status quo, endlessly pining for that next smoke, and arranging their whole lives around when they can get that next smoke. At my most judgmental, they strike me as pathetic addicts – it wouldn’t matter what their addiction was, whether it be coffee, cigarettes, gambling, alcohol etc., their behavior, pitiful as it is, is remarkably the same to me. When I am feeling more sympathetic towards cigarette smokers, then my attitude toward them is one of bemusement, especially in the winter when they have to endure the cold at regular intervals and take a break to go outside and smoke.
In contrast to my former friends turned smokers, in college I met many people who smoked cigarettes, including many very attractive ladies, who still managed to be good students. They were not rebels so much, but smoked more as a social affectation, as a way of fitting in. I never felt like I fit in anywhere, and it was clear that smoking would not achieve that for me. I was by then happier to be known as the strange character who didn’t fit in.
Besides, by college I was set on becoming a musician, with my singing voice as my main instrument. And smoking, it was clear to me, would do damage to my instrument. Ironically, it still being a time and place where decadence was prevalent, lots of people who were in the college choir still smoked at least occasionally, at parties if not all the time.
But not me. Yes, I joined a fraternity (a music fraternity) and did a good amount of drinking, but I did not get into smoking. I did date one woman who smoked cigarettes, and she was very courteous toward me, never smoking when I was around and giving me warning when she was going to smoke.
The final reason I don’t smoke cigarettes is that as I grew up anti-cigarettes, I became pro-cigars, and so I have discovered many positive aspects of smokingn cigars that, to me, are not found in smoking cigarettes, and so that lack to my mind just adds to the number of reasons that I have no interest in cigarettes. In a future post (perhaps my next post), I will compare and contrast cigars and cigarettes from my perspective.
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