I heard this song on my way to work this morning. The song was written by Joan Jett and the Blackhearts back in 1988. I somehow thought the song was older than that but I digress….the chorus of the song reminded me of my former love affair with one Mr. Marlboro, which got me to thinking. Why did (do) we romanticize the cigarette? They somehow take on that ‘first love’ persona in our mind. They never did wrong, we will never be able to replicate that giddy feeling they gave us. But why? When I sit back and think about it, there are actually more things I didn’t like about smoking than things I did like. So here’s my short list.
- Smoke in the eyes. How is it that one wrong move, the slightest little waft, will knock you to your knees as quick as mace? Maybe that’s what the police use in tear gas, if it isn’t they could.
- The one itty bitty rogue ash that would always land on top of your hand/finger. You might as well drop acid on yourself – at least that’s what it felt like.
- Burnt black fuzz around your car window. No matter how far down you had the window, why did we always seem to singe that stuff?
- The fire safe cigarette. Sounds like an oxymoron – it is! It became law back in 2009 here in Pennsylvania that they could only sell these fire safe cigarettes. You all ever hear of these? They decided to put fire resistant ‘speed bumps’ in our cigarette paper so that, if left unattended, these cigarettes would self extinguish. I don’t know, maybe they saved lives, but for me all they did was forever change the way I smoked a cigarette. Now I felt the need to continuously puff on them so I was in no danger of it going out on me. If you were unlucky enough for it to go out on you, first you’d try to puff puff puff real quick to see if you could get it to reignite. Then, if that didn’t work you were on to the dreaded relight. Either way you’d end up with some combination of the above mentioned list all happening simultaneously.
So what do you miss the least about smoking? I know there are so many reasons out there, so lets hear them and end this romance with the cigarette!
