Must Be I've Been Smoking Too Long

Now when I get to smokin'
I put my worries on a shelf
Don't think about nothin'
Try not to see myself
Tell me, tell me, what have I done wrong
Ain't nothin' goin' right for me
Must be I been smoking too long.

- Robin Frederick, as recorded by Nick Drake

Well, I never thought I'd be blogging about this. About smoking, anyway.

OK, here's the background. My dad was a smoker, to the tune of several packs a day, and so was my mom - although she tended to smoke about a pack a week. Growing up, it seemed that most adults smoked. And they smoked everywhere. About the only places I remember where smoking was not allowed was in the grocery store and in church. It was even permitted in department stores, with metal ashtrays bolted to the columns that held the roof up and cigarette burns in all the carpets.

My dad smoked with the windows up on the car. It didn't bother me when I was a little kid, but as I became a teenager, it did. Especially when my dad would drive me to school on a winter morning and he'd be smoking and refuse to crack his window open, not even a little bit. He'd yell at me if I opened mine.

Once, I pulled my t-shirt over my mouth and breathed through it until we got to school. When we got there, I had a brown ring where my mouth had been - that's how much smoke the fabric had filtered out. When dad saw that, he got mad. At me. Ah well. I'd come to understand that, later. Addiction does funny things to good people.

I remember that it was my job to clean the car every weekend - I used to wash all the brown sticky good off the inside of the car windows. Nasty, looking back on it.

I experimented with cigarettes during the summer of my 13th year. I had a summer job detasseling corn. This is detasseling corn, if you're curious. Only we didn't make minimum wage - that was before there was such a thing. We got sixty cents an hour, and I made $300 in a full summer. Something like that. Anyway, the kids all smoked - so I stole smokes from my pop (Kool Filter Kings), and I smoked too. Got good and sick the first time, turned green, bazooka-barfed, then it was easy and fun and kept my mind off detasseling, which is pretty much a lousy job, even when you're 13 years old and live in the middle of frickin' nowhere, Illinois. In 1974.

But when the summer ended, I had to quit smoking. Hard to conceal a habit in a town of 400 (San Jose, Illinois - pronounced "San Joe's" not "San Ho-Zay"), when you're 13 years old. I don't recall having a problem quitting. I just went back to school and that was the end of that.

Anyway, I managed to resist so-called 'peer pressure' to start smoking later on, in high school in Golden, Colorado. And I managed to resist it in the Marines. So you could say I avoided the trouble-spots in a young person's formative years - this would have been the mid to late 1970's and early 1980's - we had Disco to contend with. By the way, we're sorry about all that. Big mistake, looking back on it.

But being perverse as always, I started smoking at age 31, and I soon had a huge habit. Two packs a day, Salem Ultra Lights. Yum, yum, they tasted good. Loved 'em. Why did I start? Long story. Let's just say it involved a whole bunch of stupidity.

Well, I finally decided to kick last year, and on June 12, 2004, I did. It has been just over a year since I quit, and I'm glad I did. I have put on weight, yes. But I can also draw a deep breath without coughing, and I feel a lot better.

I didn't want to become one of those nasty evil anti-smokers, which former smokers sometimes become. Those guys are the worst. They feel it is their appointed duty to spew every fact nugget about the dangers of smoking that they have lodged in their pointy little heads at every smoker they see. And smokers don't want to hear it.

It's a drug folks. Smokers are addicted. And if you've never been addicted to a drug, you have no idea. There are no health facts that you can present that will convince them to quit. They already know about the risks. They already get up in the middle of the night and hack up half a lung in the bathroom sink. They already know that they have a king-sized unfiltered monkey on their backs. And it lies to them, and they know that, too. So I say leave the smokers alone. This is a battle they will have to confront themselves - or not. But nothing you or I can say will mean one tiny thing to them - and will most definitely tick them right off.

And I support the right of smokers to smoke. Yes, it is nasty to those of us who don't smoke. And yes, I think non-smokers have a right to breathe clean air. And whenever the rights of smokers and non-smokers come into conflict, I think that one must come down on the side of the non-smokers; their right to clean air trumps a smoker's right to burn one. So in airplanes - no smoking. I even go along with non-smoking office buildings and making smokers go outside to smoke - and not in that gauntlet outside the front door, either. But I don't think it is the government's business to tell restaurants that they cannot have a smoking section - let the market dictate that. I don't think smokers should be prohibited from smoking outdoors as long as it is not while standing next to someone who objects. And so on. Blah blah blah.

So OK. Last night, I had my photography club meeting in Goldsboro. There is another member of the club who happens to live on my block - we're the only members from Wilson, and it's a one-hour drive. So last month, I drove, and this month, he did.

But he's a smoker. And he asked me if I minded if he smoked. And I said it would not be a problem. Because I didn't think it would be.

But it was. He was like my dad. Oh, he cracked the window - about a gazillionth of an inch, I think. And the smoke made me sick, sick, sick. By the time we got back from the meeting, I felt like throwing up. Dizzy, nauseous, and my clothes reeked of cigarette smoke. Yes, I know smokers don't think their clothes 'reek' - I know, I've been there. Trust me, they stink. A lot. And so do the clothes of everyone else who comes near you. I was wrong when I thought my funk didn't get on everybody else. It did. I humbly apologize to those I've wronged.

Anyway, I had a nice hot shower this morning, and of course I'm wearing clean clothes, and you know what? I can still smell the damned things. It's like it is in my head, up my sinuses or something. And I have a headache and I feel slightly ill, too. The headache is kind of like the headaches I would get when I was a smoker and woke up in the morning and didn't have a smoke until 10 a.m. on a weekend - a kind of withdrawal headache. My eyes are burning like an allergy attack.

Mrs. Wiggy asked me this morning if I had been tempted by being around my smoking neighbor all evening. The answer? Not even for a second.

So there you go.

Blowing Smoke Rings,

Wiggy