The Five Strands of A Sedentary Empress

I Quit.

I seem to keep jumping ahead of the prompts.

It's no secret, then, that I find smoking to be hazardous and disgusting. What I don't talk about much is why. If I am honest, I have to admit that I don't really know what it is about it that makes me nauseous. Obviously, the smell is offensive, and the look is fairly off-putting, and the sexiest man or woman on the planet is immediately relegated to the trash pile in my mental list of guilty pleasures if I find out that they smoke (except for Johnny Depp. I don't know why he's exempt, but it's not like I'll ever kiss him, anyway). I find it dirty, leaves the fingers yellowed and the breath unbearable especially if the smoker is also a coffee-drinker. It results in discarded butts on green velvet grass or in perfect, white snow. It sounds bad, especially when the person who smokes is waking, coughing and hacking while trying to sit upright. It is a waste of money, too. To summarize, it smells, looks bad, is dirty, is wasteful and oh yes, it kills people.

My mother was a smoker until I was fourteen. She used to send me into the convenience store to get them for her, too. 'Craven A' King Size Large, and the shopkeeper would always give them to me without questionning it. I was a child, for godsake, but back then, people didn't know what they know now. Perhaps there is a connection between my relationship with my mother and my disdain for smoking? I think that's too easy, actually. What I do remember is refusing to eat anything she made if she'd been smoking at any point near or during the preparation. I would throw away my lunch at school or I would steadfastly refuse to eat my dinner, often sitting at the table until well after everyone else had been excused. It revolted me, the smell of it, and I figured that having her breathe anywhere near my food would likely contaminate it. She eventually quit (after three unsuccessful tries) when my father promised to reward her with a dog if she did it. My mother has always been one for rewards, a materialistic Pavlovian. My grandparents also smoked, and their walls were covered in it as they got older, trails of brown tears on the bathroom walls from where the condensation rained down and brought the nicotine film with it. I still remember when my grandmother, who had developed dementia, was sitting on the end of her couch looking for her cigarettes, and we said simply, 'Oh, you don't smoke! You've never smoked, Grace.' She was confused for about a second before shrugging her shoulders and responding 'Oh, I thought I did.' That was the end of her smoking, which caused me to wonder if it is more a mental need rather than solely physical. She never asked for them again, after sixty years of doing so, and basically forgot she'd ever needed them. She died in her early eighties of respiratory failure and my grandfather died six weeks later of a heart attack. I think it would be unreasonable to assume that their smoking didn't contribute in some way to their deaths, but I am grateful they lived as long as they did.

R's father was a very heavy smoker, and being around him often made my stomach turn. Just being in a car with him would make my clothes smell, enough so that my own parents asked me if I'd taken up the habit. When he'd come to visit, I would be awakened in the morning to the sound of him hacking and coughing and (oh my god!) spitting in my bathroom. I would become enraged by the sounds and smells of him, enough so that I was usually ungracious around him to the point of being rude. Couple that with his drinking problem and you have a fairly undesirable houseguest. Both of these habits came together to kill him at the age of fifty-one. R.'s uncle smoked two packs a day and when he found out he had a spot on his lung, rather than wait for the results he feared the most, he killed himself to avoid the slow, withering death he expected was coming. We never found out if it was cancer or not, but he's still dead so it doesn't matter.

My uncle E. smoked almost as much as R's dad, except he was often confined to the inside of the truck he drove for a living. My aunt often tried to talk him into quitting, but it was never the right time, never the right reason. He wouldn't take it outside, either, his reasoning being that he paid for the house and should have been able to do what he wanted, when he wanted. He developed lung cancer when he was fifty-three, it spread to his brain and he was dead by fifty-four. My aunt recently had to have a biopsy done on a growth on her lung. She's never smoked in her life, but I don't suppose that matters now. The results have not come back yet.

M. used to smoke, too. Years ago, way back when he was only a teenager. I would say I couldn't picture it if only some of the best photos of him in that time didn't include him holding one in his hand. He tells me it makes coffee taste spectacular, to which I respond that it makes your breath smell like excrement. He can't deny it, and smiles in defeat. He quit, he said, when he started dating his first serious girlfriend. Her father died an agonizing death from lung cancer and she would not entertain the idea of being with a smoker as a result. He thought about what she'd told him, weighed logic against his wants, and ultimately decided to stop. Cold turkey, he said, and it wasn't as bad as he'd thought. He'd been twenty then, only four years into the habit, so maybe that's what it made it easier, but he said that the idea of not dying an excrutiating death was really what compelled him to drop it. That girlfriend's mother also eventually died of cancer.

Are we connecting the dots?

The thing is, I'm very much about using information to make an informed decision and I can't abide by people arguing for this habit because it doesn't make sense. There is absolutely nothing about it which benefits humanity in any way, especially when you consider that people are not just smoking dried leaves anymore, but are inhaling chemicals and additives which a corporation has concocted in order to foster the addiction. This is about money, just like heroin is about money, like cocaine is about money and by buying into it, a person essentially makes themself a mark. In the world I live in, it is a habit of the lower classes at the moment, the vice of the uneducated who often bring a rolling fog with them whenever they move. It is the mark of bingo parlour parking lots, of casinos and the line outside the street health clinic. You don't often find a smoker's corner near the library or the museum downtown. In Europe, though, it is far more widespread with every kind of citizen puffing away in the pubs or in the cafe down the street. While none of my aunts or uncles currently smoke, I do have several cousins who do, which makes me wonder if 'young smoking' is on the rise there now, just as it is here? I suspect that the growing societal intolerance in North America will be enough to bring on a smoking revolution in the younger people, obliterating class distinction and opening up to include every pissed off youth with the ability to inhale. Then, as they progress in years, develop physical problems associated with their poor choices, they will want someone to help them, to heal them and for many it will be too late. It's like telling someone not to jump off a cliff because it will hurt, and having them ask you to save them just before they hit the rocks. A weird kind of stupidity, no?

I asked M. recently if he missed smoking. He said that he misses the way the coffee tasted, and that he sometimes misses the taste of the cigarette itself, but never enough that he'd want to try it again.

It's suicide, he said simply, like everyone should know this, and the only people who benefit from it are the ones responsible for poisoning everyone.

Oh.

Don't expect me to understand you if you're angry that there's nowhere left for you to smoke anymore,either. Suck it up, buttercup, because you may not realize it yet, but this is actually a good thing being done for you. It is a gentle nudge away from all the excuses you've been using to justify it, the way you need to smoke when you drink socially, or to enhance the flavour of the food you've been eating in the restaurant. By telling you that you cannot do it here and there and everywhere, it limits you considerably, eases you away from it slightly and if you think about it, it might even seem kind of nice.

I do commend the ones brave enough to try to stop it before it stops them, though. I admire you. I applaud you, too. Dark Lady, you are a brave one indeed, and I think you're the ginchiest.

It's not like I don't have my own vices, but I'm pretty sure no one has ever died from second-hand chocolate consumption.