Why we smoke.
Why do we smoke? American Indians were the ones who introduced us lowly Europeans to smoking somewhere in the 1500 or 1600's (or around there) We were instantly hooked, it became fashionable to smoke. Even nowadays, when we know how bad smoking is for us, we continue to smoke. We have companies printing glossy adverts telling us of the smooth taste or whatever with a whopping great 'You will die if you smoke!' bit at the bottom. Who is this surgeon general anyway? and why does he want to keep reminding us of how bad smoking is for us and that it's gonna kill us. We're gonna die anyway, christ we could get hit by a bus tomorrow and if wouldn't matter whether we smoked or not.
Smoking has turned into a scapegoat, if you will, taking it in the ass for just about every type of cancer going. It's gotton to the stage where you can only smoke in certain places, your house, and outside. And even when it is outside people tend to give you evil looks when you light up at the bus stop. I had that type of experience, some stupid businessy type woman kept coughing and stuff, but the way I saw it was, we were outside and she didn't have to stand beside me.
Most of my friends smoke, none of them have a particular reason why they do. The question, why, is generally answered by 'I don't know, boredom?' and most have been smoking from their early teens, me included. I remeber the day quite clearly, behind my bestfriends house, with cigarettes we'd stolen from her mom. Lighting up, inhaling, coughing, then thinking we were brillian. I was ten years old. It wasn't until I was about fourteen that I started smoking on a regular basis, getting a friend in the year above me in school to buy them for me. Then my mom caught me when I was sixteen and started letting me smoke in the house, the way she saw it was, I was gonna do it anyway so I might aswell stay indoors and do it. She even gave me money for smokes and sometimes still buys me them if I'm stuck for money and have none.
This of course meant that I started smoking more. For the simple reason I could. And so it turns out that I'm addicted to them. If I'm bored, I'll have a smoke. If I'm on the phone, I'll have a smoke. If I wanna escape to my room, I'll go have a smoke. I'm okay though, I can go a day without having one, as long as I can. If I had none, I'd go crazy and want one badly. Everyone I know is the same, most of us will list smoking under hobbies in questionaires.
But I'm losing track here. There could be proper reasons for smoking. We're less likely to loss control and kill people cause we'll sit down and have a smoke to think about it. We may be gonna die earlier, but at least we miss out on the last few years, the bad years in my mind. We spent more time pondering things, cause we need to think about stuff when we're smoking. We're more relaxed cause we have nicotine in our systems. Okay so we're not relaxed when we don't have smokes, but we are once we buy them and have one. It's a cost efficent little buzz too, cheaper than drugs and alcohol together.
I think it comes down to the fact that we're bored. We need something to do but don't have the money for any expensive hobbies. We like being able to cough up black chunks of goo in the morning. We like the little buzz we get. We like being able to to tricks with them, exhaling through our noses, inhaling through our noses, waterfalls etc. Even going as far as to do tricks involving our hands or tongues and putting them out on them. Lighters are nice too, I have a fishbowl half full of lighters I've collected. Zippos are nice too. Matchbooks can be nice too, little momentos of places we've been to and memories of what happened that night. We like pretending to be sophisticated around little kids. Disgusting old ladies by not being "nice girls" and smoking. It's a form of rebellion really, we enjoy getting looks from people. We enjoy smoking, if we didn't we wouldn't do it would we?