Gen Z doesn't know what it was like when everything smelled like cigarettes no matter where you went because half of people older than 15 in the western world chainsmoked indoors and even non-smokers had the scent permeated into our clothing, hair, furniture, and even the walls of every building.
I remember the smoking section joke.
"Smoking section" - no partition, no wall, let alone a separate room. Just... this is where the smoking section ends. Here, let us seat you next to it. Yes, the dude sitting right next to you is in the smoking section...
IN A PLANE. AN ENCLOSED TUBE.
Mind you, I smoked for decades. 20-48 off & on. And SUCH a fucking asshole about it.
Sometimes I think everything bad that happens to me is payback for that shit.
The only shitty thing I didn't do was throw the butts out into the world. THAT much, I managed to avoid. 1000 fewer years in purgatory?
I smoked very briefly as a teen goth girl in the mid-90s, and quit pretty much when it became clear that I smelled horrible for it. I guess my vanity for not smelling bad won out over my vanity of trying to look like a cool goth girl.
The smelling bad is something that haunts me. I feel retroactively HUMILIATED thinking about how AWFUL I smelled to everyone who wasn't a smoker for all those years.
All those guys I dated & slept with...
WHY DID THEY PUT UP WITH IT? I would NEVER. It's SO FUCKING GROSS. I must've stunk so bad.
what method did you use to quit?
I quit a few years after I quit heroin. I just realized it was a waste and I did not like showing my son a model of a parent smoking.
How long have you been off heroin? Congratulations, by the way. I've been sober coming up on 27 years, and the hardest fucking thing I've dealt with was opiate dependence. And let's get real "dependence" is the medical nicety for "addiction." I was fully addicted. And it was a goddamned BITCH.
I sopped smoking in 1985 when I was eight months pregnant. When I went to hospital to have my baby they had just banned smoking from inside the wards. You were still allowed to smoke in the dining room though. It was full of women puffing up a storm on Winfield 25s. 🤢
I have to give my my older, Reagan-Republican-Libertarian brother this... when he smoked in the mid-1970s, his toddler son took one or more of his butts from an ashtray and tried to eat it/them. My brother quit on the spot.
Chantix & vape. I realise the vape is controversial, but there it is. I had a REALLY hard time staying quit. Chantix helped QUITTING... but I have a VERY addictive personality, & always ended up picking up again. Having a vape around stopped that.
I cut the nicotine out of the vape eventually.
Once i was travelling by bus to another state, and i was desperate for a smoke, when we reached the first stop break mid travel i think i smoked about half a package. When i returned the smell filled the entire bus, and I’ve never been so much embarrassed to realize this is how i aways smelled
Loved it.
There's no need for the qualifier, you know. In one way or another, we're all here to "self-pimp." Whether or not we've got art to share.
You, on a far more literal level than many, have a GREAT reason to share.
SO SHARE IT.
FLY THAT FLAG HIGH! You're an ARTIST! Don't APOLOGISE.
I briefly dated a smoker once back in the day. When we kissed it was like kissing an ashtray and that was an immediate “nope.” Instant dealbreaker from then on.
When you're a left-wing secular humanist attending a politically conservative, Catholic party school in Ohio and you meet someone who comes off to you as the living personification of Greenwich Village, the fact that she smokes is not going to be enough to keep you from being utterly smitten.
Smoking is filthy almost from the moment the pack is opened. The cellophane gets tossed to the ground, the match gets tossed to the ground, the ashes get flicked anywhere/everywhere, the butt gets tossed to the ground (or sometimes dumped en masse from cars), and all that's not to mention the smoke.
What is that with smokers and just tossing butts everywhere?
I swear I saw one meticulously toss his bottles in recycling, his trash in landfill, and cigarette butt on the ground.
2/ SOL if you did not smoke.
Most folks didn't stop smoking when they raised the prices on cigarettes with all the insane taxes...poor people just have cut a lot of things out of their lives. Sin taxes just take advantage of people that have addictions...and its sad.
