Posted 2/14/2005 05:23:00 PM by Douglas

Smoking: the grey cloud that binds us all together. At least it used to. What a fascinating look at smoking, and its place in the nanny-state we live in now.

But then I realised that something was missing: smoke. It used to unwind from the tips of our cigarettes and tie us together, then spread into a sheltering haze that made the tricky acts of flirting or making new friends a little easier. Without cigarette smoke, the people at the restaurant bar that night seemed a little too separate from each other, a little less relaxed than they might have been if the right to smoke in public places hadn't been taken away. Sharing a love of smoking used to unite us in a slightly illicit club whose members all took pleasure in doing something naughty; and now that our wings are clipped, a part of that camaraderie feels like it's lost forever.

You could probably make a case for the explosion of the cinema in the 20th century as being responsible for the exponential growth of tobacco smoking, and its associated cancer, emphysema, and heart disease deaths, but it's so much more complicated than that. Even if everyone were smoking, it still made it seem that you were tempting your fate. Sure it's bad for you (as my grandfather once said, "they called 'em coffin nails 100 years ago"), but that didn't matter. Smoking gave you an instant rapport with anyone with that bummed a smoke, a light, or that was winded after walking up a single flight of stairs.

I especially enjoy the tie in with the "Puritanism" that's going on everyone now. Smoking was first, fast food and alcohol are soon to follow. Will it ever end?

While none of these is alarming in itself, they add up to a new Puritanism that turns the old paradigm on its head: now instead of tempting the Fates by being bad, we put all our efforts into being good. If smoking was about being grown up, the new Puritanism is about being a perpetual child, and living in a protected world that has never existed except in fantasy.

I couldn't have said it better. The "Nanny State" is out there looking out for everyone, because like a petulant child, we're all incapable of taking care of ourselves. Hell, you might get a burger and a six-pack on your way home. And where would that lead?

What concerns me is the picture of who we perceive ourselves to be: self-involved children pretending that we can escape death by playing God the Doctor and Personal Trainer. Though smoking may not have been good for us, the camaraderie that went along with it made this journey more fascinating, and its end perhaps more bearable.

Damn right. Dennis Leary said it best when he noted:

Cigarettes take seven years off your life. Well guess what folks, they're the years at the end! The kidney dialysis/adult diaper years. Ya know what? You can have 'em, 'cause I don't want 'em.

I don't know what my alternate reality would have been like if I was a non-smoker in college, but I do know that the most interesting people I've ever met, and those I still talk to on a regular basis are people I met while smoking.