I learned to smoke when I was in third grade.

My buddy Teddy and his sister would entertain me at their house after school. We would watch Duran Duran on videotape, or MTV or play D&D, or sometimes swipe Pall Malls from the top of the parent's bureau and pretend we knew how to smoke them. Heck, I even saw my first porno there. For two third graders and a sixth grade girl? We we're naughty!

Anyway, I didn't become a smoker then, it was just racy play. Racy play would indeed lead to me smoking*, but it would be a while yet. That wouldn't happen until after high school, just after in fact - one might even say precipitated by the end of that institution's influence on my life, perhaps the last direct effect.

See. I was expelled, after lengthy deliberations and a dubious suspension, and denied the opportunity to return to any public school or continuation. I had to go to Adult Education. It was sudden, and sorta left me spinning as far as my understanding of the system. That's another story for another time. A few results of this circumstance, though, were that my schedule became very open, and those friends of mine that could also be affectionately termed dropout were suddenly around more often than they were when our days were bound by our very dissimilar (until that point, anyway) lives.

One of these was my eighth grade sweetheart, another was my buddy Mark. As soon as my school-lessness was duly confirmed, these two wasted no time in coming by at the newly acceptable time of 7:30pm on a (not)school night to take me out cruising on the town.

After all, we didn't have school anymore, we we're free of that time burden!

Mark and that old flame both smoked. Marlboro Reds, even. The things left me spinning and sickish, but damn did they add panache to my profile! Also, I learned to blow smoke rings, which has never stopped being awesome.

Still, I was no addict. I didn't crave cigarettes or really like their taste. I didn't buy smokes of my own. Nah, it'd take more than a smoky toy to grip me! In fact, a smoky toy was exactly what I needed! I would have to pick up a distinguished pipe. That would be way more my stylish than the Marlboros I was bumming from my recent new girlfriend (yep, same one) and Mark the Driver of our escapades in young turkism.

I decided to buy a pipe and tobacco of exceeding quality at the tobacconist henceforth.

Pipes are a pain in the ass. So, next I moved on to rolling little stogies of premium pipe tobaccos and keeping these in a handmade cigarette case (altoids ftw!) for when it was time to puff up with the crew. These tasted and smelled better than the typical smokes. Delicious, but work intensive and expensive. Given my hanging with the goth crowd from time to time, I moved on to good ol' Sampoerna Extras. A flavorful and easy to deal with clove cigarette with an unmistakable profile. Bold, black cylinders banded with gold, what majesty! Addiction was insidiously gaining ground. I was 17.

I joined the college, I read Tom Robbins, I chose to smoke Camels. Who wouldn't after that influence?

Years of addiction began with my girlfriend and constant companions, smokers all, and was further ramped up by the influence of Tom Robbins. I would have liked to still smoke fragrant or flavorful smokes, but within a year, such things were dwarfed by the engineered satisfaction of a perfect Camel. I did enjoy an amber flavored and a lavender flavored cigarette that year, and perhaps today I would sample those again, but I haven't seen the like since. Ah well. - moving on...

Thus I began smoking just as I left high school and entered college. I would smoke all and sundry substances, trying all vectors of nicotine dispensation for nigh 8 years before I had the temerity to throw the little guys away for the first time. Rough! But not as bad as it might seem. Work was good, life was on an upswing.

In the end I was cold-turkey quit in a matter of days and wouldn't return to the solace of the south until much later, 6 years!

You'll see that it came to pass, all of that time later, that I lost my job, took up drinking and eventually moved myself and my family thousands of miles from home to the coast. I could call it stress if I sought a scapegoat, but one way or another within a few months I would renew my kinship with my little paper friends in the box with the camel on.

This went on for a few months, six at most, before I was quite irritated by the fact that I was paying a pack of smokes for the bridge trip every single day, and then buying another bridge trip's worth of cigarettes on the other side on the way home. Just too much. this was also compounded by the fact that I lived on the third floor of a San Rafael apartment complex, and getting up the stairs would leave me pretty beat up sometimes. At some point I got another job, moved south to San Mateo, decided it was too much, and had to lay off again. "C'mon," I thought to myself, "I did this quitting thing for six whole years, right?" Yeah. Well. I did alright for about 2 years while I lived there, and didn't even consider picking the bad puff up again until I came back home to a mile up.

Maybe the air here is too thin, maybe the stress of the huge move did it again, but my company again had more cigarettes than not, and again I found myself intimate with a cotton filter. To what do I owe this recidivism? Hey, everyone around me has got a stogie and they begin with the offering. I think about how I like to blow smoke rings and if I've had a few drinks it is all over. It began with a recreational smoke every now and then, but sure as taxes it was soon a desire to have a cigarette at certain key moments in the the day. I did well in not allowing myself smoke breaks during the work day, but it soon became undeniable that I was desirous of a smoke, and I had to begrudgingly count myself among the tobacky-vipers yet again.

You see, smoking provides me with a few moments where everyone around me steps a few feet away. When I am in public, it offers me a small token of cruel independence. A lit cigarette says to the squares: "I'm sharp and edgy, and I fulfill my petty wants!" Smoking gives you an in to the conversations outside of clubs and bars, and gives you an excuse to carry a lighter. Cigarettes are a grey currency on the streets and in jail-houses. They are a proof of your own right and power to take yourself apart if you so dare.

Lastly, a cigarette outside is a moment of thoughtful solace, most of the time. A ten or fifteen minute repose wherein one can look to the sky and meditate on the issues of the day. Only another smoker will interrupt you in this reverie, and they can usually be assuaged with a light or a smoke. It's a touch of quiet and a time to slow the heart. Still, it is nasty tasting, a stale and cloying reek on my clothes, my lungs and in my car. Smoking is a horrible drain on my monetary and physical resources, and in general makes me feel like ass in the morning.

Smoking cigarettes is also, anecdotally anyway, a confirmed trigger for my migraines.

So, no fucking more!

As of the first of this year I have again left those immaculate white tubes of illicit joy and insidious pain by the wayside. It has, at the time of this praxis, been 16 days since I have enjoyed a cigarette. Again.

I miss the smoking, but not the craving. If that makes sense. I was particularly crabby this time through, so I hope it sticks. Each time that I've gone through the withdrawal I've been a bit more intolerable, and this last time was incrementally worse than the previous few. I'm not sure that bystanders would survive a further magnified version of that.

So there you have it. An addiction taken up, and put down, and taken up, and put down, and taken up, and finally put down again. This time maybe until the anti-cancer trait is perfected. If I can even afford them then.

*Upon reflection, racy play leads to most addictions that I can think of. Worth thinking about for a minute.