Left Coast Observatory

This will be the second time I've quit smoking cigarettes. Maybe it sounds more permanent to say 'the last time'. Or does simply 'I've quit' sound best? The thing is I used to smoke and now I don't. Really.

People say that to quit cigarettes is one of the hardest habits to break. They compare it to getting off of heroin. Maybe I'm exceptional in some way because I didn't find it particularly difficult. I just did it cold turkey, and hardly miss it now. Really.

Perhaps I was never really addicted to the nicotine or whatever chemical or combination of chemicals that people get hooked on. It didn't seem like a physical thing for me at all. It's more the fussy physical habits and the psychological rewards that I crave. Of course, I wanted to look cool.

The reason I started wasn't 'peer pressure' in the sense I usually understand it. My peers at the time did smoke, and I wanted to be like them. But they didn't apply the pressure. I did it myself. So I practiced in private --sometimes with a mirror-- before my public debut as a smoker.

Whenever the moment was right I could whip out my pack (a really cool brand, of course) and draw out a cigarette. Holding it casually in my mouth I would light it and draw the first dramatic drag. There was a time when I experimented with how to light them: a lighter, or a match? Which was the best method? Striking a wooden match was pretty dramatic in its own right. But lighters won out. Then it was zippos versus butanes and on and on.

When the point of smoking was mostly image driven, it costs more because off-brands weren't allowed. Thus as the government taxed and taxed again, cost skyrocketed. Smokers being society's pariahs, we were chased from restaurants and bars. Forced to huddle in alley doors in the rain. Pretty soon you didn't want anyone to know you smoked. And as a closet smoker, you'd hear the vitriol of the non-smokers and wonder why they hate us so?

But the real reason I quit was the harmonica. I wanted to play and didn't have the wind for it. Cigarettes were in the way. So it wasn't my health, or the wasted money and time, or the filthiness of it, or the jaundiced eye the general public cast on smokers that did the trick. It was just I couldn't both be a smoker and play this instrument. It wasn't a bad trade.