The post in which everyone realizes what an idiot I truly am

I haven’t spoken about this yet but there has been something really making me completely crazy for several months now. It has been gathering steam and has now really come to a head in the last couple weeks.

See, I have been smoking the same brand of cigarettes for about 30 years now. They’re called Export A medium. Technically, I actually used to smoke the mild but they stopped making those... Anyway, these are very particular cigarettes. Made in Canada of a higher quality tobacco than, and with about 50% less weird chemicals than American. They are also significantly shorter than American cigarettes. No other tobacco product tastes like them.

The problem is that I can’t really afford them anymore. I noticed them just going up and up a few months ago. So I, with much trepidation, started checking out some roll your own tobaccos. I opted to try American Spirit Perique. It is all fancy and shit and comes in a cool black packet. Technically a blend, the perique part is a tobacco usually used in pipe tobacco blends. It is grown just on one plantation in North Carolina. So yeah, it’s all cool and hipscale I guess. In the long run it’s ok. But it tastes nothing like my smokes. It has gone stale in it’s pouch in my drawer and I kept on buying mine.

Suddenly the carton price went up ten dollars from the manufacturer. Let me put this in perspective - sixty eight dollars for two hundred cigarettes means thirty-four cents a piece. And people give me attitude for snarling at panhandlers asking for a smoke?! That's basically a buck every three cigarettes. I have been determinedly tooling around town, buying out every store that still has the old price for about two weeks now. Well, I have now officially emptied the town of all the old Exports. Today I reluctantly called the best tobacconist in town, Maison Edward, and asked them for a recommendation for loose tobacco. They suggested I might like “Peter Stokkeby Danish” whatever the fuck that was.

And that is how I found myself today, at my usual tobacconists, buying all the necessary accouterments to roll my own. The shortest rolling machine they sell, a bag of the shortest filters, three packs of zig-zag whites, and a can of this “Peter Stokkeby” muck. When I got to the checkout I just started crying. It was like I was going through that painful, disentangling, part of a disintegrating relationship. This is where the “I can just see everybody calling me an idiot” part comes in.

Well universe, just pardon the fuck out of me for loving what I love. What I love is good tobacco. More than drugs, more than booze, probably more than sex and chocolate both. Obviously quite possibly more than life itself. Because I really don’t care if tobacco kills me. Of course it actually won’t, because I am, of course, the special exception to that statistical norm. But if it did I am ok with that, well, the death part, not so much the part just prior to that.

Remember how I said earlier this fall about pieces of my identity falling away and I wasn’t handling it so well? Well this is sure feeling like another. Similar to, but less intense than a few years ago, when the cat I had lived with since I was eighteen died. The sense of loss is palpable. This is something I have known my entire adult life. And I can probably expect no support at all in this as most people, when suggesting that I quit smoking, have no understanding that I have been smoking since conception and that from over here that feels very much like a suggestion like “why don’t you just stop eating?” And don’t even tell me the government is doing all this for my own good. (The taxes part of the equation that is.) We all know that they don’t actually want me to quit cuz then I wouldn’t be paying the taxes they drool for would I? Nor would I die as early making their SSI system more efficient.

So that’s it , I am officially in mourning for my best friend and stupid “brand”. I am totally branded, commodified and I'm having a chee-Z American entitlement pissy, hissy fit about it. Yup I'm just a jerk.