Ugly Truth

There is an interesting post upcoming detailing what I did Saturday night while out with Jen, which I'll probably do tomorrow. Considering the inebriated state I was in while chatting with Guinevere about it afterwords, it's a wonder I remember any of it at all, but like with the old days of Church I remember every detail. I just don't have the energy to tackle it head on right now. So let's go elsewhere.

I thought of this one today while driving home. My life as an inconoclast during my time as my alter-ego wasn't created out of thin air. I've always held some unpopular opinions, or at least some that aren't politically correct. Just because it was on my mind, and because I need something to jumpstart the second 100 batch of posts, I figued I'd bring some of those things up. Here we go.

Smoking is cool. I've always believed this, and I probably always will. It has nothing to do with the Marlboro Man or Joe Camel, but since I was a little kid it has looked cool to me when someone is smoking a cigarette. Sorry.

I'm surprised I never became a smoker because of that. It seemed like lighting up would make me cool, and when I was younger I needed whatever help I could get, because when I was a teenager me and cool were pretty far apart. Colleen might disagree with that, but she'd be the only one. I didn't know anyone at the time who smoked either. Since then, I've been good friends with lots of smokers, including Dan, Adam, my ex-wife, Milta, Shannon, Becky, Larissa, Tanja, Lisa, and Jen. Yes, Jen is a smoker, too. I'm not sure if I ever mentioned that here or not. I used to hang out in smoky strip clubs and other bars. And the Diner was wall to wall smoke morning, noon, and night. I've been a secondhand smoker for a while now.

Oh, I have smoked a cigarette in my time. Truth be told, I have a pack in my car right now. Back in the day, I used to take cigarettes from Dan or Larissa and air-smoke them, which is to say I would go through the motions of smoking a butt without inhaling. Sure, that's dumb, but I wanted to know what it was like to see how the other half lived. Soon after that, I started smoking some teeny weeny cigars, because fuck it, I wanted to smoke something. I did inhale those, too, and I used to get a wicked headrush out of those. I stopped with those sometime around when I closed down the whole Church thing in an overall effort to clean myself up. But I picked that habit back up during my stay on second shift at LSI, if for only a few months.

It was Jen who taught me how to really smoke a cigarette. You would think it would have been Dan, or Shannon perhaps, but nope. I never actually took a real puff until Jen taught me how to smoke for real while we were sitting at a picnic table plotting evil the day before she got fired from LSI. The headrush I got from inhaling those Marlboros almost knocked me out, but they weren't really so bad. Now I only have one once in a while, just for the hell of it, like today on the way home from work. It's no cause for concern, because I can really take it or leave it.

But now I've seen how the other half lives.