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Today marks three months of smoke-free living. I don't feel healthier, sexier, more socially responsible, less of a dupe to slick marketing, or in any way like "a better person."
I do feel temperamental, irrational, petty, alienated from the community of smokers--which is really the only community I'd join voluntarily--a sucker for anti-tobacco propaganda and doctors who trade in similar pleasure fear, and generally less contented. Contrary to popular (read: uninformed, easily molded) belief, cigar-smoking really isn't about drug addiction: in any event, three months is safely past any real or imagined withdrawal stage, so I'm guessing it's the ritual I miss more than anything else. Beyond that, I don't want to contribute to the false divide, perpetuated by some cigar smokers, between our "hobby" and the cigarette-smoker's "habit": the non-smoking public doesn't distinguish one tobacco-related vice from another, so neither do I.
Anyway, so much for not smoking.
If you smoke, don't stop: angering the non-smoking public and unmasking their shallow, my-vice-is-entirely-my-business/your-vice-is-a-menace-to-public-health sense of tolerance is a responsibility that shouldn't be taken lightly (remember F. Scott Fitzgerald: "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function." By forcing this contradiction, you're boosting the militant non-smoker's intellectual life).
If you don't smoke, seriously consider taking it up. Your peers were right--your "cool" needs all the help it can get.
Pictured is actor Craig T. Nelson--I loved the series "Coach", and I didn't know until today that he was a cigar-smoker (looks like a La Gloria Cubana Serie R, natural wrapper, but I can't be certain--a good, strong smoke). Craig has good taste.