Maybe, just maybe, the thing I need — the thing I need from all you wonderful smokers and smoking appreciators — is a tender “Boo” and a consoling “Hoo”.
You may have noticed that it’s been a while since your web host published a post. And, if you were reading the posts I had published, you know that I had BIG PLANS for boosting traffic on the ‘site. I was determined to create a relaxing, rewarding and entertaining place for all of you — especially you lovely ladies — to light up and to feel simply wonderful about your sexy self. I wanted to make ‘Puff of Heaven’ a hub of happiness for smokers and appreciators to enjoy each other’s company and (of course) to enjoy all the many benefits of regular nicotine administration.
Sometimes I feel like a little puff. Sometimes I feel like a little more. Why do you ask?
Now, that certainly seems like a worthy project for yours truly, doesn’t it? You have to figure that if I’d been on my game, and spent the last month or so waxing poetic about tobacco and about all the lucky folks who make use of it; this place, by now, would be positively ablaze with the celebration of cigarettes, and virtually fogged over with the delicious smoke of burning enthusiasm.
Plus, I had this whole “stats” project lined up to tickle the numbers nerd in all of us.
What I hadn’t counted on was that tsunami of emotional provocation people euphemistically refer to as “The Holidays”.
Turns out that when you’re as old and as set-in-your-ways as Charon’s Aide, and you’re adjusting to a sudden (though expected) change in “relationship status” after being married for sixty two hundred years or however long it was… Well, in that situation, it’s pretty easy to lose a little of your pop, your bubbliness, your effervescence, as you might describe it. It’s pretty easy to start a love affair with the covers on your bed. It’s pretty easy to assess the marvelous and captivating opportunities that life provides us and say, “Fuck It!”
The good news, of course, is that “holidays” don’t last forever and even though the days in Boston aren’t getting any warmer they are getting longer, and the Patriots are winning, and (amazingly!) my gloom and depression haven’t dissuaded an ever-increasing cadre of women who — how shall I put it — seem to be more than willing to offer me an oasis of affection along that arid stretch of life one has to endure while reorganizing one’s insides.
Who’d ‘a thunk it?
Let’s let all this chat serve as a preamble to a conversation I want to provoke about one of the many nasty and unenlightened things that (clearly jealous) non-smokers say. That is, “Smoking is just a crutch for people who have unresolved emotional problems.”
My answer to that is, “Duh!”
How is it anything less than a miracle that there exists, in this astonishing world of ours, a fast-acting balm for the anxieties, annoyances, griefs and outrages that are an inescapable part of living life as a human being? Why should there be a negative connotation to the word ‘crutch’? What’s a crutch but a marvelous gizmo for enabling folks with mobility problems to get around?
Am I the only one who’s observed that life has a way of knocking you off balance from time to time? Check that! Life will only knock you off balance if you’re actually living. If, as an alternative to living, you invest all your time pretending that you’re made of better stuff than the “weak” folks you view with disdain — maybe then you don’t need a crutch. You don’t have any reason to leave that tower of strength, that pinnacle of perfection, that happy place that is your state in life. No need for help getting around if you have nowhere to get around to.
So, to sum up my response to the “criticism” that smoking is simply a way to feel good about yourself when you’ve got troubles, I say this: “My thought is that you can go one of two ways. You can admit that life is a big bag of trouble, or you can be a friggin’ liar who pretends he can glide through life riding the crest of his own magnificence — and pouring contempt on those less wonderful than him.”
If you select the latter choice you’re free to wag your finger at all us weaklings.
That’s all I have to say on that unpleasant topic.
(Was I too nasty?)
Charon’s Aide
Puff of Heaven 