The Legacy Of Nicotine ~ Smokin' Memories

I like to sit outside at Starbucks in the evening, enjoy a cup of coffee, smoke a few cigarettes, check out the chicks, and wish that I was thirty years younger. Lately I've been going through my files and posting pictures of girls who were in their teens and twenties when I photographed them, but that was thirty or forty years ago. My memories are often as hazy as that cloud of smoke, but it asmazes me what tiny little details can work their way up out of the murk, gradually over a week or two, when I decide on posting an old photograph.

This photo is one of my hold-the-camera-in-one-hand-and-shoot-myself shots with the 15mm ultra wide angle lens. I rarely crop, but here it seemed to emphasize the cloud of smoke better.

Yeah, Larry, my doc, is about the same age as I am, and we're always getting into it about my smoking and how it's bad for my heart, my lungs, my whatever, but he admits that yes, he's seen the research that nicotine increases cognitive abilities and delays the onset of Alzheimers, and that caffeine seems to enhance the effects. My last battery of scans and tests show clear lungs, clear arteries, everything works as designed, and I remind him that I'm the one with the flat tummy and full head of still mostly brown hair, not him. My mind still remembers all of those pretty young girls from the past and my eyes still enjoy looking at the ones here now. Drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes sure beats eating pills.