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.

Suddenly Everybody's a Smoker

OK, I smoke. I smoke cigarettes. I admit it! Everybody is always getting on my case about it, chewing me out, telling me how bad it is for my health and so on. But I still smoke. I remind them of research, legitimate medical research as reported in medical journals, showing that nicotine enhances cognitive abilities and delays the onset of Alzheimers. It also appears that the tobacco smoke gives your lung tissue the equivalent of a sun tan, protecting it from getting "burned' from exposure to the more harmful pollutants found in the air.

Years ago I ran across an article in a medical journal suggesting that it was better to smoke full strength unfiltered cigarettes. We're going to smoke until we satisfy our nicotine craving and we can do that faster and easier with an unfiltered Camel and get less of the harmful crap in the process.

It's getting difficult to find unfiltered cigarettes these days. I started rolling my own. A can of Bugler tobacco, which has a very similar Turkish blend to the tobacco in Camels, cost me about $13.00 and makes about 11 packs of cigarettes, which is a BIG savings! For about $10.00 each I've bought two snazzy 1920's vintage art deco silver cigarette cases at antique shops. One is sterling and marked Tiffany. I'm not sure if the other is sterling, but it tarnishes like silver and it has no makers' mark on it.

They both attract attention and a lot of non-smokers want to look at them, ask me if I use a machine to roll them (no), and invariably want to try one. It's simply amazing how many non-smokers will use that as an excuse to cadge a smoke, and then have the nerve to do it every time you run into them. It must be the need for nicotine to enhance their cognitive abilities.