Smoke 'Em If You've Got 'Em

I'd never IM'd with John Carney before today; the first topic was the investigation of a joke I couldn't remember. The joke involved an Indian, His Horse, and Said Horse's Large Dick. I still don't know what it is, but Andrew offered up a decent alternative. We spoke of our experiences Googling the joke, and how they were, at best, sordid. "Whatever you do, don't image search it," he warned. Sage advice, if I've ever heard any.

The second topic of conversation was Thomas Fleming, a guy who - according to Wikipedia - was noted by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a key intellectual of the "Neo-Confederate" movement. He's the editor of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, and is the ideological crack baby of Barry Goldwater and Ted Nugent. Naturally, this is somewhat in line with Carney's sensibilities, and John Boy wrote an article for them back in the day, which you can download as a YM exclusive here.

Now, if you're too lazy to download the PDF, the January 2004 article is about John's foray into becoming a smoker - as a libertarian and general asshole, it's his job to take up The Habit proceeding the Great Smoking Ban at the lung-ripened age of 30.

That's funny, because I'm an asshole, and I occasionally read Esquire. And I distinctly remember Esquire fiction editor and writer-at-large Tom Chiarella writing the exact same article, entitled, of course, Learning to Smoke. Three years later. And I imagine he got paid, handsomely, for it.

Now, I'm not saying that Chiarella plagurized Carney, or that he even stole the idea from Carney. But, from Carney's article:

On my way home that evening, I lit my first cigarette. It took four matches. I learned not to try to light the cigarette in the sulfur but to wait until the flames caught the cardboard match stem, and I learned to cup my hands just so against the wind. My lungs felt as if they were being pulled apart. My eyes watered. I kept spilling ash on my lapels and had trou- ble not burning my jacket. I experimented with a few different grips, settling on a cupped-in-the-hand style that not only kept the flame away from my clothes but made me feel like Steve McQueen. Best of all, I didn’t cough.

And from Chiarella's article:

My first: walking home the four long blocks from the school where I teach. I didn't know how to hold it. My fingers, clamped on the little cigarette, looked porcine, oversized, poorly positioned. The smoke, ashy and light, filled my mouth, made my eyes water. I coughed on every drag, even though I barely inhaled. I covered all this up by walking fast, figuring I'd just look like a man with places to go, a busy man, smoking his daily fact of life, not a poser considering the small elements of style that obsessed me: Was the cigarette well lit? How deeply should I breathe? Somehow, I cared, like some dumbass kid in ninth grade.

Conclusion? An uncanny resemblance in certain areas. Questioning Carney - who'd never seen Chiarella's article, delivered a near-perfect review: "He's much more boring than I am. This goes on for far too long."

Chiarella's writing once came up in conversation, and my friend started telling me about his latest human-gerbil piece. As it turns out, he'd sat at a poker table with Chiarella towards the end of his experiment. "Yeah, he's a fat fuckin' slob, and he took up smoking for Esquire, for a month. He's not doing it any more. He got rolled at the table that night." Also, for the record, John Carney still smokes. Attaboy.

In the end, Advantage: Carney (again, you can read his article by downloading it here). Rule to remember? If it's in a magazine, someone somewhere else has probably discussed it previously, in a much more entertaining matter, and in some cases, less words.

Me? I started smoking when I was 15: Kamel Red Lights. I've since smoked Marlboro Lights, Camel Lights, Parliament Lights, and in an attempt to quit smoking, Pall Mall's. In high school, people were immensely turned-off by the habit, but by senior year, they were all smoking, and by college, they were doing fucking roll-o's of Drum. I could quit now if I wanted - famous words, right? - but I kind of just do it to do it, now. It's a good excuse to get out of a bad conversation, and it gives you something to do when you're bored, pissed, or not in the mood to think of actual remedies to the issue driving you to smoke (or, inversely, it's something to do while you think of a remedy to the issue driving you to smoke). The real thrill was getting away with it when you were under the legal age, and also, doing it when nobody else was. Also, driving. Driving and smoking and especially smoking while driving a manual transmission - now that's great.

And that joke? Still don't know it. But cigarettes are made with organic horseshit. That's funny. Close enough, I guess.

UPDATE: The compiled smoking histories of YM!

99: Smoked for two weeks when I was twelve. Bought the pack from the vending machine in the police station. No shit.

Smoked Commanders my last quarter in college when I was dating an annoying smoker. I talked about non-smokers rights all the time. It infuriated her. She would exclaim: "But you smoke!". I would explain to her I was a smoking non smoker. She had great tits; give me some slack.

I smoke Dunhills when I do. Sherman's on occasion. Love their 'mint'.

Krucoff: Except for the handful of times I've smoked a butt or two in a state of total intoxication, I've never been a tool of big tobacco's death industry. Smoking cigs never made sense because it seemed like the biggest sucker draw in "will this make me look cool" teen accessory. And yeah, I was punk rock about things like that. On the other hand, drinking and drugs I understood. That shit fucked you up.