Today I invested 1/7 of my available funds in a disposable electronic cigarette. It said it delivered the rough equivalent of two packs of cigarettes. At its price that’s still more than I spend now for two packs of cigarettes, but I smoke very cheap cigarettes.
Anyway, I’d pay a little more to “fit in”. I’m getting kind of tired of smoking in odd outdoor places and of course I no longer go anywhere that doesn’t allow some kind of smoking at all.
It’s not so much about the judgmental people who explain to me the various reasons why I should not smoke, especially around them, as it is about the funny places where I have to do it. I attend something and I wind up on the fringe of the event or ducking and hiding and missing an event which one way or another cost me money just to attend.
It IS a little bit about my workplace, because people get real mad when something that smells like tobacco comes through the mail addressed to them, but even more about that, it’s about burning my sweatpants.
I often dress for comfortable combat if I know I’m going to be spending a lot of keyboard time and the standard uniform for my combat is a t-shirt and sweatpants. I burn them a lot because I smoke like a loon while I “keyboard” (verb).
I rushed home from the store with the eight dollar cigarette. After a bit of a struggle I penetrated its hermetic seal and read the little slip of paper. “This cigarette” it said, and I shouldn’t be quoting because I’m making it up “will work when you draw on it, and glow red, and you will exhale some stuff that looks like smoke but is really water and it’ll last for about as long as two packs of cigarettes”. The clerk had warned me: they don’t taste very swell, you have to draw hard and they’re not worth it.
I have previously not cared about what things taste like. I didn’t care what these tasted like, but it was acceptable anyway.
And it worked. Right away I started to jones for slightly more nicotine, but I had bought some medium version and there was a higher nicotine version, so no big deal. I sat down to the keyboard and began to compose (actually, I think I began to game, but they’re similar). In the summer, since my room is upstairs and a bit warm at times like during unrelenting heat waves, my sweatpants become a pair of Iowa Hawkeye hiking shorts, so I usually burn my leg rather than the pants. This did not happen. I am ecstatic. The thing dangles right in my mouth. I can walk around with it. I can pack stuff while not-smoking it. It doesn’t have any odor.
I didn’t keep track of the time but I can rarely be intense at the keyboard for longer than an hour or an hour and a half without having to change activities and I had already mowed part of the yard in the heat earlier so I decided to nap, having discovered this amazing new technology.
I gave me and the cigarette an hour’s rest and eagerly returned to the experiment but this time the little front part that glows like it’s on fire blinked instead, and blinking means it’s “out”. No vapor that looks like smoke but isn’t. Fail.
Dammit. I am either capable of smoking the equivalent of two packs of cigarettes in a hour when I’m doing it enthusiastically or so or the thing was defective or the claim is a little exuberant. The thing’s guaranteed in some way so I wrote to the company and I also ordered a sample of the more-nicotine kind.
I really wanted it to work. There are other kinds, and there is a non-disposable refillable kind and maybe among those is a solution. Like I say, it isn’t so much about the judgmental people as it is about the sweatpants, but as it turns out it’s ALSO about the ashtray which occupies valuable real estate on my desk and the lighters all over the place which occupy certain real estate in my brain keeping track of them……….
If it just isn’t to be though-if I really am capable of vaporizing eight dollars worth of nicotine in a hour or so, I’ll be very disappointed. I really thought I was on to something.