Yearlong Song Challenge, Day 9: Joe

Prompt: "A song involving the smoking of one or more cigarettes"

Selected by Joe

"Jesus, Etc."

Wilco

Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, 2002

The problem was that I just look so fucking cool with a cigarette.

Yeah, I know, I know—probably not really. But the point was that I felt cool, smoking. It didn't really happen all that often. Only when I drank, of course, but it wasn't the former-smoker's habit of bumming-a-smoke-because-drinking-awakens-it-within-you kinda thing. If I was drunk and there were cigarettes available, I had one, because I liked how I looked when I smoked 'em.

"Smoked" should have quotation marks around it, because I didn't even inhale. Hurt my lungs too much.

I feel like the "I look so cool smoking" became a joke too. Like, I knew that I wasn't actually cool, and you knew that I knew that I wasn't cool, but saying it still somehow made it true, in my mind. I was cool. I was... dare I say it... Joe Cool. (I am now being told that the smoking camel mascot of yore was never called "Joe Cool.")

I've probably had 50-100 cigarettes in my life. That's not including cigars (Black & Milds, White Owls, etc.), which I guess should be included in this story, but that felt like a teenager thing. E.g. the morning I turned eighteen years old (and the morning before the night when I Puked on My Birthday), I walked to the A-Plus on the walk to my carpool buddy's house and bought a pack of Strawberry Philly Blunts, and smoked one as I sauntered through Rockledge like the freshly-minted adult that I was. Deeper down the hole of alcoholism, though, it tended to be cigarettes.

I was never addicted to cigarettes and never had a problem with them, but I fear that if I put one to my lips now, it would act like a trigger, bringing me back emotionally to those beautifully blitzed nights of yesteryear. Which is kinda funny, I guess, because it's usually the reverse, right? A former smoker is triggered by inebriation and gives into temptation once more. But I'm afraid that my temptations will lead in the opposite direction. Best to just stop with the whole shebang.

And because I wasn't addicted to cigarettes and because I don't necessarily miss much about them (the smell in the hair and clothes the next day, their propensity to burn the throat and make the High Lifes pretty rough during subsequent sips), I'm thankfully not sitting here all twitchy at the thought of having one last smoke (I'm just realizing this now: I hope that this song prompt isn't triggering any of the actual former smokers in our blogging crew).

But the thing I miss terribly is the emotional elation that I felt whenever I had a cig hanging out of my mouth. My mind was warped by alcohol but that doesn't make it any less true: I felt cool and confident while smoking. I felt like my most suave self. Of course I wasn't actually cool. Of course! That's not what I'm saying. I'm talking about my emotions here, however deluded they got. This is what I felt. I felt good. And isn't that what "being cool" really is, at the end of the day? Just a feeling, a projection?

There's a lot that I miss in sobriety, and if we're considering "smoking cigarettes as a confidence builder" as an appendage of a drinking addiction and not necessarily an addiction unto itself, then yeah, man, I miss it. I miss having a way to instantly feel good. But it's important to remember the good times and the bad. I wouldn't have quit if it was all good times, and yet the mind has a way of forgetting all the bad shit that led you to the point where you needed to quit or die.

I'm wondering now if my brain's insistence that smoking cigarettes made me look cool is a defense mechanism, like if I am able to think about the "ha ha I smoked a cigarette wasn't that silly" then I won't have to think about "ha ha I drank so much that I wanted to disappear." There's irony in this too, how cigarettes are a known killer, like infamously so, and yet I used them (and use the idea of them still) as an emotional balm, as a way to raise self-esteem, as a mental health boost in the face of the severe physical health detriment. Trust me, this was part of the joke too.

I have no idea how I looked. I'm not far enough removed from the situation to know whether I actually looked cool or if I'm deluding myself like so many teenagers in the 1970s did when they picked up the habit. The only way I can think to do it is to provide some evidence, and let the reader decide. Here are two pictures and a (very grainy) video of myself smoking. I see this evidence and I see footage of a Joe K*** who has never looked cooler. I acknowledge that I probably look like a tool (as penance for my lack of humility, I say now: I always look like a tool). But you tell me. Cool or tool.