Nosmo King

Nosmo King…heh. I believe it’s the punchline to a joke about a woman who named her baby after a “no smoking” sign she misread in the hospital.

Anyways, for many years I smoked cigarettes. Like a chimney. I was never a pack-a-day sort of person, but given the opportunity, I could burn through a pack pretty fast. I don’t smoke any more, but sometimes I miss it.

The thing about cigarettes is that they are a great crutch to help you relax. The act of drawing on a cigarette and exhaling the smoke outwards is like one big sigh. You’re releasing whatever tension you have with the smoke you’re blowing out, and you get to do it over & over, or at least until your cigarette is burned down to the end. That’s the best part of smoking that I still miss to this day.

What I don’t miss (beyond the obvious health hazards) is the smell, the ashes & butts, and the yellowing of your skin and teeth. Also, I used to carry a Zippo lighter in my pocket, and sometimes the lighter fluid would leak out and give me a rash on my thigh.

One day I caught a bad case of the flu, and was unable to smoke for about a week. When I recovered, I somehow lost the desire to smoke, and never did it again. Plus, my fiancé never liked it, so that was an extra incentive.

If you need a book about cigarettes, I highly recommend Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: Branding and Design in Cigarette Packaging; it’s all about cigarette packaging through the years. Good stuff. Plus, it’s much better for your health to read a book.

...However, if you have to smoke, I highly recommend Botschafters. It’s an imported cigarette available in better smoke shops. But you didn’t hear it from me.