A VERY PRIVATE ACT

A few days ago under an essay about attitudes toward smoking and drinking by women during the forties and fifties, a reader made a cynical remark, which is spot on, and reflects the situation that now maintains precisely.

Eurus Holmes said…

These days only bad girls smoke tobacco. Good girls these days drink to excess, wear lots of makeup, and speak loudly in awful accents.

It doesn't matter if one speaks in a pleasant tone, wears muted makeup, dresses modestly, and eschews alcohol. Apparently smoking tobacco is enough to make one "bad."

It's almost as if he's watched the Real Housewives franchise a lot, or lives in San Francisco. Women on television are terrible role models, irrespective of your gender.

Of course, I enjoy heading over to the pharmacy, as I did yesterday, because the women there always lecture me on the evils of tobacco use. There is a distinct 'frisson' to being told you are sinful.


阿麥先生，戒菸！

Look, it's not like I'm ripping wings off of little angels for fun and profit. Nor am I renting out my body to sailors. At about three to five pipes a day I am showing immense restraint. And seriously, I eschew make-up, revealing dresses, and psychotropic substances.

If I had my own patio, I'd be out there many mornings as the sun crested the hill, enjoying my first cup of coffee with a fine Nicaraguan cigar, while reading Anthony Trollope. While the cat I also presently don't have lazed in the sunbeams or played with dancing dust motes.

How civilized!


Nowadays smoking is a semi-secret act of defiance.


Well, cigars and pipes, of course. Cigarettes are largely all about addiction. Even so, nothing goes better with your low-fat vanilla syrup Venti, and the lifestyle that represents, than a good smoke. It's the perfect way to reward yourself after another company meeting with those dickhead middle-aged fraternity boys who think they know everything.


You can balance the bad karma from tobacco by eating organic, avoiding gmos, and being a gluten-phobic vegan yoga practitioner. Honest.

I've got gravitas, I have a pipe.
Would I lie?

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