My father said to me, "Son, if you ever start smoking you only smoke Camels. Unfiltered". I was around ten at the time and never expected to heed my fathers advice, I never planned on smoking. The only smoker I had ever see up close was my mother and she made it look so, so unappealing, like a chore or something that required a great deal of thought.
When I was older still my father handed me his lambskin cigarette case. I never knew why, it was coupled with his warning to never smoke, and of course at that age I had no intentions of doing so. And then things started to slowly become a more grey to me. I truly believe to true turning point was when I seriously started to watch old films. I knew what I wanted. I wanted to be Cary Grant and Bogart, and Errol Flynn. I wanted to wear a fedora and long coat and only utter the most profound and careless of lines, I wanted a cigarette. These men knew what life was. It was a drink in one hand a cigarette in the other, or in case of Bogart dangling ever so slightly in the corner of his mouth for hours on end ( a movie I have yet to perfect as well as him), but they knew a secret I didn't. And so I did what any youth who looked so much older then his current age would do: I bought a pack and tried my hand at the art of inhaling. It didn't work. By no means can what I did be considered smoking. And so it came down to me carrying around a pack, only in extreme cases of wanting to look as dashing and mysterious as I could.
So now I sit huddled near my window with a Camel filter (Sorry Pap) dropping ash onto my already ash stained keyboard and new robe, which will soon bear the markings of my nightlife of smoke and ash, still trying to look like my black and white heroes, and think awful lofty thoughts and read here for hours. And it's in these moments in which I am truly content.
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