Where There's Smoke
When I was about eleven or twelve, when other kids were beginning to experiment with cigarettes, I made a quite conscious analysis of smoking and decided it wasn't for me. I simply couldn't see the sense in taking leaves, drying them out, crushing them up, setting fire to them and breathing in the smoke. It's a testament to American advertising genius that they were able to convince the masses that something so inherently absurd was pleasurable. But then, as Frank Lloyd Wright pointed out, move the "m" in "the masses" over one space and what have you got?
posted by John M Crowther @ 7:31 AM
3 Comments:
when I was a child, growing up in rural Alabama, there was a weed that grew in abundance in the fields around our house. The older kids, who called it Rabbit Tobacco, would dry the leaves of the plant and smoke it. Ten years later, as a Botany student, I learned the real rabbit tobacco, gnaphilium obtusifolium, grows only as far south as North Carolina. When I went out in the field to try and collect what I had known as rabbit tobacco so I could dissect it and find out what it really was, I found my memory of what it looked like was too dim for me to collect a sample.
Anyway, when I was about eight, I decided I would smoke some rabbit tobacco. I collected the leaves, dried them out, and rolled them in some newspaper.
You can probably guess where this is heading.
I set the curtains in my bedroom on fire. I ran to my bathroom, got a couple of Dixie cups of water, ran back, by which time my entire dresser was in flames.
I don't remember much of the rest, but from what my older siblings told me, I walked into the den, where my family was watching TV, went to my father and said, "excuse me, there's a fire".
My father jumped up in a panic and screamed, "Where?". I reportedly answered, very calmly, "In my room".
By that time the fire had climbed the walls and the smoke was so dense the fire department had to be called.
I was afflicted with a terminal case of cuteness as a child, so nothing happened to me, except suffering an acute aversion to smoking.
Funny thing is, although I don't like to be in a room where someone is smoking, I find the smell of someone who has been smoking attractive. I wonder if you can get lung cancer from smelling smoke on someone's sweater.
This brings to mind Bob Newhart's monolog on Walter Raleigh's bringing of tobacco to england. "You can set on fire and inhale the smoke or crush it up fine and stuff it in your nose" 'Doesn't that make you sick/"" Yes but after a while you get to like it." Good cartoon John! roger
Kind of like the man who beat his head against the wall because, he said, it felt so good when he stopped. eh, Roger?
Funny story, Kate! Actually, I couldn't see where it was headed at all, which made your telling of it that much more fun.
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