Stop smoking!

Why, oh why, would anyone smoke these days? The Complete and Total Loser can understand it if you're over 40, but surely anyone younger than that grew up in an age when smoking was so restricted and expensive that they didn't get thoroughly hooked on it.  
Or not. The Loser has a friend who is 36 and smokes heavily, even now, just under a year after his mother died of lung cancer at the age of 58. 

A woman smokes a cigarette outside Philadelphia's 30th Street Train Station.

His friend's mother died

The Complete and Total Loser's friend's mother died this morning. Very sad, but the Loser never met her. He's sorrier for his friend than for his dead mother. 
She died of lung cancer after smoking for decades. Just a coincidence, probably. 
Yesterday the Loser went to a Hallmark store in search of a sympathy card. They're awful. Trite, stupid messages. He couldn't find blank ones. He did in another store a few years ago. Advice: If you ever find a simple sympathy card, like one that just says "Sympathy" on the outside and is blank inside, by a handful of them and put them someplace where they'll be easy to find. 
The Loser settled on a set of cards that simply had the initial of his last name on the outside and were blank inside. In other words, not a sympathy card. His own words will convey that.

A friend's mother

"It's a matter of hours now," a friend texted to The Complete and Total Loser about his mother's impending death. 
The Loser has genuine feeling for his friend and his mother, whom he has never met. His sympathy is a little tempered by the fact that she was a smoker and is dying of lung cancer. Also, on some level the Loser, whose own mother and father died in 2011, feels a little glad that what's happening to his friend isn't happening to him.

While awful things are happening elsewhere, happy tourists, in this case from Columbia, smile and pose under the Robert Indiana Love sculpture in Philadelphia.

The Fundraiser

The Complete and Total Loser has a coworker who's mother is dying of lung cancer. (If you smoke all your life, you will have a premature and unpleasant death. The coworker doesn't seem to get this and still smokes, even in the house with his mother.) Recently he and family held a fundraiser to help cover her medical costs. Until she left due to illness, she'd worked in a bank and had good health insurance. The copays got her. 
The fundraiser was well attended but it wasn't the Loser's kind of event. It was as if a hundred people entered a room that could accommodate fifty and decided to shout as loud as they could for no reason. The Loser was hungry and got there late so he ate a piece of aging beef. The plastic forks were bad ones even by plastic fork standards. The Loser had to use it more as a shovel. The piece he got in his mouth was the largest piece of anything he'd ever eaten. At one point, he wondered if someone present knew the Heimlich Maneuver. Somehow, he got it down and twenty minutes later he felt like he'd had a vitamin B-12 shot.

To many, noise equals fun.

Lung Cancer

A coworker of the Complete and Total Loser learned recently that his mother has lung cancer. About 75 percent of lung cancer victims are dead in two years. Is his coworker upset? Sure. Has he quit smoking? Nope. Has the Loser said, "You really should quit smoking"? 
No. He's proud of himself for not saying that.
But he should.

Eric Lawson died Jan. 10 at his California home. The cause was respiratory failure due to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or COPD. The ruggedly handsome Lawson portrayed the smoking cowboy in Marlboro print ads from 1978 to 1981. He also had bit parts in such TV shows as Baretta and Charlie's Angels before injuries sustained on the set of a Western film ended his acting career. A smoker since age 14, Lawson later appeared in an anti-smoking commercial that parodied the Marlboro Man and an Entertainment Tonight segment to discuss the negative effects of smoking. (People Magazine)

Children's Letters to the Loser #13

Dear Complete and Total Loser,

My dad smokes in our small house even when it's winter and all the windows are closed and he won't let us open them because of the heating bill. I don't think it's good for me or my little sister. What can I do to make him stop?

Alice

Dear Alice,

You father should not smoke in the house. Nor should he smoke anyplace else, but nicotine is an addictive substance that's not easy to stop, something I know from personal experience. Too much good science has shown that second-hand smoke is harmful. You won't find many people -- even smokers -- who defend smoking in confined spaces around others. Not only is the smoke bad for you and your sister, your father's smoking in the house presents a greatly increased risk of fire. After all that, however, your father is legally permitted to smoke the house. I'm afraid that your only recourse here is to present him with information about the perils of smoking and urge him to quit. Meanwhile, advocate getting a high-quality indoor air filter. All this will be an exercise in diplomacy for you. Persuading people is a thing best done gently. Do it with love, not condemnation.

I wish you luck,

The Complete and Total Loser

The Complete and Total Loser has a Cigar

The Complete and Total Loser quit a pack-a-day cigarette habit at age 25 in 1984 knowing he'd never stop if he put it off. The effort succeeded and to this day he breathes clean air deep.
Yesterday, inexplicably, he craved a cigar. This is odd, especially considering that he had never smoked one in his entire miserable, failure-ridden life.
He had won one in a jocular office raffle in 1998 and he knew that unlike the job he still had the cigar. After a little digging through drawers of the worthless crap he saves he found it. It's a Montenegro, "made in Mexico with the finest tobaccos selected leaf by leaf supreme quality," the box said. Inside, wrapped in thin paper, was a well-constructed sealed glass tube holding the cigar which did indeed look handmade. It was the kind you have to cut (or bite, if you're a 30's-era gangster) the end off of. The Loser cut a little with his Swiss Army knife, surprised that it didn't have a little attachment made for the purpose. He lit it and puffed.

Suck hard. Harder.

Within five minutes his tiny, dank apartment smelled like a men's club and his mouth felt like a wet ashtray. An inch-long ash clung to the burning end. He resisted inhaling, knowing you don't do that with cigars and that he'd vomit if he did more than once, though he was tempted to do so and experience the dirty kick burning tobacco gives you.
For a moment, he fantasized that the cigar, a large one, would somehow imbue him with the arrogance of those who smoke them and that success would would follow. No such luck.
He doused the ember, let the remaining seven inches dry, and returned it to its home, where it will remain for another decade, give or take.

Updike is Dead

A pack of Marlboro cigarettes.

The Complete and Total Loser read John Cheever which gave him no room for John Updike so the Complete and Total Loser didn't read him. And now he's dead of lung cancer.
Smoking will do that to you. Hard to believe a guy that smart would smoke himself to death.
The Loser learned to smoke at 13 from a summer friend named Richard.
“Take a small drag,” Richard said. "When you get used to that, take bigger ones.” One night, girls present, the Loser took bigger drags than he was ready for, blowing out impressive clouds. Later, as he and Richard headed for the small sailboat Richard's family owned to sleep, he vomited.
Many stop forever at that point. By summer's end, the Loser was addicted. He found he could buy cigarettes from most stores and that vending machines were unsupervised. Only once in his teens was the Loser refused a pack of cigarettes. You had to be 16. He'd get 50 cents daily to take the bus home from school and then hitchhike, saving the money for cigarettes.

John Updike, smoking.

 The Loser's mother smoked. There’s nothing a teenage smoker likes more than a smoking parent. It covers the smell and provides a source of free cigarettes. If you knew how to roll a joint, you could get butts from a parent's ashtrays and use the leftover tobacco to roll your own. She smoked L&M’s, an awful brand. The package used to have graphics like Marlboro’s, but not as bold. In the 70s they went for a hip look—a photo of a couple, smoking of course, surrounded by trees in full autumn color.
Marlboro was the preferred brand. They came in crushproof boxes, which meant you could put the pack in your blue jeans pocket and still have unbroken cigarettes after a day of bicycling and running around.
The Loser's older brother took up smoking at boarding school. “You’re not a real smoker,” he said, “unless having a cigarette’s the first thing you do in the morning and the last thing you do at night.” Smoking in bed was hugely pleasurable. There are times even now, decades after quitting, that the Loser wakes up from a dream in which he was smoking and searches the sheets for a burning ember.
He quit in high school, an all-boys school where he was unpopular. Not going to parties meant few opportunities to impress girls. Even though his tobacco use was withering on its own, it still required a conscious effort to quit.
He went to college in rural Ohio, miles from any city. The isolation was good. The only TVs were in lounges, there were no VCRs, the campus had one computer in the physics department.
The winter of 1977-78, his freshman year, broke records with its snowfall and cold. Even though the campus was small and neatly contained, lying along a level spine-like path less than a mile long, classes were canceled during the worst of the storms that season. From women's dorm rooms came popcorn, cookie dough, hot chocolate, decks of cards and board games.
One reason people start smoking is for a feeling of social togetherness. That winter, as the Loser played backgammon and hearts, he began to borrow cigarettes from friends, first as a joke, with mocking cool. He was soon hooked again and bought packs for those he’d borrowed from. Eventually he skipped that step and bought his own. Winstons.
The late 70s were a smoker’s paradise. You could smoke almost anywhere; dining halls, hospital waiting rooms, libraries, airplanes. Cigarettes cost about 75 cents a pack. In big cities, young people on street corners promoted new brands by giving packs to passersby. You could smoke anywhere. Only once in four years of college did anyone ask the Loser not to smoke while they ate. There were fold-to-assemble ashtrays made of coated paper, a dull aluminum, at library desks and study carrels throughout the campus. Even parties at the jock frats were thick with smoke.
The Loser majored in art. Much of art involves waiting. For gesso to dry, for film to develop, for plates to etch, for ideas to form. A cigarette, held and smoked the right way, was an indispensable part of being an art major.
The Loser didn't quit till he was out of college for three years. At age 25 he knew that, being a loser, he would never be able to quit at age 40 and that he would be the type to get lung cancer or heart disease by 50 if he didn't. It took several attempts but the final one took and now he lives smoke free. When he thinks of how he could simply walk into a store and buy a pack at any time, the idea surprises him a little. He sees smokers standing outside in the cold, the heat, the rain and pities them.