The Smoker's Cult - an intro

May 31, 2003

The Smoker’s Cult - an intro

So I’ve been talking about this book for a while..

So far i haven’t put a single thing down anywhere.. This could be a place to start to put it together.. write down scraps as journaling..

So what have I done? I took up smoking. I did it, as i said, as a research project.

I wanted to understand smokers.. I had never been a smoker. There seemed to be a particular cameraderie among smokers.

I was also spending a lot of time with a house full of kids who smoked.. but they didn’t smoke in the house, they would periodically all get up and go out to the back porch in a space about 5x5 and smoke cigarettes.

I would be left on the living room couch by myself, wondering what happened? We were in the middle of a conversation.

So I started to go out with them so as to not loss the track of what was being discussed. I noticed that everyone had their own brand. I wondered what the difference was, and realized that there was really only one way to really know what they were talking about: try them..

I already had been smoking pot for 20+ years… inhaling hot vapors was nothing new to me. So I started to sample different brands.. decided before too long that i like Camel Turkish Gold.

So for a while, whenever everyone would go outside, I would bum a Turkish Gold from Kaci (my friend Craig’s girlfriend)

At first, these folks were somewhat dubious about me smoking, but I insisted. After a while, they sad that they would rather me bum smokes from them than have me start buying cigarettes..

All this started about march 2002.. by july i was living with these kids, and going out with them to the porch for smokes..