The commemoration from three weeks ago of my finally quitting smoking was a one-shot deal. In person, I can tell the story more than once – though for lack of interest, once is probably more than enough – but that’s not especially the case with writing, least of all with the memoirish anecdotal essays that dominate this space. Most stories should only be written once, though there are writers who despite possibly agreeing with that, go ahead and write one story again and again and again (Dan Brown, I love ya but I’m looking at you). So while I’ll continue to celebrate that particular anniversary for the rest of my hopefully extended life, that story is down and it is done.

But it also got me thinking about the rest of my smoking past, those seven-plus years when cigarettes were close to my heart, in the breast pocket of both my denim and army jackets. I really don’t want to glorify that aspect of those years, an aspect which in most ways was the most debilitating both physically and financially. I pray that whatever damage they’ve done has already been done, that the consequences have been paid, and that we’re largely if not entirely square. Now, watch as I write about all the fun I had while smoking.

And it was a lot of fun. Most of the memories I have of smoking are of the people with whom I smoked, good people whom I joined and who joined me in celebrating life by temporarily escaping from it. At the same time, if we were to go by the numbers, I’d say many more than half of the cigarettes I’d smoked were by myself, either in a car or in an apartment, or on a street walking somewhere, usually. I’m mostly terrible at estimating numbers but even for me that seems right. I’m not blind to the fact that smoking was a personal pursuit more than a collaborative one, but the best memories of the times when smoking brought me together with others, and that’s undeniable.

Very little of the drinking I’ve done has been alone, for whatever that’s worth, so that particular drug and its use and overuse and not to say abuse seems somehow more excusable than nicotine’s, even though it’s probably as wasteful and more costly if not as addictive. That’s only to say that my relationship with cigarettes was more dual-sided, black and white, both interpersonal and personal. I’m sure the personal part of it contributed to the difficulty in finally quitting, but that’s how it goes. It got me through the day. The promise of that tiny high, that withdrawal pang snuffed, that denial of oxygen a couple of times an hour pulled me gently through life like a sled dog, providing a ritual and a dangerous semblance of order in the midst of a sheltered cerebral middle-class white kid’s version of chaos.

So: The idea for the next couple of entries was to enumerate twenty memorable smokes, if I could be that precise, one each for a hypothetical pack. Sometimes I could be so precise, but for others the memories were residual, ruts driven into a particular location what for having smoked there so damn much. The point again will be to describe these times without necessarily celebrating them. We will see.