I smoke.

I smoke quite a bit, actually.

In fact, I'm smoking right now.

Katherine used to hold a cigarette out to me. "I don't smoke," I would tell her. "Just have a cigarette," she'd say, her beauty irresistible. "I picture you as a professor, reading and smoking in your office," she'd tell me. It didn't sound like too bad a future. It would have been more direct just to fuck her, but I took up smoking instead.

Seana said that all of us smokers and drinkers, including her, were steppenwolves, referring to the Herman Hesse novel. My first serious girlfriend's father had made the same observation about me, before I smoked. I can't hear the word without thinking of the toy, part of the Super Powers line, which I sent away for using UPC symbols and actually received in the mail. When I squeezed his legs together, his arm, holding a jagged ax, would hammer downwards. I loved the toy and only later discovered Jack Kirby's four-color original.

Claire, when she cleaned the room, put them in little baggies with the label "cancer sticks." She made one say, "please do not smoke me." I did, in front of her, though not without a tinge of sadness.

I don't fit the models. I didn't take up smoking in high school. In fact, I hated it. My parents hated it, forbidding throughout childhood candy cigarettes and chewing gum packaged like chewing tobacco, though my brother and I found confusing their explanations of packaging, childhood influence, and what exactly chewing tobacco was. Smoking killed my grandmother, with whom I lived before she moved to the hospital. To me, smoking was the enemy. In high school, my friends smoked, but I resisted any and all pressure to do likewise -- except for once. A friend said that I didn't smoke because I hadn't really tried it, so I did, throwing the cigarette away halfway through, hating it entirely. I tolerated my first girlfriend smoking, but as she drove I slouched backward ridiculously in the passenger's seat, hiding from the ever-growing grey mist that started at the ceiling and slowly filled the car downward on those evening car rides. This was not the makings of a smoker.

I didn't start smoking until college, and then not my freshman year but my junior one. As far as can be discerned, two elements were especially blameworthy in this matter. The first of these was my drinking so heavily that after a party in which I remembered asking for a friend's cigarette and having perhaps another or two more, I was informed that I had smoked just about the entire pack. The second was Katherine's looks, or my infatuation with her generally, and her afore-mentioned insistence on the matter, summed up in her statement: "Trust me, you are a smoker." Of course, she smoked like a chimney and loved company.

I haven't stopped since. I tried to quit once, lasted a hellish week, and then started right back. Like most smokers, I imagine that I'll quit one day, but this week's too stressful. What I need is a locked and padded room with a laptop and some books.

Smoking's quite underrated, really. I mean, sure it will kill you, but there are some advantages.

Smoking, like eating used to be, is a social ritual. There's a community among smokers, who share cigarettes and gestures as they speak of love and life and literature. The best are the cafés artistiques and the academic smoking lounges, or balconies, gathering places for outright crazies and repressed crazies, respectively. The conversation itself is rare, but the camaraderie of smoky air and mutual addiction adds an ephemeral spice to the savoring.

I'm thinking most clearly of the smoking deck on Southern Illinois University's Faner Hall, where I would talk for hours with other graduate students and professors -- blissful, ranging conversations on the department and out lives or arguments on obscured intellectual ideas, rarely studied but greatly fruitful. There, outside of the halls of formal academia, unburdened by its constraints, one could confess one's ignorances, one's secretly beloved subjects, the stumbles and fumbles of one's academic career. This was the real academia, the pretenses dispelled by carcinogenic fumes. The articles that could have been written from these discussions -- the really brilliant ones, the articles one would never present to one's colleagues or at most conferences, the free-ranging, frank articles with new lines of thought, new or newly honest takes on how we teach and what we teach -- boggle the mind.

And it would never have been possible without the vicious, morally repugnant companies that market those burning, phallic sticks of death.

Having that first cigarette in a rented car, or just someone else's. Having that first cigarette in a hotel room, freshly rented and cleaned.

I'm not fond of a cigarette after sex, though I'll have one. It's only recommended, or a famous cliché, because your lungs are breathing hard as you inhale deeper. You could get the same result by running a mile or ten, but most people are less inspired by that than by screwing.

No, forget the cigarette after sex and have one instead in a virginal environment. In the middle of the grocery story as you close up. In a new place, a virginal clean place.

It's the joy of fouling, of coming on a beautiful woman's face, of clubbing a baby seal and staining the arctic with blood. Only no one gets hurt, short of the tumors.

Smoking, for all its beauty, is no longer hip.

On a layover in San José this week, I could not smoke in the airport, even in the solitary bar. This is because San José is in California, where smoking is illegal almost everywhere, including all bars and restaurants. The major of New York City announced this week that, similarly, all public places would be smoke-free, that second-hand smoke is a health risk to employees who we would not force to choose between their work and their health if the risk resulted from, say, radiation or a gas leak. And, much as I hate it, he's right. The logic's irrefutable. But that doesn't mean something's not lost, that there are no remainders and the equation is tidy in implications, if not the ultimate decision.

I support greater tax on cigarettes, so long as that tax goes to programs to help smokers quit and to pay for health care. Unfortunately, we have no socialized medicine in this country, and the health costs of smokers paid by the state are hypothetically only those left after the dead or dying smokers houses and heirlooms have been repossessed. Meanwhile, we pay millions for ad campaigns using MTV-style rapid cutting ("jump cuts" as the elite stupidly refer to them) combined with filmed publicity stunts that demonstrate one important, and quite horrifyingly relevant, fact about cigarettes per thirty-second spot. Cigarettes contain poisons, yes, strange ones that a person would never imagine would be included. But we already know cigarettes kill.

We don't have free programs to quit, however, for which the ad money and tax money might be used to pay if truly concerned about our health, or at least our bills for slowly and painfully dying. We also don't have free programs to counsel and console us after the fact as we miss our gesture stick, our social lubricant, or our new car and hotel fouling equipment.

Or our convenient excuse to excuse ourselves as I, needing a cigarette, do now.

"If you're going to smoke, please don't smoke around me," asks a child on a manipulative "public service" commercial.

People ask smokers all the time not to smoke around them, sometimes even outside. I've seen people pass by smokers, holding their mouths with their hands as if facing nerve gas, and then cough just after passing. At best, this is psychosomatic and just plain pathetic. At worse, these namby-pamby fucks should be shot.

When asked not to smoke where it's permitted, I typically give some version of this response: "Okay, asshole, I'll stop smoking around you when you put on a mask or hold your breath to cross the street -- because car fumes are far more poisonous than second-hand cigarette smoke." You walk across a city street, you're immersed in carbon monoxide and foul-smelling, carcinogenic shit; it's terrible. A cigarette by comparison is a trickle. Hell, those who object should fucking port a gasmask anyway; it's a dangerous fucking world after all, full of modern industrial shit a lot worse than second-hand smoke, and most of those objecting are putting worse shit directly to their bodies, or popping prescription pills without long-term studies, or eating genetically modified and chemical-filled shit without complaint. People should try being consistent for a change, but I suppose that's less fun, or generative of a self-righteous, morally superior feeling, than fucking with other people.

Assholes. Fucking assholes.

Though the dominant religious interpretation of smoking is of pollution of semi-divine human bodies, another interpretation is possible. Indeed, in as much as the spirit has been lost from the Western trinity of human aspects, its meaning nearly unrecoverable, leaving only the dichotomy of the body and soul, and, in as much as the mind has become identified with the soul, and the physical brain with the mind, smoking is indeed good for the soul.

To smoke can not only be construed as active engagement with life, linked to vigorous contemplation and discussion, but also to something deeper since to smoke knowing to do so leads to death, even painful death, may represent a radical, if not gnostic, denial of the body. Moreover, smoking has been shown by medicine, the same authority by which we judge smoking a bodily pollution, to actually be good for the brain, though these affects are rarely discussed out of fear that they may lead people to smoke. Smoking prevents the onset of Alzheimer's disease and improves the brain's mnemonic capacity, as many smoking and studying students have discovered. To smoke, then, may be read as a radical act affirming the mind over the body, the improvement of mental functioning and insurance of its longevity over the increased odds of physical decay and destruction.

Smoking, in our present cultural climate, also has political dimensions as well. To smoke may be read as a protest against the fact that we are lied to on the matter, the positive benefits repressed from public discourse as one would with a child unable to weigh the grater harm. Moreover, in industrialized nations, smoking has become a marginal activity, increasingly removed from public spaces and made the subject of government propaganda. To smoke, then, is a contrarian act, akin to a Buddhist monk setting himself aflame in protest of the government's policies in Vietnam, in protest of imposing a stigma (not to mention increased insurance costs and difficulty finding lodging) upon those who do not or can not, because of addiction, behave in accordance with a dominant culture, upon people already suffering from higher risks for deadly diseases, not so qualitatively different from putting lepers in concentration camps.

These are all rationalizations, of course, and I do not recommend smoking to anyone; despite the truth of these arguments, it remains to be said that smoking, according to the experts on these things, will also kill you.

Hey, our country was built on tobacco. What would America be if it weren't for the economic stimulation of tabacco farming? Tabacco was long considered a quintessentially American product.

In these post-September 11 days, I certainly hope you're not asking me to dishonor my heritage. I certainly hope you're not asking me to spit on the graves of the honored dead by putting out my cigarette, by snuffing our American heritage, if not the American dream itself. Shouldn't we have tabacco festivals around the country, conducted with copious flag-waving and accompanied by informational kiosks describing America's long association with tabacco, accompanied by black-and-white images.

Be a patriot. Smoke a fag.

YOUR ASSIGNMENT THIS WEEK

This column is to make up for one of the six weeks that this column was on hiatus. No new column is due until Thursday, 22 August, but you'll get more before them. I had a brainstorm while drinking three tall fancy coffees today and four columns got written. No kidding. In the case of this column, however, I've had the idea for some time and actually wrote a draft of the first section on Sunday, 11 August, just for the record.

As usual, a number of small updates have occurred within The Continuity Pages in general. Updates of particular note include the page for Miracleman.

No assignment for this column as it's only the first in a series of columns posted at the same time, and there's one for one of the others.