Smoking and the toilet

Recent time off has given me some perspective. Some short-sighted, some with more depth. Sleeping til noon most days firing off cover letters into the job application black hole that is seek.com gives a man time to consider how best to spend his day. Smoking cigarettes has become a perfectly beautiful waste of my time. I guess it is the romantic in me that allows me to give each life-taking draw on the end of the cigarette more meaning than it deserves. In my mind it is akin to being James Dean in one of his posters, nonchalantly holding a cigarette with a devil may care look as he smokes a few days off his life, looking down and to the left with one leg up. It’s almost as if he knew at that moment his end would come sooner than rather than later, and the cigarette he is smoking makes no difference one way or the other.

I read a book call The Tipping Point recently which put some light on the attraction to smoking. It states that small pockets of influential people can popularise something like smoking for the masses. Put a group of Musicians, Writers, Actors and Artists in one room while placing a group of Engineers, Scientists, Doctors, and Politicians in another. It becomes fairly clear that the former group will be consuming more cigarettes than the later, and in my mind the musicians and actors are far more influential in my life than an Engineer. Maybe it shouldn’t be so, but it is. Jimmy Hendrix playing to Woodstock with a half smoked cigarette by the nut of the guitar, wailing out ‘all along the watchtower’ like the rock God he was has stuck in my mind more than E=MC2.

So I feel somewhat justified on a time waster’s level to enjoy my time smoking. If I can’t be a rock star, at least I can smoke cigarettes like one, even if from a passerbyers perspective I look more like a homeless person feverishly smoking than a rock star with a death wish.

Better still and far more hedonistic is to smoke while passing a bowel movement. This is a much less romantic past time, but it is one that allows a committed time waster to break some rules and get a small rise out of the otherwise flat day. Aside from the laxative effect, you feel that you are stepping outside the socially drawn line. Idle hands are the devils plaything after all. And apparently the devil likes to use them to smoke on the toilet as far as I’m concerned. The smell admitted from the cigarette is a moot point since you are in a room that is specifically designed to house vile odor.

But the level of filth and genius is unparalleled which allows a man to think of himself as a arguably the Coen Brothers’ most famous character ‘The Dude’, not that he smoked mind you, but he did break convention regularly.

Whether this humble writer is actually as cool as The Dude is not up for discussion, as the answer is definitely not. However like a small child dressed in his Superman pyjamas jumping from the dresser in his parents’ room to the large queen size bed, and yelling ‘Superman!’ arm and legs extended at full length, in my mind I am that flying super hero as I pass last night’s dinner, inhaling sweet French cigarettes whilst trying to blow a perfect smoke ring. With my bare hairy white legs exposed to the bathroom elements. Be careful when you ash into the toilet, it can be painful if you manage to drop hot ash on your nether regions.

The small things like smoking will allow you to shrug off the mindless thoughts and worries that move through your head during a time of unemployment. Will I get a job soon? Will I be paid as much as I once did? Will the current economic climate allow me to be in the career I desire? Instead, compare yourself to James Dean, Jimmy Hendrix and The Dude…

I have made my choice which world I would rather live in, one where the harm of cigarettes are nil and void when compared to the grand social statement you make to yourself while gently pulling the nicotine-fulled milky smoke from the cigarette you purchased from the pleasant Indian man at the corner store. I will smoke on the toilet because it means that I can leave my troubles behind for the duration of a bowel movement.