If you’re a Floridian who smokes cigarettes, there’s no better time to take a serious stab at quitting than summer. You never feel more like a slave than when you’re getting up from your desk or couch or restaurant table to go outside, knowing you don’t even want to go outside, that it’s a million wet degrees and you don’t have your sunglasses and the sidewalk is full of “hot-enough-for-ya?” closet masochists “enjoying” all that moistened Florida sunshine. A cigarette outside under the blazing summer sun is never quite satisfying; it’s more like a chore, something to be checked off the list of shit that had to be done that day.
(And if you’re not sure you’re completely ready to give it up, you can always set yourself up to fail by declaring you’re just taking a summer vacation away from your habit.)
My own efforts to quit smoking have gradually grown more substantial over the last few years. My problem is simply that I still love almost everything about smoking. The way the stress seems to leave my body when I exhale the first drag. The way I can always find an entertaining conversation when I step outside to join my tribe. The way just holding a cigarette in my hand makes me feel in control, the captain of my own destiny.
Of course it’s stupid and self-defeating and gross. I know that; I’m working on it.
The desire to give up the worst things about smoking cigarettes while keeping as many of the good things about it as I can has led me to try a wide variety of e-cigarettes. They’re uniformly unsatisfying. Not because it’s impossible to look cool while pulling on a cylinder of metal and/or plastic with a fake-ass little light on the end — I’m quite comfortable in the certainty that I’ve never looked particularly cool doing anything — but because smoking an e-cigarette isn’t enough like smoking a real cigarette. It’s … thin.
A couple of months ago, I started noticing people pulling on something that didn’t make even the usual stupid half-assed attempt to resemble a cigarette — something it wasn’t, and would never be. It was something different. It was an apparatus, a sleek, modular system that looked like nothing so much as a miniature electric toothbrush from The Sharper Image, minus the bristled head.
The personal vaporizer.
Hi Scott, thanks for your article on smoking or should I say vapor smoking. I have seen many people with a very big silver contraption hanging around their neck and I hear it really works. Unfortunately, I don’t want to have this contraption hanging on my neck. So when I saw your article and the pic of you with a small vapor cig I wanted to write to ask you where you got it and if it is still working for you…That contraption is do-a-ble, it reminds me of something from back in the 70’s…;)
Thanks,
Tori
Hi Tori, the batteries and “juice tanks” that make up personal vaporizers come in different sizes. That’s actually my friend and Creative Loafing graphic designer Joey Neill in the photo. We both opted for the smallest battery and tank available for just the reason you mentioned – they can get a bit unwieldy, and I’d rather not have an oversized rave-pouch hanging around my neck at all times. I’m still pretty conscious of having mine in my pocket if I’m wearing, say, a pair of jeans, but I felt the same way about a deck of smokes and a lighter. I don’t even notice it if I’m wearing cargo shorts or pants. Thanks for playing.