So for the past 20 years I’ve been an idiot. On and off, I’ve smoked cigarettes. There’s still no one thing on the planet that can ease anxiety or sooth the mind like a cancer stick. I don’t give a shit what people say about exercising. Cigarettes are fantastic and require zero effort. Therein lies the problem. They killed my uncle, gave my dad cancer, and have caused irreparable harm to friends and family.
I’ve always been able to stop. Don’t ask me why, but the addiction didn’t catch. This time around though? I haven’t been able to. I got the itch, the urge to quit which is usually all it takes… but I pushed through. I’d gotten to the point where every time I’d smoke, my head would get foggy, I wouldn’t feel better, and after that last drag I’d say aloud “I need to fucking stop this.”
Many years ago when vaping was in its infancy, It got me to stop smoking regular cigarettes overnight. They were these little things the size of a cigarette that’d lose charge in a few hours or run dry after a few drags. By the time I stopped with them, I’d been building my own e-cigarettes and making my own fluid, a truly cottage industry in my own home.
So yesterday I dropped $150 on a vaporizer from Smok, some batteries, coils (the bits that heat up the fluid), charger, and fluid, the whole shebang. Last night I ordered fluid with zero nicotine as well. I’m back to vaping. I haven’t had the urge to light up since. There’s still a half-used pack of camels in my medicine cabinet.
Over the years, as the popularity grew, so many people are vaping these days that it’s hard to avoid the folks who insist on making the biggest cloud of vapor and puff on the damned thing every 5 seconds. The vaporizers are no longer the size of a cigarette, or even a pack of cigarettes, they’re the size of Sony Walkmans. To some folks, they just want to be *seen* vaping, and it’s annoying as shit. Folks like me who are just trying to get off of cigarettes don’t need anything so gaudy.
I posted a photo of my new vaporizer online last night, shortly after the jokes and jabs started rolling in like clockwork. It’s a miniature douche flute! Nobody knows what the long term effects are of it! That second one got to me. Follow the line of reasoning here folks… people are continuing to smoke cigarettes which are known for a fact to cause cancer and kill people, because they don’t know the long term effects of vaping.
Ok, so cigarettes cause COPD, cancer, death. Some folks will experience these side effects early in their life, others it will take 30, 40, 50 years before all those soothing drags catch up to them. Either way it’s pretty much guaranteed that if you smoke cigarettes, bad shit will happen.
How do you top guaranteed cancer and death? Who gives a shit what the long term side effects of vaping are? I don’t. All I know is that I haven’t taken a drag in 24 hours, and as soon as my new fluid gets here I’m off nicotine. I’ll feel better, smell better, and sleep better until all those cigarettes finally catch up to me some day. Seems worth the “risk” to me.
