culture and substance

One of the invisible important decisions you make when pretty young is how you're going to consume substances that change your body and mind.   

What is coffee for —– what is it?  A way to make up for your habitual lack of sleep?  An occasional pleasant pep-up?  A bitter dark taste that sets off dessert perfectly as its mild stimulant sets off the wine you had with dinner?

What is drink?  Is it a social lubricant?  A reward?  An escape?  A permission to break or bend your rules?  An end-of-the-day relaxer?  A way of announcing high-culture plans, or romantic plans?

All these things matter, and yet they're rarely discussed as you decide who you're going to be and how you're going to engage the world.    I saw how some of my friends in school treated alcohol:  as a way to go wild.    (You could go to a high school party and not drink a sip and people would assume you were wasted if you said something funny.)    I saw how my parents treated it:  as an enjoyable array of flavors to go with dinner or evening or party.    They were in their 20s in the early 60s, the Mad Men era, and have their generation's confounding tolerance for Old Fashioneds and Manhattans and Martinis.    Not surprisingly, even though I rarely drink 20th-century cocktails at all, much less as a way to ritually say "evening has begun," I otherwise treat alcohol pretty much the way my parents do:  as a nice civilized thing to have with dinner or among friends, not as a way to become someone else or "loosen up" or go crazy or excuse myself from the rules.

All this because I was just thinking about cigars.

Ask me whether I'm a smoker, and I say No, of course not.    But I do enjoy the occasional cigar.    Cigars are made of tobacco, and when you smoke one you are smoking, which makes you a smoker.    This puts me with people in my grandparents' generation, who would say that they "don't drink," and yet enjoy wine and beer with dinner and friends.    Which is of course drinking.

But that doesn't mean they're not saying something meaningful about their experience.

Here's a question to ask:  how many people do you know who have expressed a desire to quit cigarettes, wishing there were a simple way to do so, making and breaking vows, setting goals and keeping them or not?    How many people do you know who smoke cigarettes who wished they didn't, or wished they did less?    Looking around, I'd say it's vanishingly impossible to find people who don't feel that way.

Now:  how many people do you know who say that about cigars?    "Man, it's an awful thing, and I wish I could give up cigars, but it's just so hard!"    Looking around, I'd say it's vanishingly impossible to find people who do feel that way.    Don't believe I've ever met one.

That fact gives us no information about tobacco, but it does give us plenty of information about cigars versus cigarettes, and why people use them in the first place, and the results they're going for, and the results they actually get.