Smoking

non-subject: smoking
aww ~ 11/06/13

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Mom said she didn't inhale. Maybe she was telling the truth; usually her cigarette hung from her teeth as they bit the butt. I don't recall seeing her inhale, but the butts wore lipstick stains indicating that at least sometimes she inhaled.

Dad smoked a pipe and an occasional cigar. He usually sat in the family room in the rocker by the window that gave a view to the pasture behind the house - the pasture that grew weeds and grass and trees and briars and poison ivy and jimson weed and polk berries down by the creek. Heavy laden cherry cigar or pipe smoke would linger in the middle of the room as sun light shone through the window. As a child I liked to watch the heavy smoke sit like fog undulating ever so lightly like it was alive. The hanging smoke had a mesmerizing effect, surreal. It reminded me of the ocean.

I don't know for sure when Mom and Dad gave up smoking. I don't recall Dad smoking after his accident in 1983, but perhaps he took a few puffs from time to time. It seems Mom too smoked less, eventually giving up cigarettes altogether.

As a teenager, I only tried cigarettes a few times. I didn't enjoy them. What was the point of smoking a cigarette? To me the whole point of smoking anything would be to get high. I could get high by hyperventilating and entering a dreamlike state. When I was around 14, in one hyperventilating session at the Community Center in the girl's bathroom, I ended up lying on the cold tile floor against the cold tile wall, my body tingling and my mind numb with no memory of the previous 30 to 60 seconds other than it seemed like time had stood still.

Another time when I was around 14, Beth and Tricia and I smoked tea leaves trying to get high. Tea leaves only burned my throat.

One time Beth and Tricia and I opened some Contact capsules and separated the tiny colored pellets contained within the capsule. We had been told that swallowing only one of the colors, seems like it was the red pellets, would give us a buzz. It didn't work.

I tried smoking mullein in my 20s after I developed asthma at age 22. I'd read mullein relieved asthma. It made no sense to me how smoke could relieve asthma. It didn't work.

I understood the point of smoking pot; the purpose was clearly to get high. I smoked pot only for about six months when I was 14 and 15. I smoked a lot of pot during that time...morning, noon, and night. Sometimes we laced our joints with added THC. I gave up pot after the jimson weed incident; jimson weed changed my chemistry or neurotransmitters or something. After the jimson weed nightmare, pot made me extremely paranoid.

So I abandoned pot for chemicals and psychedelics. No physical smoke was involved in psychedelics.

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