Cigarettes are in so many ways the perfect product in the consumer capitalist culture. The value of the product is entirely in the mind - the personal characteristics that have been bound up with cigarettes through films and other visual arts. And of course the addictive power of the smoke.
I've quite before, once for nearly ten years. And what drew me back wasn't an addiction to nicotine, but a nostalgia for the person I was, the constructed identity which included Marlboros as an essential feature. Right now, as I'm withdrawing from cigarettes I am withdrawing from that narrative.
And I notice that thinking and writing about them generates an extremely powerful desire for cigarettes. I am safe, for the moment. Two miles away from the nearest store. With a car, recovering from surgery, dulled by Vicodin. Yes, this escape was planned.
Anyway, I'm a little off right now and I'm feeling a little embarrassed about pushing my way into this series of diaries, but I stumbled across it yesterday and wanted to write something because I thought it might help. So please bear with me.
I came to the understanding that smoking cigarettes is the perfect metaphor for living in the consumer culture when I read The Cigarette Century by Allan Brandt. I recommend it to everyone, but particularly smokers who might gain some understanding of how they got to be that way.
Quitting for good means quitting the whole bundle of images and notions and feelings that made smoking cigarettes seem so necessary. I have this idea that the same process is what keeps us shackled to the whole consumer culture. I mean, we know the human race can't go on this way, we know we need to change. But we don't.
Buying a car that gets good gas mileage is like smoking low tar cigarettes.