I Am Curious (Blu), Part I

I'd been planning an epic post about my lifelong love affair with cigarettes for a long time when unforeseen circumstances rendered the whole idea painfully absurd. What follows is a little taste of that blog-post-that-never-was-to-be (aw, TEARZ!), as well as a little scenesetting for tomorrow's post, wherein I will discuss those unforeseen circumstances.

The idea was to begin with a brief history of my cigarette addiction--how I started smoking as a way to wean myself off the Doritos and full-flavor Coca-Cola habit, which by age twelve had turned me into, in my mother's overheard words, "a fucking whale;" how cigarettes and my intense brand loyalty to Marlboro Reds formed a crucial part of my social identity through my teens and twenties; how through some high-powered self-help intervention I managed to kick the habit with almost no suffering or feelings of deprivation at age 29; and how, in the wake of a big move and some interpersonal and romantic upheavals, I took the habit up again during the first half of this year--and to filter this history through my then-contemporary dabbling in smoking Blu brand electronic cigarettes.

I was also planning to write some very foolish stuff about the specific relationship of gay men and cigarettes, how without the looming responsibilities of parenthood the temptation for even thirty- and fortysomething feys to keep flirting with Thanatos by cheerfully puffing away can be uniquely difficult to resist; and how, as the impact of AIDS has waned a bit since the height of the epidemic, a (perhaps wholly imagined-by-me/anecdotal) tendency for gay men to persist smoking into later life has helped to keep a creepy, unspoken Death's Head-Peter Pan image of gay men alive in our (homophobic) collective consciousness.

It was also to be a humorous and very personal product review of Blus, which I smoked, and more or less enjoyed smoking, for a couple weeks as a cig substitute. I was going to start with a detailed blow-by-blow on their pricing model, how they work, and how you use them--which I'm so glad I don't have to do anymore because it's actually really complicated and would've been totally ZZZZs to try to explain--and then go into the finer social nuances of smoking the stupid things.

As semi-satisfying a smoking substitute as Blus actually turned out to--briefly--be, I was going to conclude that they'd never fully catch on...because what's the point in being HALF a smoker? Smoking electronic cigarettes is probably the least cool thing ever. Out and about in LA, if I lit up a real ciggo I could still reasonably expect that maybe 1 person out of every 20 was not actively pegging me as a pitiable, run-down wreck of a weak-willed human for smoking. The other 19 were, yes, but maybe one person was sympathetic, or sweetly indulgent, or--even better!--a smoker themselves! But when I smoked an electronic cigarette in public, that was 20 out of 20 people full-on thinking I'm a douchebag. That's like 100%!

But even though I was going to finish my review with a big old thumbs-down--I mean, besides the shallow reasons mentioned above my e-cig actually SPONTANEOUSLY COMBUSTED in my pocket on the dancefloor at Akbar, such that I had to pull it out of my totally charred jeans pocket and toss its smoldering remains posthaste into an unattended martini glass--smoking Blus was kinda fun, especially when I would videochat my helplessly regular-cig-addicted friends like Bmad and taunt them by blowing (fake) smoke in their faces.

Don't I look happy? Carefree? And--completely incidentally and not at all as a set-up for what I'm about to reveal next--HEALTHY? I was, all of those things! Smoking Blus, like smoking cigarettes, was totally fun!

At least, it was fun until MY RIGHT FUCKING LUNG FUCKING EXPLODED!