On Smoking 🍎

Indestructible Nokias, sticky floors, mysterious strangers and casting spells

Hola!

Hope you are surviving and thriving in this tail end of Mercury retrograde. ☄️

Just hopping in here to do a lil one-off note because this weekend marks my 2-year anniversary since I quit cigarettes and this is a HUGE DEAL!

Once upon a time, fifteen (sixteen?) year-old me smoked her first Marlboro Light outside a skeezy dive bar with sticky floors and cheap destornilladores that served underage teens near Buenos Aires’ Chinatown. I confess it wasn’t peer pressure. I was simply young, curious and naively inspired by that iconic Breakfast at Tiffany’s poster of Audrey Hepburn in pearls, or maybe it was Sienna Miller’s glittering hot mess depiction of Edie Sedgwick in ‘Factory Girl’?  Or Bowie and all the rockstars?

 This was the indestructible Nokia days, and I was positively hooked. At first I would just steal a smoke here and there, at a quinceañera, outside of the movies. I remember having a brief fling with Parisiennes because I thought the name was sexy but that didn’t last long because that tobacco was STRONG AF, like 70-year-old Italian mafia uncle strong. I later went into Camel Blues and stuck with them for the longest time because at one point (this is peak 2010s hipster era) they came out with a marketing campaign which featured really cool illustrations of different cities on the packs and I loved collecting them. (Does anyone else remember these? Buenos Aires was in there along with London & Tokyo & Paris and Toronto obviously wasn't. Lol). Anyway, a couple years later I would smoke the infamous Macdonalds in Montréal, and then I became a loyal Belmonts girl in Toronto, switching from a 20 to 25-pack somewhere in between.

I’m not going to pontificate on the risks of smoking because:

1) they are KNOWN  🤷🏻‍♀️

2) I was always so annoyed by people stating the very obvious and very unhelpful iTs nOt hEaLthY fOr YoU

and..

3) I am a BIG believer and advocate for harm reduction. Controversial, perhaps.. but if a pack of cigarettes is the only thing that’s gonna take the edge off, SMOKE IT baby! Do what you need to do to get through the day. Trust me, you’ll eventually get sick of it anyway. 

And because I am attempting a lens of gratitude in all my milestones and downfalls, I must humbly express that smoking cigarettes has given me:

• unwavering friendships

• WILDLY fascinating conversations

• countless philosophical ramblings that have truly contributed to my creative essence and ever-present existentialism

• gossip, lots of it.

• many, many chances to ask a hot, mysterious stranger for a light (and their name) 

• job opportunities! for real! Yes, it IS like that Friends scene where Rachel is missing out on the perks

• much-needed Vent Sessions

• even-more needed breaks from work (and I’m not just talking about a 9-5, past me was ADAMANT on juggling 2-4 part-time gigs across industries at all times, on top of studying and running my own grassroots projects).

• and lastly, the ever-crucial solo time: lil bite-sized pauses of reflection that I did not yet have the maturity or intuition to create for myself, sans substance.

In 2018 I quit for a month and then started up again because I was stressed (who else).  In 2019, I managed to quit for three whole months, but mostly because after backpacking through Germany I settled for a couple weeks in a nature preservation museum in the tiny village of Staudernheim (which had virtually no cigarettes), and later spent two months in Vaasa, Finland, a weird and special city where I did my first artist residency (shout out PLATFORM) and smokes were way too expensive anyway. I started again on a hostel rooftop in Rome after a really big cry, freshly ghosted by a random Bulgarian guy whose picture is probably in the textbook definition of ‘narcissism’. 

It wasn’t until I had fully embodied that photo of Ben Affleck smoking through the pain of existence, (ie: pandemic) that I did what any other late-20s city bruja would do: go deep into the woods with some spit and a whole lot of intention and cast a spell. Third time's the charm, as they say. 👁️ That weekend I went camping, I shifted to smoking herbs which lasted a couple of days, and then I halted altogether. 

The migraines! The terrible, terrible mood! I was gaining weight and coughing up years of tar and drinking tea like my life depended on it (which I guess it did?). Fast forward 1 year later and I’m singing again, and 2 years later; here I am with CLEAR LUNGS and a debut EP nearly ready to be released into the world. Take that, throat chakra <3

I’ll never forget having drinks with a friend who told me, way back when I had just started, that smoking is simply following your body's natural urge to breathe, to INHALE and EXHALE. That really stuck with me. 

And in quitting, I also learnt the art of letting go… of past selves, of past lives, and to not fall into the trap of allowing something external to me control my existence.

Quitting cigarettes remains one of my proudest accomplishments and I’m happy to support you if you are on the same journey. Let’s MAINTAIN OUR VITALITY baby! 

🍎 TO LISTEN 🍎

Simply for the line “...smoke the days like cigarettes…”.

🍎 TO WATCH 🍎

I actually remember attending a Philosophy class at the Universidad de Buenos Aires back in 2012 where the professor was an avid smoker. We were allowed to smoke inside (!) only if we participated in discussions (genius). But then exams came around and the professor would wander up and down the aisles with a half smoked cigarrette hanging out of his mouth while the rest of us sweated our way through Foucault. Absolute cruelty lol.

🍎 TO READ 🍎

Jack Kerouac’s On The Road is my de facto beatnik wannabe smoking novel, along with T.S Eliot’s The Wasteland and Jim Morrison’s poetry. Big vibe and I stand by it to this day.