Grievance #2: Up in Smoke

Dec 24, 2009 16:44


“That’s the lamest excuse I’ve ever heard for not smoking.”

Um, what?

Again, another honestly stated thing that I had to run into, this year.  Again, we need to keep in mind that I happily go out and about amongst the people, and don’t tell them to necessarily quit doing anything they’re doing, unless it’s affecting or damaging something that I happen to have a vested interest in.  It seems like a fair deal, until apparently I’ve been somehow asking to hear the phrase above.

¿Really, guy?

I could have sworn we were past peer pressure after high school, but yet again, this is the kind of thing that most people will use the excuse of “oh, don’t get annoyed, he’s just high.”  The thing is this: That kind of statement isn’t really said by a first-time smoker, so the fellow has made a free choice to smoke, and therefore to say utterly inane and stupid bullshit.

This is another one of those situations where I wouldn’t have a problem, if people could just wrap their heads around the fact that I already am wired in a different enough way and can relax readily enough without pumping smoke into my lungs.  Look, I appreciate the offer tonight, but I don’t want to: That okay, maaaaan?

But I digress: This is a combo entry, and no one’s going to be happy with me for doing it, because everyone wants to separate one kind of smoking from another in order to feel better about themselves, much like various alcohol drinkers separate themselves so readily, as if the container and coloration are going to fool anyone who knows what’s going on into thinking that these individuals are not consuming alcohol.

The same effectively goes for various classes of tobacco smokers, even.  This shit simply kills me, so it’s going to get addressed:

Yes, I’m very proud of you paper rollers for stickin’ it to The Man and not having a bunch of other chemicals involved in your cigarettes.  You are not fooling me into thinking that you’re being healthier than someone who isn’t smoking, however.

The list of ingredients that lie within a factory-constructed cigarette puts the side of cereal box to shame, so it’s clearly a good thing to not smoke those, if there’s any ability to move away from them.

However, I’m going to skip the effects of tobacco and various cloves.  Oh yes, I’m about to pull the curve ball pitch of cutting directly to what the problem with smoke itself entails.

Now then, I’m not going to claim that I don’t get the romanticism behind smoking and such things.  I mean, the invention of human-guided fire is one of the founding bedrocks of civilization, and without it, my genetic line would probably have not survived enough generations to produce such a mean-spirited jackass of a 27 year-old boy/Man.  However, all of that volatility hints at volatility: Nature doesn’t really gussy up anything for any function other than indicating how much time has passed (layers of sediment and such), hiding from hunters by mimicking something dangerous or innocuous, or hunting other creatures by blending into the surroundings.  For the most part, everything else tends to have some hint of either present (or past, for vestigial organs/traits) function.  Nature doesn’t really write mystery novels at the macro level: If you can see something, it’s going to indicate quite a bit (you’ll notice my wording for subatomic quantum physics consideration, of course).

As such, fire involves a very volatile reaction.  Now, there are different colorations and properties to fire in relation to other compounds existing within, but combustion reactions tend to use air as the oxygen source, a fuel (generally of carbon and hydrogen), and perhaps other materials (each category of metal tends to have its own gorgeous tendencies of color when part of a fire).  As a result, we get major products of water, carbon dioxide, maybe some nitrogen gas, and heat, ¿but what about those minor products?

Y’see, no one is telling the flame what to do (unless your beliefs about the universe are that anchored in a system of determinism, in which case I have absolutely nothing to say to you, other than wondering why you’re going to treat me like I had a choice in writing this, by comparison), so there are a lot of byproducts.  A goodly amount of this is carbon monoxide, and thankfully we have developed detectors more directly geared towards picking this up (as opposed to carbon dioxide, in which case breathing too hard might set one off, and you wouldn’t be prepared for when I set fire to your house).  Another general product involves the randomized creation of cyclic hydrocarbons.  If you’ve ever had your eyes glaze over from deciding to be cute and browse your friend’s organic chemistry book, you’re at least remotely academically familiar with what I’m referring to, in terms of the preferred conformational structure that long chains of unsaturated carbon atoms take when they get up past 4 carbons in a row in the chain.  Now then, imagine these being created outside of laboratory conditions, being inhaled into you.  Forming under the speedy heat of provided by that nice warm cigarette and the tiny raging infernos involved, these cyclic hydrocarbons are hardly finished fully forming, are they (P.S. They’re not)?

So, these volatile rings have multiple binding sites that will attempt to react in order to reduce the entropy that has been introduced into the system, and they don’t give a flying fuck if your trachea’s involved.  It’s random, so go ahead and roll the dice if you’re a gamblin’ man/woman.

On top of it, such volatile aromatic hydrocarbons also have been shown to speed up other reactions through their accidental mischief, and I am particularly referring to the reactions governed by the P 453 enzyme.  To keep this from going completely out-of-control, I’ll keep it short by saying, if there’s a chemical whose metabolism is important to you, than P 453 probably has a hand in it, and about 70+% of your medications are going to be affected by this as a result.  There is a reason why you’re being asked if you’re a smoker when you’re being prescribed that medication.  If those reactions are getting sped up, you’re basically looking at drugs and internal body chemistry being metabolized so fast that they frequently doesn’t even have a chance to reach its target location/receptor.

¿Do you really honestly think that your marijuana smoke doesn’t contain carbon and hydrogen, and that oxygen doesn’t have anything to do with the combustion reaction?  If you do, then either you don’t have any respect for science (which resulted in the computer you’re reading this on, jackass!), or are quite possibly high.

So yeah: I will bracket it in with the other kinds of smoking, for that very reason.

Nicotine is habit-forming, and as it is, the stuff’s getting fucking expensive due to the fact that the government is taking its role as the servant of the larger populace very seriously with the insanely stringent rules and regulations that it is passing down the pipes, so it’s not even a great financial solution for pepping you up from all of the misery that you’re experiencing from your life getting shorter (which of course has nothing to do with your smoking).

I mean, this shit is so blatant, that it’s even something that can affect you by eating blackened barbeque food, as more recent studies have revealed repeatedly (which, when you primarily keep in mind the chemistry principles that I am hinting at, can make sense, even though it’s a bit distressing for our summer activities).

Obviously, in any of these cases, antioxidants (read: vegetables, regardless of whether you’re an omnivore or otherwise) clearly combat the damaging possibilities of these oxidizing molecules, but you are still playing dice, and no one should pretend otherwise.

On a sidenote, I know that marijuana isn’t habit-forming as a chemical dependency, but to say that it has no psychological dependence at all is sheer folly of an epic proportion.  As such, I engage in such activities rarely, as I find my ambition to be a critical aspect of my personality, and don’t find it necessary to hamper it anytime soon.

Oh yes, there’s that romanticism in burning out, rather than fading away, that inherent danger that’s enhanced by the danger in smoking and having a devil-may-care attitude.  That’s fine, but I don’t want to hear a damn thing about you ever being old, and… that’s another entry altogether.

I do miss rock ‘n roll shows above ground with smoke, but I can get over that association readily.  I happen to like not damaging my yelling/singing voice by any means other than what I actually do to it by exercising it, frankly.  I will jump back on this is in an upcoming entry.

smoke, airing of grievances, nicotine, festivus, tobacco, marijuana, smoking

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