Nostalgia for a Bad Habit

Daily Editorials
Thu, 02 Apr 2026 21:00:00 -0700
Opinion

I miss smoking.

There. I've said it.

Now, I don't miss it enough to go out and buy a $17 pack of cigarettes — which is apparently the lunatic price these days — and sit down and smoke them, but I certainly miss it enough to hope that if I'm ever on a plane that's about to go down in a fiery ball the Bermuda Triangle, some kind soul on board will have, and agree to bum me, a square.
Updated: Fri Apr 03, 2026

I miss smoking.

There. I've said it.

Now, I don't miss it enough to go out and buy a $17 pack of cigarettes — which is apparently the lunatic price these days — and sit down and smoke them, but I certainly miss it enough to hope that if I'm ever on a plane that's about to go down in a fiery ball the Bermuda Triangle, some kind soul on board will have, and agree to bum me, a square.

God help me if the only combustible on offer is a vape, which won't precisely do the trick.

I don't blame anyone who's trying to preserve their health, however dubious the method, but I always felt the charm was in the smoky old cigarette itself. There was the ritual of lighting up, tapping it into the ashtray, the way you'd have to grip it between your teeth if both hands were temporarily occupied, scrunching up your eye like Popeye to keep the smoke out.

Cigarettes were punk. (Don't tell my kids I said that.)

If they didn't kill you, I'd never have stopped.

At the beginning of TV shows and movies on streaming services now, they start with a polite little notice on the screen listing all the various and sundry evils to which you'll be exposed should you keep watching.

You see all kinds of warnings now — violence, of course, and drug use and whatever the heck "thematic elements" are. I even saw a warning once for "pervasive language," which, as far as I could understand, meant that I wasn't watching a silent movie.

And there are, of course, warnings for smoking.

There was a time, back in the days of the dinosaurs, when everyone smoked in movies. Man, woman, occasionally even a child, for a laugh. It was impolite to smoke and not offer one to everyone in the room.

"Of course you want a cigarette! Who are you, Queen Victoria?"

Over time, that changed, and for a while, smoking's solitary cinematic refuge was in the hands of an occasional bad guy.

Lately, I've been noticing the return of cigarettes in movies and TV shows. Here and

there, the good guys are smoking. In "The Pitt," even a few doctors and nurses light up.

Though, come to think of it, the way it's portrayed, the cigarette's usually a sign that

someone is so resigned to their miserable existence that they're willing to throw it all

away for one pull on a cancer stick. I guess it's even impossible in fiction these days to

fool yourself into thinking your pack-a-day habit will probably turn out fine.

I was never one of those smokers anyway. You know the kind I mean: The ones who wake up in the morning and have a cigarette before they get out of bed. I could go days, even weeks, without one, though I'm sure they kill just as reliably if you're not truly addicted as if you are.

When I started smoking, as a teenager, the danger was the draw, but soon enough it evolved into a nice little 10-minute escape from reality. It was a shortcut to a break at work, when you could ask one of your fellow waiters to watch your tables for a few minutes while you went back to have a cigarette. It was something to do with your hands while you stood around at a club, feeling self-conscious. It was a way to relax.

I told myself I'd quit when they got to be $5 a pack, and then they were $7, and $8 and eventually cigarettes just didn't fit into my life anymore. There's certainly no place for them now.

After high school, I lived in Greece for a while and during that time, politicians were debating a law requiring all restaurants to have nonsmoking sections. The country had one of the highest smoking rates in the world then, with something like half of the adult population being smokers.

On the news one night, they asked a perplexed restaurant owner what he thought of the law.

"What happens," he posited, hands spread in confusion, "when a group of people come in and some of them want to smoke and some of them don't?"

As I grew up, I became that group of restaurant-goers. Some of me wanted to smoke, and some of me didn't. The latter side won out, thankfully, and I quit without many pangs. Those I get now, the vague longings, decades after I stubbed out my last butt. I think back on cigarettes the way you would a gorgeous, terrible boyfriend.

Yeah, he never cleaned his bathroom, he burped at the table, and you had a pretty good idea he was going to cheat on you eventually. You couldn't, in good conscience, stay with him any longer.

But there's nothing wrong with thinking back now and then about how fun he was while he lasted.