A puff of danger / Familiar strangers

Today: A.J. Daulerio, editor, journalist and the proprietor of The Small Bow; and Julianne Escobedo Shepherd, writer, editor, co-founder of Hearing Things and author of the forthcoming book Vaquera.

Issue No. 230

Smoke Signals
A.J. Daulerio

Surreality TV
Julianne Escobedo Shepherd

Smoke Signals

by A.J. Daulerio

For 20 years I was a pack-a-day smoker, and I’d tried to quit in every conceivable way—cold turkey, patches, Wellbutrin, hypnotism—but nothing ever stuck for more than a month. In 2017, in my 40s, still smoking heavily, and now staring down a due date for the birth of my first child, I read Allen Carr’s Easy Way to Stop Smoking as a last resort. Somehow, through a bit of mind-control sorcery I still don’t understand, it worked. I planned never to touch a single nicotine product ever again, because I’m so paranoid that the spell might break and I will end up a 50-year-old pack-a-day smoker unable to take the stairs nor do anything active with my THREE children. 

After my annual physical this year my primary care physician, a 60-ish man with an earring, informed me that despite my good behavior, my spirometry results revealed I had the lungs of an 83-year-old man.

“Eighty-three!” I was aghast. I felt betrayed, having assumed that my seven-year abstinence would, at the very least, have given me age-appropriate lungs. 

“If it makes you feel any better—you were 91 two years ago, and the good news is you still don’t have emphysema.” Ninety-one. Jesus.

I was frustrated. Every time I see my doctor, I do this dumb bit where I try to convince him he should let me smoke cigarettes again, especially now. Then, he counters with some variation of the following.  

“If there’s a news report that a meteor is about to hit the earth and there’s no chance of survival, I’ll set up two lawn chairs in front of my house, and you and I will smoke a whole pack together.” 

To be annoying, I decided to test him some more.