Smoking on the Can

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Although I’ve spent countless hours defending my weed habit, I would never defend my love for tobacco. Where standing up for cannabis becomes more mainstream everyday, the defense for tobacco weakens—and rightfully so. We all know how bad cigarettes are for us, and doctors (mainly my sister-in-law) tell me quitting tobacco is the best thing I can do for my health. Time and time again, I’ve tried to quit smoking tobacco, but—as many of you know—it’s really fucking hard. Cigarettes are engrained into my daily routine. Although I’m a fairly strong-willed person, I can’t quit smoking. Even if I manage to cut out cigarettes from my life, I have another habit to face, because I prefer to smoke spliffs. (Of course, I always smoke with pure hemp papers; I’m not an animal.) No joint is as juicy to me unless it has that extra kick, and this preference harangues me daily. A few decades ago, hearing a stoner criticize tobacco would have been laughable, but medical knowledge has turned the tables. You can call anti-cigarette ads propaganda, but they’ve outperformed any headway Reefer Madness made.

As the tide changes, I’m frequently reminded of why I should quit. Instead of hating myself for failing to quit smoking cigarettes, I recently took a comprehensive look at my smoking habits. I isolated my addiction down to three or four cigarette breaks a day and realized they all take place while I'm sitting on the toilet taking a crap.

I learned this habit from my relatives. My family is weird. We’re Muslim, and although most of us were never particularly religious, we adhered to the restrictions our culture dictated. Avoiding pork was easy, but abstaining from alcohol was another story. America is a country where drinking is a part of life; sobriety made us a whole different kind of family. Most my family members—especially my parents’ generation—lacked vices, so they smoked. In my house, the adults smoked in secret. Somewhere along the line, they deduced that the best place to feed a clandestine smoking habit was in the bathroom before a shower. Theoretically, this was a good idea—stuffing the door with towels keeps the smoke in, the shower steam neutralizes the smell, and most bathrooms have a vent. For years, these practices prevented me from discovering their smoking habits. As a kid, I never thought about the weird smell that lingered in the bathroom after my uncle showered, but around the age of 13, I put the pieces together, and I wanted to take part in the family ritual.

I had recently moved from my home in Thailand to Long Island, and my circumstances were not apt for socialization. At a time when most kids were occupied with soccer practice and birthday parties, I had oodles of time on my hands. On top of being bored as hell, I had arrived at an age when most kids want to break a rule or two. One day after school, I came home and went straight to the bathroom to do a search for contraband. Sure enough, underneath the sink behind a multipack of scrubbing pads were a pack of cigarettes and a book of matches. I quickly shut the door and carefully pulled one of the pristine white cylinders from the box. I did a quick check before lighting it. Door stuffed with bathroom mat? Check. Fan on? Check. Makeshift toilet paper ashtray? Check. I lit the cigarette. For two minutes, I was in the throes of excitement until the process of smoking the whole thing began to feel tedious, but I was stuck—if I didn’t turn the whole cigarette to ash, I needed to dispose of it. What if it doesn’t flush? I wondered. I’m in it this far, might as well finish it. But what do I do, just stand here? Well, there’s a toilet. I might as well take a shit.

The moment I sat down on the can and took a drag of the cigarette, I felt the legacy of my forefathers. If you’ve smoked a cigarette, you know that it can make you need to shit, but hopefully you have the restraint to not combine the two activities. However, if you make shitting and smoking a habit, no shit will feel as satisfying unless you’re smoking the customary cigarette that goes with it. You’ll be cursed to be a cultural deviant for the rest of your life, and you’ll tie an essential function of your body to a detrimental substance. The first time I smoked a cigarette in the bathroom, it all made sense—all the adults in my family weren’t just hiding their smoking habits from us. They were hiding their smoking and shitting habits from us.

As much as I knew this that first time, I knew I was fucked. For me, smoking on the can made me feel better about waking up for school. I  despised waking up early, and that morning smoke eased the transition between slumber and real life—which I always found so difficult. It became an addiction, and without ceremony, I joined the ranks of my family’s secret society.

The habit was pretty easy to maintain all through high school when I lived at home in can-smoking central, but when I went away to college, my dorm's community bathrooms posed a threat. Undeterred by building regulations and the guaranteed opposition of my floor-mates, I smoked in the stall. Guys would stand outside the door and yell at me as I smoked, but I didn’t care. Eventually, the guys realized I refused to quit. When I moved off-campus the following year, I continued my smoking and shitting ritual. Few roommates cared, and on the rare occasion that someone confronted me about it, I apologized, admitted it wasn’t cool, and then confessed that I was going to continue smoking and shitting no matter what they said. Because I refused to budge on my morning ritual, I became easy-going when it came to my housemate’s foibles. I knew they would always have my bad habit on me, so I ignored the annoying things they did.

After 16 years of smoking as I shit, I now execute the habit like a ninja. If the right elements are in play, I could smoke a pack of 100s in your master bathroom and you would have no idea that I was ever there. That said, I’ve started to cut this awful habit out of my life. On days when I wake up feeling right, I can power through the morning without having a cigarette until after lunchtime. But then there are those mornings when I wake up hating everything and know I won’t be able to get through the day if I don’t sit on the can for 10 minutes with my head in my hands, smoking a cigarette and wondering if I should call out of work just for the fuck of it. On those mornings, I regress to my old ways, and the possibility of having a tobacco addiction for the rest of my life seems more real. If that’s the case, I sincerely hope the world becomes more and more critical of tobacco until it’s illegal. I’d rather not curse my future kids with the same fate by leaving them a pack of cigarettes to find behind the multipack of scrubbing pads in the bathroom.

@ImYourKid

Previously - Hans the Weed Snob