Going Hot Turkey.

“Going cold turkey” sounds hard, right? Like, imagine you’re so addicted to this thing, you enjoy it regularly for years on end, it creates part of your identity and weaves an important part of your social fabric, and then one one day it just… stops. That would, like, leave a hole, y’know?

To be sure, it’s mostly alcohol / nicotine addicts that seem to use this language of “going cold turkey,” but it could realistically be applied to anything else as “addictive” as these really rather benign and humble passe-temps.ⁱ But what do you call it when you decide to take up these kinds of things anew? And in middle age, no less? Why, “going hot turkey” of course!

Which is exactly what The Girl and I have recently decided to embark upon with smoking. It feels like the time is right to pick up a new passion together, especially since we don’t actually have a lot of overlap in our hobbies otherwise. I mean, I like to collect objets d’arts, she likes to weave and knit.ⁱⁱ I like to bicycle outdoors, she likes to go to spin class. I like to golf, she likes to swim. Etc etc you get the picture. And since we both categorically agree that smoking is *objectively* cool – the controlling of fire, manual-to-oral interaction, millennia of history – and yet it’s something that was pretty much socially verbotten in our social circlesⁱⁱⁱ growing up (and really to this day).^iv So as we now appear to be entering a new chapter in our lives, in which our children require fewer and fewer of our daily hours,^v there’s an expansion of opportunity currently being created and by golly we’re going to fill it with so much stimulation Disney will want to charge admission. And this is our first intentional foray: hacking darts!

After a long weekend away together in Kelowna, we’re already having a blast dusting off old packs of *flavoured* Mexican tobacco, lighting real wooden matches, ordering vintage Dupont lighters off eBay,^vi researching solid gold cigarette cases, and generally engaging with this timeless ritual; one that connects us, calms us, stimulates us, and even provides deeply under-appreciated health benefits. Of course being cool and connected is its own reward,^vii and is more than enough for our purposes, but if you’re the Bryan Johnson type who’s always looking for ways to health-maxx, you’ll certainly be interested to learn what the nanny state took from you^viii while feeding you a thousand and one other nutritional poisons, not least of which is that smoking and nicotine help to:^ix

• Increases cognitive function
• Ameliorate cellular energy metabolism disorders
• Reduces neuroinflammation
• Protect from oxidative stress
• Inhibits glucose hypermetabolism (prevents cancers, Alzheimers, etc.)

Inhale, exhale, indeed! See you on the other side.

1. To quote from an ancient MP translation:
   

   There’s a theory (one I don’t credit) that a card game can be an addiction, like tobacco or something. Do you know how little sense this theory would make to someone who’s smoked cigarettes for the past twenty years ? From my point of view, only barbiturates like and heroin are truly addictive substances. Not alcohol, nicotine, pussy, hashish, the Internet, cards games of any description and so on and so forth. The test for an addictive substance is simple: take one of the things in question, isolate the taker, and then withdraw the substance suddenly. If he dies (as opiate addicts die, quite clearly) we’re talking about an addictive substance. If he doesn’t die, it’s not an addictive substance, it’s simply bad pussy.

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2. eg.

   

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3. “Social circles” is, of course, just a polite and sociali(stic)ally acceptable way of saying “class” or “caste”, in case you hadn’t noticed:

   

   I don’t recall where exactly I found this table online and I don’t agree with 100% of it but it mostly feels directionally correct. ↩

4. Smoking cigarettes still “codes” poor in our little corner of the world, which is a shame! But also leaves room for us to reshape the woefully uncool social norms.

   

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5. The shift is currently on from quantity to quality: parenting still matters! ↩
6. This shit is just *cool*

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7. How much less anxious and socially isolated would Gen Z (or the rest of us) be if they (we) hacked a few more darts, drank a few more drinks, and just generally acted more European/Asian and less square? The answer is: probably a lot! Goodness knows we’d ↩
8. Ahem
   

   If “this is what they took from you” was a thread: https://t.co/Rj0S1JFdzg

   — DR22 Ω 🪬🎭 (🐬,🐬) (@DejaRu22) February 1, 2024

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9. Per Nature, 2023, Nature, 2024, etc. ↩