Lately, I’ve been thinking about smoking. All the time. It started sometime after we kidnapped the president of Venezuela but before we watched Alex Pretti get shot and killed by Customs and Border Patrol agents. Or maybe it was between their detaining young Liam Ramos in his bunny hat and their releasing that tranche of Epstein files and nothing happening. I definitely felt it a couple of weeks ago as I headed inside a fancy dinner party the same day our president had, via social media, threatened to wipe out all of Iranian civilization if the Strait of Hormuz wasn’t open by 8 p.m. The invitation was for 6:30 p.m.
Anyway, it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when it started. But with each passing day of this absolutely deranged year, my desire to contemplate how to make sense of it all while puffing on a cigarette grows.
Like many ideas of middling wisdom, this one was fed to me by the algorithm. A woman named Stephanie Wittels Wachs was suddenly on my Instagram scroll, reminiscing, longingly, about smoking in the ’90s. Obviously, she clarified, she wasn’t going to smoke; she was just thinking about it. Because smoking kills you. And if she died, she figured, who would take care of her kids? Very solid point, I thought. Then I remembered: I don’t have any kids.
I certainly remember smoking in the ’90s — it was divine. Before we stood around staring down at our phones, we used to stand around staring at each other.
