Word: smoked
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...cigarette is also a pill that relieves stress. On a flight from St. Martin to New York a few years ago, the captain announced that smoking was permitted in the last four rows of the plane. Some of the smokers, who had psyched themselves into a few hours without a cigarette, now realized they might light up if only they were in the right seats. A frantic bidding war arose for those seats, stoking a commotion that the captain finally quelled by rescinding his order and declaring this a nonsmoking flight. If Klein had been captain, you could've smoked...
...PEOPLE SMOKE...
...Smoking, Klein argues, nudges the user into a state that is not so much narcotic as contemplative. "The moment of taking a cigarette allows one to open a parenthesis in the time of ordinary experience, a space and time of heightened attention that give rise to a feeling of transcendence, evoked through the ritual of fire, smoke, cinder connecting hands, lungs, breath, and mouth. It procures a little rush of infinity that alters perspectives, however slightly, and permits, albeit briefly, an ecstatic standing outside of oneself...
...Klein suggests, the pleasure of smoking is both aesthetic and metaphorical. Aesthetic: the votary aspect of lighting a cigarette. The very phrase "cigarette lighter" can refer both to the machine that provides the flame and to the person who clicks his Bic - or, if he's using matches, snicking his stick. Metaphorical: Smoking can represent passive surrender (one ingests the drug without a much greater expenditure of energy than an opium den denizen) or an active assertion of ego (exhaling smoke extends your "space," creates a cloud, a gentle miasma, a box around you). A cigarette is an undomesticated...
...must mention, just in passing, another of cigarettes' metaphorical potencies. "Smo-kin'!" exclaims Jim Carrey's frenetic alter ego in "The Mask"; and we know he is referring to a different -king. Smoking is, at heart, oral gratification. There is, shall we say, a certain sexual implication in putting our lips around a long, thin object, ingesting its essence into the mouth, perhaps swallowing it, then expelling it. Put this way, the act of smoking is, literally, a blow job. And the ritual "smoke after sex" - is this not the reward for all the exertion of coupling? For some smokers...