smoke addiction (iv)

One of the sensory pleasures of smoking not often discussed is the visual quality of the smoke. I particularly like cigarette smoke because of its subtle blue tint. Sorry, I'm not one of those writers who will track down the pantone number for you; it's just blue, maybe like a matte metal grayish-blue, maybe like a blue anodized aluminum tube with a satin finish that's rubbed over with a gray crayon, something like that. Anyway, it's blue, whereas cannabis smoke is about as white as a cloud in a kid's painting done on white paper, where the kid just leaves the cloud space and watercolors the sky around it. Cigars? Swear to god, the smoke is actually brown, just like the wrappers, although admittedly I haven't smoked enough cigars or observed enough cigars being burned to say I'm confident in that generalization.

Although, now that I've finished that paragraph and my high is starting to fade, my memory reminds me that not all cigarettes have blue smoke. When I was considerably younger and considerably more self-consciously pretentious than I am now, I smoked these really black tar and asphalt-tasting little numbers called sobranies. The paper was actually this dark, rich mahogany and the filter a metallic gold. (Gold! I felt like a bond villain smoking them in our small-town cafe. Maybe more like the son of oddjob in a witness relocation program.) Anyhow, those things were like angry dragons or coal-fired trains, pumping out a thick, velvety charcoal haze. The smoke strangely smelled nice, but it was not a pretty sight.