An Acquired Taste

My mother let me have a drag on her cigarette when I was five or six years old.  I didn't like it and never tried to smoke again until I was about 20, and then it was a pipe.  I had always liked the smell of other people's pipe and cigar smoke, but I soon found out that it tastes much harsher than it smells, even thought I didn't inhale.  People told me I would get used to it, but I never did. 

 A year or two later I tried pot but, since I had no inhaling experience, the only thing I got out of it was choking and coughing.  Somebody suggested that I should practice with regular cigarettes until I learned how to inhale properly.  After trying several brands, I settled on a mild menthol with filter, I think it was L&M.  At some point I switched to True Menthol and smoked those until they stopped making them some years later.  I ended up making my own for about 1/3 the price of store bought.  When Obama laid a hefty tax on the raw materials, most of the brands started calling theirs "pipe tobacco" because the tax increase neglected to include that.  I don't know how they got away with it, although I'm glad they did, but this stuff doesn't taste anything like the pipe tobacco I used to smoke back in the days when I wasn't inhaling.  Ironically, I never did develop an affinity for pot.  All it did was make me feel goofy and, according to what people have been telling me all my life, I'm already plenty goofy without it.

I have been told that I still don't inhale properly because I don't suck it all the way to the bottom of my lungs like you're supposed to do with pot.  This may be true because, when I told a doctor back in 2008 that I had been smoking for 50 years, he was surprised that he couldn't find anything wrong with my lungs.  He did find something wrong with my blood though, said that my red cells don't carry as much oxygen as they should.  The more I think about it, I think I have been this way all my life.  I have always seemed to need to breathe more than the average person doing the same activity.  Like most other things, it has gotten worse over the years.  I suppose it wouldn't hurt me to quit smoking regardless, but I don't want to.  I have heard the you have to really want to quit if you're going to quit, and I don't.