Via Dreher, a very readable piece by Tom Chiarella on taking up smoking at the age of 46:
As a nonsmoker, I always figured cigarettes were an indulgence run amok. But there is something tangible about need, even when it’s self-created. It feels good to need. There’s the moral confusion — do I need or do I want?
And three weeks in, on a day when I smoked fourteen cigarettes, I realized that I could finally enjoy one following sex.
This was because I could finally enjoy a cigarette, period. It had ceased to become a chore or a challenge. I liked it. I liked smoking. Dopamine? I don’t know. Didn’t care. Just wanted a smoke. I practically jumped out of bed. My girlfriend and I wrapped ourselves in blankets and stood on her porch. The smoke filled my chest so that my body heated itself in a new way. We jabbered. Winter approached. "I always wonder," I said, taking a drag of my cigarette, "how many more winters do you get?" I sounded morbid and wistful. Pathetic. I coughed a little. But that’s how it went with smoking. A cigarette amplified truth. If you were sad, you sounded sadder.
But the cigarette notched everything upward, too. Everything seemed more potent and brilliantly illuminated. The sex, the beer we were sharing, the apple I’d left at our bedside, even the cold breeze up under the blanket, tightening my scrotum. I was a dopamine factory just then.
The Dish 