tobacco

[Big Bill]

 

Nothing is dumber in my opinion in this life then dying young with a pretty corpse I plan on sliding into a grave sideway's coverred in scars' date=' overweight, smelling of booze with a stogie in one hand.

 

 

What's the point of living live if you're not enjoying it.

 

As it's been stated, to each his own.

[zigzag]

I see little in the way of "peace" ritual today. Sad' date=' ain't it?

m

[/quote']

 

Once again, I may have misinterpreted your message (sorry), but as far as the social aspects of smoking, you should see the smoking area outside the building where I work. I told a VP that if he really wanted to find out what was going on around there he needed to start smoking.

[milod]

Ziggie...

 

It may be because I hit a degree of maturity in a relatively rural area, but I think not if one is describing "coming of age" as a male in the 1950s and before.

 

The way I was taught, and discovered it similar in a wide range of "white" communities of various economic strata across the country and in the "black' working class community in Chicago at the early 1960s, there was a relatively elaborate but unwritten ritual not at all dissimilar to the Japanese tea ceremony that had to do with cigarettes.

 

I have no idea what, if any, similar rituals may have held sway among females my age and older.

 

Males my age and older have agreed, when I put things that way, that there was a relatively similar ritual into which they were "initiated" at some point in their teens, either directly or indirectly.

 

That "ritual" seems to have dropped dead with the boomer generation that technically follows me by about two years. I don't know if the burst of use of marijuana contributed to that among members of that generation or what... but...

 

I'm not putting a value judgment on tobacco per se - but I am stating that there seems to be a real loss in civility through loss of the tobacco ritual, or any near equivalent at least outside an illegal drug culture.

 

But then, when I was 17 and 18 I used to draw sociograms. <grin>

 

EDIT: Yup - but you don't really wanna know the statistics that have brought federal laws even on swimming pool drains compared to statistics on unsupervised children drowned in toilets or 5-gallon buckets.

 

m

[zigzag]

m

 

I pointed out the smoking area at work to illustrate that the social aspects of smoking are not dead today. More than any other promoted social activity at work, our smokers use that activity to bond at work.

[milod]

Big Bill....

 

Yeah... I admit that I tend to look at a lotta stuff, from music to foods we eat, with a major personal emphasis on culture and history rather than current "politics" and cultural "zeitgeist." I guess I have to admit that I keep doing it kinda in spite of myself because I know it seems easy for many folks to misunderstand a lot of it.

 

Parenthetically, "education" comes from Latin roots and roughly might be translated as "to lead out from" rather than "to cram information in." It's music, too, and in music and elsewhere I believe one should always be looking to learn other perspectives, other techniques, unfettered simply by habit.

 

That's where often I find myself the "loose cannon" when "accepted thought" is so otherwise obviously contradictory to other easily available information or concepts. Some of the Norlin era Gibsons might even serve as examples since some of us here find those instruments quite acceptable regardless of some "un-Gibson-like" concepts of construction. In effect, they still are great musical instruments.

 

That's as obvious to me in music as it is in anything. As musicians we either become remain creative or we become frozen in a personal time warp with little change in technique or general approach to creating music. I've said before that when I quit learning, on guitar as well as anything else that catches my fancy, I hope I am then rapidly planted.

 

A favorite saying from an earlier "life" when I taught stuff for money was, "practice doesn't make perfect, it only makes habit." It's true whether mental or physical, the two combined as in guitar playing, or other aspects of life.

 

m

[ShredAstaire]

Watch "Thank You For Smoking"....some of you guys would be good lobbyists! Time for a career change?