Everyone Who Smokes Virginia Slims Is Dead Except Me. Apparently.

I can’t believe I paid $14 dollars for this nonsense for five months.

Photo by Mathew MacQuarrie on Unsplash

I can’t say I’ve ever had my finger on the pulse of “cool.”

For example, I have owned multiple leather jackets and not a single motorcycle; I got frosted tips six months after NSYNC broke up; the only commentary I have on an MMA fight is, “Why can’t I have arms like that?”

I’ve always wanted to be cool but couldn’t puzzle it out. I thought my mom was cool, which probably explains a lot. But when I turned eighteen, I was able to do the one thing that is objectively cool.

Smoke cigarettes.

Then, fifteen years later, outside a bar in Hyannis, the man who bummed a Virginia Slim off me frowned and asked, “Your grandmother teach you to smoke?”

And I tried to tell him, “Oh, no — I live out of the country mostly and slim cigarettes are more common abroad; these are the only ones that are slim like that, so when I’m in the States I smoke these.” But I could tell by the look on his face, that it was too late to salvage my cool, so I let him show me a time-lapsed video of him putting in a window and tried not to wince when he walked off saying, “Thanks for the slim.”