The Menthol Cigarettes of Mints

I used to smoke. To be honest, I totally miss it. I started in college for the nicotine kick, cramming for exams. But in the end I loved the activity of smoking. In New York, when you’re waiting for people to show up at bar or restaurant, it’s the perfect waiting activity. You’re not just sitting there, craning your neck like a loser with a is that them? Is that them? No, it’s not them…look on your face. It’s better than reading a book or paper because you’re not constantly looking up to see if your friends finally arrived. (The best smoke of the day, by the way, was the after-a-good-meal-smoke and the late-evening-wind-down-before-sleep smoke.)

Man, I miss smoking. I’ll shortcut through the chronic bronchitis, the gross reekiness of it (including, but not limited to, breath, teeth, clothes, hair, and hands), the way it sucks your skin ragged, and how it’s simply bad for you. After years of regular smoking to social smoking, I quit cold complete turkey about 4-5 years ago.

One of the irritating things I remember about smoking was once you pulled out a pack, people come out of the woodwork asking you to spare a cigarette for them. In general, you conceded, hoping for good smoker karma if you were ever empty-handed. But when you were down to your last two or three, it was totally grating.

Then I discovered the slacker-proof cigarette. One night at a show at Continental, I asked this friend Ben for a smoke and he pulled out a pack of Menthol cigarettes. I said ewwww, man, when did you start smoking Menthols? And he explained he started because he was sick of people bumming cigarettes: you want people to stop snaking your smokes? Smoke menthols. Nobody wants to smoke them. Needless to say, it worked on me but I couldn’t bring myself to get hooked on menthol cigarettes.

Now I discovered these:

To be clear, mints and candy don't have that My Precious level of stinginess that cigarettes have. I don’t mind sharing them, but I, myself, can go through an entire tin of mints or candy in one drive or sitting, like a bowl of pretzels. These Liquorice Altoids are the ultimate pace mint. I can only have one at a time...for a long time. My tongue is numb for about 10 minutes. I’ve had this same tin for months.

I initially bought them thinking, I like black Twizzlers so I should probably enjoy liquorice flavored mints. Well I discovered that real liquorice is a lot more hardcore than black Twizzlers. It’s like saying I could win NASCAR because I know how to drive stick.

Anyhoo, if you're with me, you're welcome to try these out yourself and see if you can handle more than one.