The Monstrous Cavalcade
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On vaping

Vaping seems a lot less like a cult these days. It still comes over a bit like they've repackaged smoking to better appeal to children, but seems to have been embraced as a way to satisfy a craving without sacrificing major organs to it.

Of course, when these tweets were written we were still deep in cult territory. Social media was full of photos of crowds of vapers (vapours?) exhaling simultaneously as though they were trying to hot-box whatever warehouse they were gathered in; all experiencing each other's sickly, sticky exhaust.

It was a time when even the etiquette wasn't understood; while we all knew that cigarette smoke was absolutely banned from venues, we could only offer confused shrugs when someone produced one of these new gizmos and proceeded to pump out the sort of cloud you'd normally only see looming over an unpronounceable Icelandic volcano.

To cap it off, vape shops were also still relatively few, and what was on offer had an aura of low-rent sex shop about it: full of vaguely glistening men blowing smoke rings while explaining to wide-eyed customers which part of their chosen contraption went where, and silently judging them how much wattage they could handle. That was the genesis of this daft series: the illicit hardware being dealt from strange establishments, in customised configurations against a set of criteria only those in the know had any concept of.

All of that was at the fore when these were written, and now that's subsided these tweets are suddenly dated. Vaping doesn't necessarily have that weird and underground feel about it that it had a few years ago when it was the under-lit, drifting around a city at night, criminal car gang of inhalation based activities.

Where can I get one of those long e-cigs that pulls snow & ice in at the front & sustains the impoverished vestiges of humanity at the back?

Where I can get one of those ambitious new e-cigs with the reusable vapour chamber you can recover from its oceanic landing platform?

Where can I get one of those e-cigs filled with nano-bots that infect your cells & integrate you into a single vaping hive mind?

Where can I get one of those e-cigs that's strawberry flavoured & has that LED on it that tells you when you're going to be euthanised?

Where can I get one of those e-cigs that's a full body suit that recycles all bodily waste so you can keep vaping in harsh desert climates?

Where can I get one of those e-cigs that's like a giant gel-filled pod in which you're forced to breathe the vaporised remains of the dead?

Where can I get a vaporiser that starts as one of those alpine horns but ends in an intricate custom motorcycle exhaust assembly?

Does anyone know where I can get an e-cigarette thing that looks like a chrome oboe being orbited by the ships from close encounters?

Note: Not all of these got zeros, but the majority did, and it didn't seem right to break up the set. Also the replies they got were very much discussion how limited their appeal was, so I'm giving them a pass

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