For the Love of MY Cigar
The mail lady just came, delivering the brandy-new issue of the famed JR CIGARS catalog, something I’ve looked forward to for years on end! The cool thing about the catalog is that it has gone through a transformation, becoming kind of a hybrid catalog/cigar magazine. Not only loaded with an endless array of tasty tobacco treats for your purchasing pleasure, it’s now filled with articles from some of the wonderful writers who penned for Cigar Magazine. Okay, that would also include me, as I do consider myself most wonderful, indeed (um, you really don’t need to ask my wife’s opinion, honest, I think she’s actually busy right now.)
The good execs at JR had enough faith in me to give me my own column that appears in every new issue, entitled: What Really Roasts My Robusto! It’s my own personal space to rant, rave, holler and blow smoke at the people, places, and things in the cigar world that I either love or loathe. Now, I generally write the articles several months in advance, and sometimes when I finally see them in print, I can’t even believe I’m able to string cohesive thoughts together, let alone remember what I actually wrote. But in this latest issue, I write about the cigar being my best friend in the whole world, and man is that ever so incredibly true!
Sometimes I step back and take a look at how much I love cigars and I think I freak myself out a little. How can a human being have such a passionate love affair with an inanimate object… one that you actually destroy by fire, no less? And I can almost guarantee that just about every person reading this feels the same – and you know it! Did you ever really think about why we love cigars so much, and dedicate so much of the time we spend around their brown and leafy existence? Why the hell are we so intoxicated by the sight and smell? What in the name of God makes us crave its brown and oily complexion, where smoking one to the fingernail is all we can possibly think of at any given moment?
Now it’s no secret that my wife loathes cigars – despising the odor along with its possible health drawbacks. (Just waking up every morning is stockpiled with its possible health drawbacks, but that doesn’t seem to phase her.) When I started smoking cigars some 17 years ago, she thought it was a fad and I’d be onto something else in a few months like I did with comic books, baseball cards, shrunken heads, and Danny Bonaduce action figures. But almost two decades later, what she thinks is a habit, has turned into a romance, one like I have never known and certainly never expected.
God dayum, I friggin love cigars.
Now if any of us Brothers and Sisters of the Leaf had actually saved the receipts for the amount of hard-earned cash that we have actually spent over the years on cigars, humidors, cutters, lighters, and goofy shirts with prints of cockatoos drinking single-malt on them, I think the Ah-Ha moment would just about kill each and every one of us.
Now that I think about it, the purpose of this here blog post isn’t really to come up with an answer to why you or I love our premium aged treats so much. It’s really more of a cathartic exercise of self realization, one that allows us to admit that our fixation (not a habit, a fixation) is an important part of our existence, and all we can really do is continue to go with the flow while enjoying the living hell out of our MONTECRISTO RESERVA NEGRA, CASA BLANCA RESERVE, HENRY CLAY HONDURAN, SANCHO PANZA EXTRA FUERTE, and CONSUEGRA DOMINICAN bundles!
Hopefully I’ve helped some of you with your stogie love affair conundrum, letting you know that you’re all right… you’re not going mental or becoming a housebound introvert with Nicaraguan and Honduran tendencies. You’re a cigar smoker… a lover of ligero, the patriot of puros, and a magistrate of maduro. I can tell you with absolute certainty that the cigar IS your best pal in the whole wide world, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.
Smoke “em Cuz Ya Gottem’,
Tommy Z . JR Cigars Blog With the Zman
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It’s almost inventory time at the “world’s largest humidor” and Sonia, our warehouse manager, wants to get rid of as many cigars as she can so she doesn’t have to count ‘em. Since we’re team players, we want to give her a hand so we’re making this great offer!
