To vape is to be lame

I recently met a fellow in London so ashamed of using his vaporizer in public that he buried his face in his collar anytime he wanted to inhale.

Of course he was right to feel ashamed; vaping being about the most undignified thing one can do in public short of a stroll in the nude. What was remarkable was an apparent contradiction: his vaping should preclude the possibility, but this fellow seemed otherwise cool.

To own a vaporizer is to pledge oneself to the fraternity of the uncool. That’s been true from the technology’s inception, difficult though it may be for vaping’s constituency to accept. I’ve spoken to smokers desperate to quit but unwilling to even consider vaping as an alternative because the gains in well-being could hardly be worth the embarrassment. I’ve seen hip friends try, and fail, to take up vaping ironically, because not even irony can penetrate such a carapace of uncool. I’ve heard it speculated that some day a daring vape-friendly vanguard will come along and reclaim it – and time will prove those speculations wrong, because you cannot reclaim something that is lame in its very essence. Why is it lame to vape? Perhaps it is due to the extravagance of those lurid aerosol exhalations, which spew a sickly grey and billow up like mushroom clouds. Perhaps it’s the nerdy arcana of vaping culture, a satellite of the long-lame bong-ripping head-shop scene, the most flagrantly unfashionable speciality boutiques in the history of modern commerce. Or perhaps it’s simply the conspicuous show of effort toward what’s meant to be casual: where the smoker’s cool derived from his insouciance, the vaper’s style is laboured and perilously overdone. Vaping is fundamentally, unrelentingly lame, evermore.

My London friend was too cool to be seen vaping, which is to say that he did not did have a chinstrap beard, was not wearing a leather trench coat, and had things to say about subjects other than vaping and its attendant paraphernalia. His error was in presuming that he could get away with vaping if he acknowledged its lameness and made a tactful attempt to conceal the act. But vaping isn’t accommodated so easily.

Vaping’s uncool is totalizing: it dominates the vaper and cannot be joked, reasoned or explained away. The only thing one can do is embrace the steep reduction in social status and hope for privacy in shame.