We will never let you quit.

Nobody is born smoking. Everybody starts somewhere. For most of us it was a borrowed offset smoker on a Saturday we had nothing else planned, a bag of charcoal, and someone older who said, calm and certain, just put the meat on and don't open the lid. We did not understand yet what we had agreed to. By hour six we did. There is a moment, somewhere around the third hour, when the smell reaches the front yard and the neighbors go quiet, and you realize there is no longer a version of your life where you don't do this. We are that someone older now. We are saying it to you. Just put the meat on.

We believe smoking is not a hobby, a phase, or a thing you do on holidays. It is a devotion. It asks for your weekends and then your weekdays. It asks for the hours other people spend sleeping. It will reorganize your yard, your freezer, your friendships, and the part of your calendar you once reserved for rest. We are not going to pretend otherwise, and we are not going to apologize for it. A devotion that costs you nothing was never a devotion. You will give it fourteen hours and it will give you eleven minutes of something you cannot describe to people who have not been in the yard at 4 a.m. That is the exchange. We think it is fair.

We are, openly and without shame, in the business of recruitment. We want your brother-in-law who keeps saying he's 'thinking about getting into it.' We want the man at the office who brings store-bought to the potluck and lies about it. We want your kids, eventually, when they're old enough to be trusted near the firebox. Smoking spreads the way the good things spread: one person does it well in their backyard, and three houses down the street start asking questions, and within a season the whole cul-de-sac smells like post oak and nobody can remember who started it. That was us. We start it everywhere we go. We are doing it to your neighborhood right now.

Understand that this is a lifestyle and lifestyles do not have an off switch. You will stop being someone who eats and become someone who plans. You will keep a wood inventory. You will know the difference between cherry and hickory by smell, in the dark, half-asleep. You will develop opinions about water pans that you will be unable to keep to yourself. People will ask you, gently and with concern, whether you maybe want to take a weekend off, and you will look at them the way you'd look at someone who suggested you take a weekend off from being alive. They mean well. They don't get it. We get it. You're home now.

And we will never let you quit. Not because we can't let you. Because we won't. People will tell you it's a lot, that it's taken over, that maybe it's gone too far. They will use words like 'obsessed' and 'concerned' and 'it's a Tuesday, why is the smoker on.' We have heard all of it. We have a bigger smoker now. Whatever you are looking for that made you find this page — the calm, the patience, the long quiet hours that belong only to you and the fire — it is here, and it does not end, and we are not going to be the ones to take it away from you. Stay. Put the meat on.