First Contact

SMOKING

I'm not writing this piece to complain about smoking itself. Or preach about how bad cigarettes are for you. I smoke. A lot. At least two packs a day. Usually more. So I can't trash smokers themselves. That would be hypocritical. It's the non-smokers, or those who quit, that bug the living hell out of me. Even worse...the smokers who DO take the hypocrital route.

There is nothing more obnoxious to me than when I'm enjoying a cigarette-whether it be on my front porch, on the street, or anywhere- and I'm approached about it. “You shouldn't smoke!” they tell me. Or “You know that's bad for you, right?” Well maybe I shouldn't smoke. There's a LOT of things in this world that shouldn't be done.

Like having sex with goats. I think that's wrong. I think it's perverse and disgusting and I think that every goat-fucker who still breathes air should be forced to stop (both goat-fucking and breathing.) But despite my views on fornicating with our hooved friends, I'm not going to preach to the people that do it. I'm not going to burst through the door of a barn, where a lonely farm-hand is making whoopee with a member of the livestock and yell “THAT'S BAD FOR YOU!” or “YOU SHOULDN'T DO THAT!” Why? Because its stupid. It's annoying. And quite frankly...if I were plugging a goat, I'd feel extremely awkward if I had to listen to a lecture about how wrong I am while I'm still sac deep in Goat-Land.

But enough about New Zealand, (Oh snap!) I'm talking about smoking. Yes, I know it's bad for me! I've read the countless pamphlets and books, seen millions of Television commercials telling me how it will blacken my lungs. I've seen the warning posters everywhere listing the ingredients of tobacco that most people don't know, like tar, and chlorine....and the blood of newborn babies, (I don't know...I didn't memorize the list...) Point is, I know it's going to kill me, or at least make me sick. The thing that seperates me and all true smokers from the rest of society?

We don't care.

Or at least most of us don't. I mean, if you cared that much about cancer, or lung disease, or dying young, would you start smoking at all? Or if you did start for whatever reason, but you cared about all that, wouldn't you stop? I don't wanna hear “Oh it's so hard to quit.” or “I'm trying so hard to give it up.” You know what? If you care enough about your health, you'll quit. It wouldn't matter how hard it is, you'd DO IT and wouldn't complain. If you're a smoker that tells everybody you're “trying to quit, but can't.” You're lying to yourself. You aren't trying to quit. You're TRYING to try to quit. And you don't care enough to succeed.

That leads me to my next point. Legal smoking age. I've smoked cigarettes since I was nine years old. Nine, that's right. It started with stealing cigarette butts from my mother's ashtray when she was outside. It then graduated to swiping full cigarettes and eventually whole packs from her purse. People say it's wrong to smoke under 18. Why?

Smoking can and likely will kill you. EVERYONE knows this. If you smoke, and you're not just doing it to impress other people, you're taking your own life into your hands. That's a hefty responsibility. You're taking charge of a HUGE aspect of your life. Most people can't handle the idea of playing with their own mortality. So I think that if you're a kid and you make that decision, and realize what you're doing, you should be allowed the buy cigarettes. Seriously. I didn't start smoking to be popular. Nobody KNEW I smoked till I was 15, and even then I didn't advertise it. Why? Because I smoked for one reason: to relieve the stress and anxiety that came with living in an abusive household.

No, I'm not going to whine about the fact that I got the shit beaten out of me on a day to day basis by my mother. Old news. But I will say that it made me a very high strung kid. Smoking helped me cope. I knew what I was doing, even at that age I knew the potential consequences. There are grown men and women that only smoke at parties, or light a cigarette but only pretend to inhale. They think it's cool. They do it for show. These are the people that shouldn't be allowed to buy cigarettes. An ID card showing your age doesn't make you mature. Or intelligent for that matter.

So here's what I propose: Instead of having a law that requires you to be 18 with a card as proof to buy cigarettes, there should be a maturity test. The test will not be a piece of paper. You will be taken to a room. There will be no furniture in the room. They will shut the door, leaving you alone in this bare, windowless room. The only other objects besides you will be a pack of cigarettes, a lighter and an ashtray. The pack of cigarettes will have a label that reads as follows.

“WARNING: Smoking these cigarettes will cause instant cancer. You will grow large malignant tumors all over your body, will have to endure months of chemo therapy and suffer from immense hair and weight loss. You will constantly be sick. One puff from these will make your teeth yellow and your lungs black. You will cough constantly and often times said coughing will bring up lumps of plegm or even blood. Smoke at your own risk!”

Yes it's going to be a very BIG pack of cigarettes. The point of all this being: If the test-taker reads this label and still decides to smoke one of the cigarettes, they will be allowed to buy them. That deals with the “handling your own mortality” bit. But what about the rest? That's part two of the test. The test taker is moved to another, identical room, occupied by them, another man (in the nude) and a goat. The nude man proceeds to make love to the goat, and you have to decide whether or not you're going to say something.

That's what I think the process should be. Not that it would ever happen. Human kind hates new ideas. Especially new ideas that might WORK. Anyway...I've spent a lot of time talking about smoking...cigarettes. But cigarettes aren't the only smokable objects in the world!

George Carlin once said: “Sometimes [a cigar] is a big brown dick!” Cigars do look like dicks don't they? Big, long....brown. One end is always wet. You smoke cigars...and you can “smoke” dicks too! Amazing how obvious, yet unobvious these similarities are. No I'm not saying that cigar smoking makes you a homosexual male. But it does make you look pretentious. Well let me be more specific. If you smoke a cigar, indoors...in a big cushiony swivel chair with a bottle of burbon on the mahogony desk in front of you...you're pretentious. If you smoke a cigar outdoors in a lawn chair in short shorts and and undershirt... you look pretentiously white trash. If you walk down the street in the middle of the day, dressed like a “gangsta” rapper, smoking a grape-flavored cigar and holding it like a joint....you're a douchebag. All pretenses of pretensiousness are dropped and you graduate to full douchebag status.

That's all I have to say about cigars, honestly. On to marijuana. Hey, dude! Wanna go roll a joint, light it, smoke it, and eventually kill any working brain cells we have left? HELL YEAH DUDE! Pot smokers make no sense to me. You have a plant, that when set on fire and inhaled causes you to become lightheaded, extremely hungry and makes you laugh for hours on end at things that aren't even remotely funny. I don't see a point. I'm constantly hungry and I don't even smoke weed. I like to laugh at things that deserve laughter. I like being an intelligent person capable of forming full sentences, containing words with more than two syllables, and not have said sentences punctuated at random intervals by little intellectual nuggets such as “uuuuuh......” or “mmmm....” or, “duuuude.”

But on the other hand...if you want to smoke cigarettes to impress others...suck on a big brown dick-I MEAN-smoke a cigar, or destroy your brain with marijuana...go ahead. I can't and don't want to stop you. Your choice. But just know that I don't like you very much.

End Rant.