Guess what, friends. Smokers
ALL KNOW that smoking is bad. That it causes
lung cancer.
Heart disease. Low birth weight in children. We all know all of it. We also know that we're
stupid to keep smoking but we do it anyway because we
like it. That's the whole big reason. It's not a
political statement, it's not an
intentionally anti-social behavior, it's nothing but an
addiction. And did I mention that we like it? And guess what else. We
know it stinks. Most of us don't like the smell any better than the rest of you do. So we're
polite about it, some of us. We don't smoke in front of non-smokers, even if we're
outside. We buy
Altoids by the case. We put our long hair up in a
ponytail before we
light up so that our heads won't stink when we go back inside. (Where it's
heated and/or
air conditioned.) And while I'm ranting,
non-smokers have already pretty much had smoking done away with everywhere but in a smoker's own
car or
house anyway, at least in most of the
United States. We don't smoke in office buildings, restaurants, theatres, hell...ANYwhere lest we wish to pay an enormous
fine. For killing ourselves. Which we can't afford because we spend all our
money on
cigarettes. Nothing like kicking one when one's down, hm?
I
know smoking is
gross and
bad and
expensive and
stinky and
not a good idea. All smokers do. But we
like it. We aren't the driving force behind big-business
tobacco companies setting their
advertising target age-range younger and younger every year. We don't want kids to smoke. We don't want to
impose smoking on ANYone, fortheloveofgod. We just want to kill ourselves and go broke and
reek in our own homes or cars while we curse ourselves for our
addictive personalities in
peace. And to
heck with people who have never had an
addiction who say things like, "so QUIT, you stupidfuckingmorons!" It truly doesn't work like that for most people. And besides, some of us
like smoking and we don't
want to quit. So shut up already.