smokin'
Crap. That didn’t go well. It seems that I missed a few days. The trip went well enough, I made it home, and I saw many good things. Everyone should do this, this cross-country trip thing. In like, a car or something that moves slower than an airplane. Trains are nice, but they’re expensive, and you can’t get off whenever you want to, and you can’t smoke.
Smoking. I’m really starting to feel like I’m having fewer and fewer friends because of this smoking thing. It’s fascinating. It’s like you’re married to someone for 20 years and you wake up one morning and they tell you that they never really liked you. It was an infatuation that got out of hand, the kids happened, and now, they’re out of the house it’s time to move on. This has never happened to me, mind you, but I’ve had my strange marriage moment. Something about her wanting my children but not me. And we didn’t have kids at the time. Thank God we never did.
There have always been people who didn’t smoke. If you were a smoker, you either didn’t know who they were, because they didn’t hang around with you, or you never even noticed that they didn’t smoke, because they for one reason or another never made an issue out of your smoking. They were just regular people. Like smokers.
There have always been places where you couldn’t smoke. Like Aunt Edna’s house where Uncle Eddie was in an iron lung or there were plastic slipcovers or they spoke in phrases from the Bible. The Natural History Museum, Church, places where it just wasn’t proper to smoke. Everybody (well, most everybody) knew where these places were. Now smoking is just assumed to be a crime wherever you are. I have come to know people who smoke that won’t smoke in their own houses and cars. This is normal now.
I’ve seen more than one marriage predictably fall apart partly because one person purposely married another with opposite smoking habits; each one assuming that the other would be reasonable. The smoking partner inevitably made the compromises, and endured unending sniping for the duration.
The presumptuousness of the post-modern American occasionally throws me off. The presumption of the culture is that if you smoke, there is not only something wrong with you, but you are fair game for rudeness. The reasoning is that simply by smoking, the smoker is being rude. Tit for tat. This inner certainty of the acceptable debasement of smokers today is notably new. Oftentimes nowadays it is because of self-loathing.
We are all familiar with the reformed smoker. The zealot that loudly and insistently denounces his former smelly compatriots. But there is a new breed. One that smokes occasionally, or one who has fallen off the wagon and feels sin burning in their lungs with every drag. These are the compromisers. The ones in shame with themselves who put abstract limits on their filthy habit, and wish to impose those limits on others, so that they also may share in the shame. This furtive sinning and subsequent proselytizing is akin to the backsliding preacher, who with his pants down tells the deflowered parishioner that, “It’s OK to do this with me this time because I’m a man of God, but you should never do this with anyone else until you’re married.” The compromiser says, “Hey, I smoke too, but you shouldn’t smoke (insert the time or place) because I don’t.”
The reasons are many and varied. It will stink up the car and I won’t be able to sell it. Ditto for the house. Hey. Get some fucking air freshener and clean it once in a while. You’re supposed to paint the house once every couple of years anyway if you bought it to turn it over. Open the windows. Clean the ashtray. Live a little. Or quit and shut up. The non-smokers at least have a point. They don’t smoke. It’s people like you that give up just that little bit of freedom and comfort (read pursuit of happiness) that costs the rest of us, and you, down the road.
