Tell me you don’t smoke!

I do this one a lot. If you’ve heard it all before then clearly we’re good friends. heh heh. Disclaimer- from here on I use the collective ‘you’ to refer to smokers, and sometimes the less intelligent public en masse.

Smoking makes you ugly! It makes you smell! And- it affects the way you taste, if you’ll permit me to be vulgar. It makes the whites of your eyes yellow and dulls the sheen of your hair. It stains your teeth and your breath always stinks. Your clothes smell and so does your living space. You can’t see out the windshield at night because it’s covered in the oil and grease from smoke. Smoking doesn’t make you look tough, or cool. It makes you look weak, like you need the chemical crutch to keep you in the game. You can’t cope, so you smoke. And oh your life is so-o-o-o hard. Yeah, well. Then you die. Early.

Smoking is killing you right now, and it won’t be a pleasant death. And your smoke is killing me. Your smoke is worse for me than it is for you (though I’m not sure I get that one yet). Where the hell do you get off lighting up if I’m in the room? Do I stick knives in you?

When I was little I did the thing where you steal all your parents’ smokes and flush them, or hide them or what have you. And all I really got was grounded. They said they appreciated the thought but I’d just cost them $30 so kindly stop it or we’ll kill you, you little twerp.

Dad eventually quit after a couple of failed attempts. I’m reeeeeely proud of him for it, because he smoked for a helluva lot of years. And on top of that, dear old Mother keeps on smoking like a chimney, so no support there. Perhaps it had something to do with his doctor telling him he’d already knocked about ten years off his life, and every cigarette he smoked counted for another seven minutes.

There’s a thought: next time you have a smoke think about this- you’re paying for that time twice. The first time around you would be better off going for a walk or even staring into space, but the second time… well, the second time you’re dead. See what I’m saying? If you take seven minutes to smoke a cigarette, and that cigarette takes a further seven minutes off your life, then your life is going up in smoke at 8.5 cigs/hr. Or something like that.

There’s the great story about an ex-girlfriend (we were still on speaking terms). She was pregnant and at her routine visit to the doctor getting an ultrasound. The doc asks her casually if she was still smoking and she said she was, but she’d cut down quite a bit. The doc invited her to light up. “Right here in the office?” “Yeah, go ahead. I want to show you something.” The doc points to the monitor of the ultrasound, at the tiny little flicker of the baby’s heart. She takes a drag and nearly chokes when the heart stops dead.

She bursts into terrified tears and a few panicked seconds tick by before the baby’s heart stutters back to life.

I don’t think she’s touched a smoke since.

Tell you what: you light up and I’ll hit you in the head with a hammer until you’re done. Seriously, what’s the difference? Same light headedness, right? Same increasing probability of irreparable damage. And if I’m not available on short notice when you get that nic-fit you can just lower your head and run into a wall. It’s a lot cheaper.

You can buy cigarettes at the pharmacy, but ecstasy is an A-List drug. Don’t you people have even a tiny little clue?

I could go on and on, but in the end only one thing in this culture could possibly make a difference to most of us, and that’s the one I’ll leave you with, in singularly unusual cynicism (clearly you won’t listen to reason):

Smoking makes you ugly.