Just take it easy there non-smokers

Remember Jim Fix? The big famous jogging guy? Jogged fifteen miles a day. Did a jogging book. Did a jogging video. Dropped dead of a heart attack when? When he was fucking jogging, that's when! --- Dennis Leary

I managed to quit smoking and haven’t touched one for about nine months and quitting smoking, cold turkey is easily the hardest thing I have ever done in my life. If I could do it all over again, I wouldn’t.

To me, the most interesting thing about quitting was how you don’t realize how addicted you are to something until you try to stop doing it. People, while they are smokers have absolutely no idea how much they NEED their cigarettes; as soon as they try to quit, than reality sets in.

I got to a point, about 3 months after I had quit where I was absolutely dumbfounded that something could be legal and this addictive at the same time. I felt like a victim, like I had been taken for a ride. I should have never even had the ability to become that addicted to a bunch of chemicals that I could buy at any gas station. This was the only month of my life where I felt I could identify with the non-smoking activists.

But than six months went by and the cravings subsided and than nine months and I don’t really care anymore. I guess I am about back to neutral about the whole thing. Honestly who am I to judge what anyone else does? The reality of the situation is this, cigarettes are legal, they are addictive, and nobody is forcing anyone else to smoke them.

Smokers, outside of the hood, are adults, who make their own decisions. If they want to smoke, then let them smoke, what do you give a shit?

And stop your bitching about second hand smoke from cigarettes. Do you have any idea what kind of toxic hell you breathe into your lungs every time one of the 64 million cars in this country drives by? It is a horrific, cocktail of burnt fossil fuels, lead, ozone, scorched metal, engine coolant and air that has been forced through layers of disgusting filth. And this is all mixed up, into an aerosol that billows in and out of your lungs, and into the sky, all day long. Yet, you whiny boobs don’t seem to care about that, as long as Steve from accounting walks 50 feet away from the door of your office buildings to smoke his morning cigarette.

Now, the government is attempting to force Big Tobacco to place pictures of defunct organs on their packs of cigarettes. And naturally, big tobacco is refusing and saying that it is unconstitutional; which it is by the way.

I suppose you could amend the constitution to allow for forced speech in advertising, which is detrimental to the company selling the product. But wouldn’t that open a pretty big can of worms?

First off, are there still smokers who think cigarettes are good for them? Every pack they have ever bought came with a handy warning from the Surgeon General about how your head will fall off as soon as you take one puff. Do smokers not have televisions? Have they all just missed the 26 year long “Debunkify” campaign of teens talking about how uncool and unhealthy it is to smoke? Do smokers never go to the doctor who incessantly tells them to stop smoking? What about the dentist? Do all the smokers have dentist that encourage them to keep smoking cigarettes?

Do you think maybe smokers just don’t give a shit what you people think? After all, if they cared so much, they probably wouldn’t be smokers in the first place. Putting a picture of a dead lung on a pack of cigarettes is going to do nothing but make people like me laugh every time they see one. And I am not going to laugh because of how stupid and futile I find the newest non-smoking initiative. I am not going to laugh because of how much taxpayer money the FDA will spend on the operation. I am going to laugh because at that point, I will live in a country where I can’t walk into a gas station without seeing a bunch of boxes with defunct smokers’ lungs all over them.

I hope it catches on. I hope it catches on big time. I hope it gets to a point where I can’t buy a burger at McDonald’s without a picture of some morbidly obese person on the wrapper. I hope that every time I am pumping more, good old fashioned gasoline, into my truck, that I have to watch a video of the polar ice caps melting, in real time, above the pump. I hope that someday, when I decide to take a shower that is longer than some interest group likes, a video of the dust bowl drought begins to play in my bathroom. I hope that every package of meat in the grocery store has some diatribe printed on the wrapper about how this animal died in vein and how I should not eat him. I hope every beer I get at the bar comes in a glass with a picture of some guys liver spots on it. I hope every piece of music that contains explicit lyrics comes with a note about how “The Trench Coat Mafia” liked to listen to Marylyn Manson. I hope every door knob has a flu warning above it, brought to you by Purell. I hope every cell phone comes with a picture of a brain tumor on it.

At that point, in my opinion, America would be the most hilarious thing since the first time I watched Bigger and Blacker by Chris Rock. I don’t even know if I would be able to leave my house without laughing until I gagged.

Luckily, there is not really all that much preventing such hysterically paranoid propaganda from invading our lives. So there is a fairly good chance, unless quite a few things are reformed, that this could eventually become reality for us all; starting with a bunch of packs of cigarettes with black lungs on the boxes.

Don’t get me wrong. It is not bad to care about things, but when you caring about something turn into expensive ridiculousness for us all, than I have a big problem with it. Every time the activists decide to run anything about big tobacco up the flagpole to the Supreme Court, it cost all of the tax payer’s money. Err-go, we are all buying cigarettes.

To me, one of our biggest problems in this country, is this “what about me” mentality. Too many people are going through their lives, paying to much attention to everyone else around them and making things up in their heads about how they are somehow negatively affecting their awful lives. Nothing is ever my fault, it is everyone else, doing things around me that I disagree with that makes my life so drab and boring and worthless. So it is these people, who take it upon themselves to ignore the established order and attempt to pass rules and changes that do absolutely nothing but cost everyone else money, all for a minority of “concerned citizens”.

Do what I do, ignore people. Unless someone is directly effecting what I am trying to get accomplished in the next five minutes, that guy could be smoking crack at a Pizza Hut for all I care. What that guy wants to do is what that guy wants to do. I don’t want to do it. I am smart enough to understand that it would be an awful idea to join him. I am also smart enough to know that if that guy keeps doing what he is doing he is going to either die or go to jail. There is no need for me to take it upon myself to launch an anti-crack smoking at Pizza Hut campaign on the taxpayer’s dime. I’m not going to alert my congressman. These things work themselves out, not everything requires my intervention. I don’t need to get involved with everything that I think it annoying. I’m not going to let things that annoy me take over my life like that. I’m probably just going to laugh about it for ten minutes and go home and cook some chicken that came in a package with a picture of a guy who died from untreated Salmonella.

It doesn't matter how big the warnings on the cigarettes are; you could have a black pack, with a skull and crossbones on the front, called TUMORS, and smokers would be around the block going, "I can't wait to get my hands on these fucking things! I bet ya get a tumor as soon as you light up!" ---- Dennis Leary