The best post ever posted on the AOF forum... -- The Anti-Oppression Federation

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Date Posted: 22:30:01 05/18/03 Sun
Author: Bullock doppler
Author Host/IP: cache-dl06.proxy.aol.com / 205.188.209.42
Subject: The best post ever posted on the AOF forum...

Let me start by getting one thing straight: I am not a smoker.

I don�t like smoking.

It�s unhealthy.

It�s unwholesome.

It smells.

I�ve always disliked it.

I�m one of those people who thinks smokers should be cruelly hounded out of office buildings, restaurants, bars, hospitals, public transportation systems, sporting arenas, churches, synagogues, mosques, and other enclosed spaces, to be left huddling forlornly outside revolving doors in the cold rain, while they suck sadly on their death-sticks in a feeble attempt to service their addictions, to be scoffed at all the while by healthy, clean-living passers-by who hold their breath as they stride past on their way to happier, longer, better-smelling, warmer and drier lives. In short, I think cigarettes suck.

On the other hand, I like them a lot.

When I say I like them, of course, I mean I like smoking them.

A lot.

When I say a lot, I mean both that I like smoking them a lot, and that I like smoking a lot of them, a lot.

Everybody clear up to this point?

Anyway, just because I may enjoy the occasional cigarette, and by occasional, I mean the occasional one I�m smoking right now as I write this, the occasional one between the occasional one I just stubbed out and the occasional one I�ll fire up right after I finish smoking this occasional one, that doesn�t make me a smoker. If you think about it carefully, every moment of your life is an occasion. As an aside, what the hell kind of word is �occasional,� anyway? Write it over and over and it starts to look like nonsense. Maybe it�s the nicotine talking.

Okay, where was I going with that?

Oh yeah, I�m not a smoker.

Whoa, you say! Sounds like you�re a smoker, Bullock. Ha! Wrong! See, I�m not a smoker because I don�t fit my definition of a smoker. The way I see it, a smoker is:

a) A person
b) who smokes
c) who is not me.

There. Logically self-contained as far as I can tell. Armed with this simple syllogism, guilt-free, I can happily puff away to my heart�s content. Well, maybe not to my heart�s content, but you get what I�m trying to say. I like smoking not because of the gentle, soothing nicotine buzz, not for the supposed�and very real�coolness associated with it, not because having cigarettes around is handy way to avoid looking like an ass when a woman asks, �Got a cigarette?�, nor because cigarettes are convenient, non-cash, get-away-from-me baksheesh to loiterers, panhandlers and other assorted unsavory types.

No.

No, I like smoking because it combines two of my favorite things: fire, and sitting around on my ass doing nothing.

The fire part is pretty self-explanatory.

I�m a guy (or so I�m told).

Guys like fire.

I won�t go into detail on the humorous advantages of always having a cigarette-generated fire near at hand, because Jerry Seinfeld (or Tim Allen, I can never keep those guys straight) has already covered it pretty thoroughly, and I�m not him. If I were him, I�d be busy rolling around in my residuals checks laughing my ass off, with a big-breasted nude teenager on each arm (or shoving piles of cocaine up my nose if I was Tim Allen, er, or Jet-Head I guess), instead of sitting here in a smoke stenched clothing puffing on a GPC Light 100 while trying to type some shitty article...

As for the sitting around on my ass part, I don�t know what else I can say. It just goes well with smoking. If I just sit around on my ass all day, and someone asks me, �Hey, man, what�d you do today?� what the hell am I supposed to say? But if instead I polished off a whole carton of Camel Straights, well, that�s an accomplishment!

I�m not going to give you that tired old �the tobacco companies seduced me!� bullshit as the reason for my habit (hobby? habit? whatever�). No, like any good American, I place the blame where it always belongs.

I blame the French.

See, in addition to smoking, I also like to travel

(ok, I�m lying, but you get my point)

(and if you don�t, you�re just not paying attention/I am full of bullshit)

(look, I�ve seen the travel channel and watch CNN OK?)

(Please stop staring at me).

Travelling is basically another form of sitting around on your ass all day, except at the end you have pictures of it.

(Wow, that was actually kinda poignant, I should write that last bit down�no wait�)

I don�t know if you�ve ever been to Europe, but let me tell you, Joe Camel would be sucking on an oxygen bottle after one weekend of hanging around with those fucking guys. They smoke like it�s going out of style, and over there, it�s not. The whole damn continent is like �Europe, Brought to You by Marlboro.�

The French like smoking because they like sitting around in cafes all day.

They discovered long ago that few things go better with smoking than sitting around in cafes doing nothing, except for jumping in and out of foxholes and shooting at each other, which is what the French do when they�re not sitting around in cafes all day.

Even given the foxhole thing, you have to admit that if you�ve got nothing better to do than loll around in a bistro for fifty years bitching about American cultural imperialism, you might as well have a Marlboro Red to puff on while you�re stuck there.

While I�m talking about foxholes, I might add that Hitler (no, not Lexx/Ugly/Hitler, that�s another, interesting subject) was a rabid anti-smoker.

God�s truth.

(He was also a vegetarian, but that�s yet another post entirely.)

I�m not trying to equate anti-smoking with anti-Semitism, genocide, and the attempted destruction of everything that�s beautiful and humane (that�s again, yet another post).

All I�m trying to say is that if you have the choice between a soothing, calming smoke, on the one hand, and a Fascist dictatorship on the other, what are you going to choose? Maybe if Hitler had taken a puff now and then, he would have been happy with just the Sudetenland and wouldn�t have ignited another World War.

On a related note (NOTE: It�s probably not really related), I have it on good authority that Lyndon Johnson and Bob MacNamara switched to decaf between the years 1964 and 1968, but I�ll try to stay on message here.

Once I was forced by the Opressive United States Government to go to Haiti.

Okay, you say, relaxing place, not a foxhole in sight, no need for a calming smoke there.

WRONG.

In Haiti, the minute I arrived they handed me an advisory saying that many U.S. personnel were suffering from �mild intestinal discomfort, �due to some unknown contaminant� currently present in either the food, or the water, or perhaps both.

Eventually, I broke down and ate something and, lo and behold, I did experience �mild intestinal discomfort,� the kind of �mild intestinal discomfort� characterized by �sharp, stabbing pains,� much like �a thousand knives� being �thrust into my gut,� punctuated by �periodic bouts� of �violent vomiting� and �effusive diarrhea.�

On the other hand, if you�ve got to be stuck in a foreign country suffering from extreme nausea, and you�re not averse to smoking, you could do worse than Haiti, where they have a thing or two that can settle your stomach.

Or so I hear.

OK, where was I?

Fuck it, I�ll just ad lib�

As a teenager, I lived about 20 miles from Mexico, in the affluent, sunny, and gun-infested streets of San Diego�therefore, because of my natural curiosity, desire to experience exotic cultures, expand my mind to new ideas, and to quench my thirst for cheap liquor, I went to Mexico several times�

In Mexico, they�ve got all the microbial fun available in Haiti, plus the French joys of getting sniped at from foxholes, plus homemade firecrackers, plus barrels of tequila, plus careening diesel buses like something from a Ralph Nader nightmare, piloted by crazed drivers swerving all over the road to dodge their mescaline hallucinations, all of it under an incessant, merciless sun and in one hundred percent humidity.

If there�s ever a country that needed to sit down and light one up, it�s Mexico.

In Mexico, dying from tobacco-related illness is positively the last thing on your mind. Living long enough to sprout a healthy, pumpkin-sized tumor is just about more than you can hope for. In Mexico, when you climb into a cab, (if the driver doesn�t rob and kill you straightaway), you�ll have the pleasure of stopping to pick up, in rapid succession: a seventy-year-old woman holding a leaky basket of dead fish, two guys with machetes, and for an encore, a shirtless guy carrying a five-gallon jug of gasoline.

This would be one time when I would advise you to extinguish all smoking materials.

Halfway up a steep hill, on a blind curve, the car will stall. The driver, who is after all a professional, will get out, pop the hood, and begin banging on the engine with a rock. Maintenance completed, he will stuff himself back into the driver�s seat, turn the salsa music up to ten, and fly on up the hill at eighty miles an hour. I SWEAR TO GOD I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP. At the top of the hill, halfway to your destination, the driver will screech to a halt at his cousin�s shack so everyone can pile out to plunk down their pesos for warm Cokes and chili-flavored potato chips.

If you don�t deserve a cigarette after that, when do you deserve it? Even C. Everett Koop would be wandering around trying to bum one.

On the other hand, when they�re not busily trying to kill both their visitors and themselves with speeding, poorly maintained machinery, Mexicans have a lot of time on their hands. In Mexico, you can sit down at noon and smoke half a carton waiting for the twelve-fifteen bus. The national sport is soccer, need I say more? Four hours in the blazing sun waiting for a zero-zero tie is good for a butt or three.

One good thing I discovered about smoking in Mexico is the warning labels. First of all, they�re in Spanish, which makes them even easier to ignore. If, like me, you�re unfortunate enough to understand a little Spanish, they still sound better than the ones we�ve got here in the States.

I�ve always maintained that it�s not the cancer that scares me. It�s the emphysema. By the time my lungs are going malignant, I�ll be able to get new ones from the machine on the corner, or from the stable of clones I�ll have locked in the basement. Hey, how I�m supposed to keep my bored, locked-in-the-basement clones from smoking is my problem, okay?

But the emphysema has always given me the willies, and it�s why I�m careful to keep my consumption under half a pack a day, rounding down.

But while smoking in Mexico, I found a way around those worries. See, the warnings in Mexico say:

EL FUMAR ES CAUSA DEL CANCER Y ENFISIMA PULMONAR

Or, for the rest of you out there:

SMOKING CAUSES CANCER AND PULMONARY EMPHYSEMA

Let�s look at this for a minute. EL CANCER. Already covered that. No problem there, in any language.

Now for the rest. Compare the two. EMPHYSEMA. ENFISIMA PULMONAR. The very word emphysema scares the hell out of me, but �enfisima pulmonar� sounds kind of cool. Try it out. Say it aloud. Give it a little Ricky Ricardo flair�el enfisima pulmonar.

�Lucy! I got to go down to the club to practice the new number! After that I�m going to get the enfisima pulmonar!�

That settles it. Fred and Ethel can get cancer. Ricky and I are getting the enfisima pulmonar.

At this stage I should probably point out to any employees or representatives of the George Washington University Health Plan out there that this article is a work of fiction.

Also my parents.

So this brings up the question: �Why not just quit?�

(NOTE: It may or may not have brought up that question in your mind. If you are trying to follow my train of thought here you are fighting a losing battle.)

First of all, not officially qualifying as a smoker makes it difficult to quit. Aside from that, it�s not the quitting that bothers me, so much as the not smoking anymore. Not only will I have to live for many more years, I won�t be able to smoke my way through them.

I could smoke cigars instead, trading in the emphysema for cancer of the lips and throat. I haven�t adopted this course yet mainly because I�m not a fat, jowled, martini-swilling Republican asshole. But this could change. For similar reasons, primarily my dislike for NASCAR racing and sister-fucking, smokeless tobacco products are not an option.

There�s always the patch. I especially like that three-step kind. I was thinking of starting with the small one, and then moving on up from there. Maybe when they develop some sort of bodysuit I will pursue this avenue with greater interest.

There are new products out there, pills that fiddle with your serotonin levels to decrease the pleasure derived from smoking (the most popular being Wellbutrin).

With all due respect to the pharmaceuticals industry�I�m a big fan of many of their products�if I�m going to fuck around with my brain chemistry by inserting mysterious substances into my body, it�s not going to be to decrease my pleasure in anything, thank you very much.

Mostly, I�m hoping that the politicians will come along and make cigarettes too difficult for me to lay my hands on, but somehow stop short of the whole goose-step-and-armband trip. Didn�t work the first time around, but who knows?

In the meantime, I think the best course is just to limit my intake. After all, it�s a life-dose situation we�re talking about here. I don�t worry about eating the occasional double quarter-pounder with cheese, any more than I worry about consuming the occasional entire box of Captain Crunch in one sitting.

Why should I worry about the occasional cigarette?

Perhaps the answer lies in establishing a simple system of ground rules. I think a good rule would be: I will only smoke cigarettes while I�m drinking, or immediately after I�ve had sex (If you haven�t yet experienced this particular pleasure, I highly recommend it).

(The cigarette afterwards is pretty nice, too).

Limiting my smoking to these instances should serve to reduce my intake significantly. Or, if it doesn�t, it means I�ll be having a pretty good goddamm time.

Well, I could go on forever, I guess, but I�m out of cigarettes.

Now, where are my car keys?

---

Bullock (AOF godking)*

* Now that was a post worthy of the AOF community, as opposed to the tripe and spam our little fucknut spews all over the board when he gets sad/drunk/stoned/bored/lonely/stupid (all the time).

Kilus grow some fucking balls.

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Replies:

Re: Now that was a post worthy of the AOF community (and kilus's balls) -- Grim, 22:45:12 05/18/03 Sun