Dear Smoker,
I wanted to write you and let you know that I've been thinking about you lately. Sometimes, I even think about you when I'm with my wife. I just wanted to thank you for everything you do for me:
1. You freshen up a restaurant. There's nothing I love more than barbecue ribs with a mesquite smoke flavor, except maybe barbecue ribs with a tobacco smoke flavor. Even though it's illegal to smoke indoors in our state, you know that you're above the law, and that nobody really minds smoke anyway. How right you are.
2. You beautify the city. You liven up boring brick sidewalks with your little white and yellow butts. Even though it's perfectly unacceptable for me to drop an apple core on the sidewalk or even in the gutter, you can drop your unused portion of cigarette anywhere, and that adds to the character of the city.
3. You let me ride in your car with the window cracked in the middle of the winter. This gives me the sensation of speeding down a slope on my snowboard, but instead of that nasty pine tree scent, I get tobacco. I'm glad you cracked your window, it was getting too hot in here, it is a balmy 45 degrees.
4. My clothes don't reek like laundry detergent when I'm around you. My hotel room smells like a dream after you've left. Without you, we would be living in a stale world, breathing plain air, but you have provided everybody within 100 feet a distinct odor for them to breathe in.
5. You stand your ground. Despite people dying young from lung cancer and scientific studies proving that smoking is bad for you, you continue to hold to your convictions. Why do you need to quit? You can jog for a good 5 minutes without stopping for a cig, and that seems healthy enough. Smoking ain't gonna kill YOU!
6. You care for your family. So much, in fact, that you smoke their cigarettes for them every time they're around. "Thanks for smoking around me!" they say, with sincere feelings of gratitude in their hearts. "Now I don't have to spend the money on my own pack of cigarettes!" How kind of you. Instead of making them pay half for your cigarettes, you let them breathe it in for free.
So, once again, I thank you for smoking. Please make sure you blow smoke in my direction every chance you get. I will smile and my lungs will thank you for it.
Sincerely,
Me
8 comments:
I'm not a regular commenter... though I do read here a lot... and can I just say
AMEN
AMEN
and
AMEN
!!!!!!!!
PS say hi to Melly
You picked up smoking recently?
OK, I want to know what prompted that?
Ah, fond memories of being in Vienna and breathing in the dream of second-hand cigarette smoke. I think that four months of that equals an entire pack of cigarettes.
Imagine what it is going to be like for the next president of the United States with all those cigarette butts all over the White House lawn.
This post was some good, clean, old-fashioned fun! Smokers are the BEST!
Mark has a relative who claims she does not want to quit. It astounds me, given all the info out there. I think she is just too proud to admit that she's addicted.
Ralph wore lots of your shirts in Italy. A yella Midget kicking contest one too.
I'm finally ready to comment on this post. Everybody, but NOBODY, smokes here in North Dakota. I think I even saw the bishop of our ward light up between Sacrament and Sunday school.
I lived with a smoker for 16 months in KC, but he was a total hermit and his room was on the complete opposite end of a long apartment unit. Somehow it never really bothered me. But EVERYWHERE we've stayed/lived at, the smokers here in North Dakota are just driving me insane. Total addiction, and I'd feel bad for them if it wasn't such an incredibly selfish problem. It seriously affects your neighbors, particularly if you live in an apartment. The vents are all connected, and as long as it's allowed indoors (and in windy, freezing cold ND in the winter, apartments "have to" allow indoor-smoking), it makes sleeping/living just miserable. I had no idea how much it would affect my living experience here in ND so much. The absolute worst is waking up on a weeknight at 4:30 am to a stale stench of nicotine/tobacco and realizing that your neighbors' addiction is so pathetic that they have to wake up in the middle of the night to get their fix. And then I toss and turn for the next 3 hours, whether the windows are open or not (and if it's cold, heaven help you).
I had a leadership training session with about 30 leaders (team leads, supervisors, etc.) at the CS center here in Grand Forks last week, and during a break about 20 of them all went outside the hotel to smoke. As the EQP told me (who also works at Amazon), a lot of the people here spend a lot of time staring at 4 walls, what with the weather conditions and lack of anything to do here.
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