Kiss My Ash – Fiction

Kiss My Ash

by Kerry Joyce
illustration by James Corwin

Call me a poorly adapted lab rat who deserves to have his ration of cheese balls reduced by half (again), but I’m thinking of picking up a pack of Luckies for the first time in years, for no other reason than that the people who say smokers make them sick make me sick.

How I ended up here on Planet Ridiculous with these latter day tub thumpers is best left to the philosophers.  The kind of philosophers who don’t worry they might be cheating themselves out of five golden years riding a bed pan in some retirement home, with every second helping of Hagendaz.

Only one third of all adults smoke.  So how come if nonsmokers really want clubs and restaurants that are utterly smoke free, someone hasn’t opened up a “breath easy?”  Smoke free accommodations could be promoted in the same way some Chinese restaurants advertise their food as being free of MSG to draw in business from the hypochondriacs.

The real reason the free market has not inspired the opening of completely smoke free establishments is the sad fact that most people are deadly dull.  And those who are not? They are almost always members of that underappreciated minority, cigarette smokers.

Yet, like polar opposites, the boring are often drawn to where they believe excitement can be found.  Of course their idea of excitement is pretty sketchy, and includes squinting in a crowd with 200,000 other bores toward the rumored latitudinal and longitudinal position of “The Tall Ships.”

A night on the town consists of shaking their head and futilely fanning the smoking air in front of their pinched faces, while discussing ways to pass stupid laws that will keep smokers at bay. As if nonsmokers would actually pay a cover charge to spend several hours socializing with a roomful of people like themselves: The type, who as teenagers refused initiation into the nicotine ritual, with its many honors and benefits (danger, dizziness, defiance, a legitimate reason to play with matches) with a lame reply like: “No thanks, I don’t want to take the change of getting cancer when I’m sixty.”  Or “I’d really like to, but I’m one of the masochists on the cross country team.”

Sure, some smokers are boring too, and becoming a nicotine fiend won’t automatically make you interesting, but bores who smoke, and the women who love them, eventually join the ranks of the reformed zealots anyway.  They think giving up cigarettes at last gives them something to talk about.

These are the people you’re parents should have warned you against, but didn’t.  They quit smoking, take up jogging for a couple of months, and observe with sublime satisfaction how their stool now floats as well as any bar of Ivory, thanks to the 700 kilograms of dietary fiber they consume each day.

Drunk with power, or perhaps the fermentation going on within their busy digestive tracts, they become hellbent on making the whole world over in their boring, bourgeois image.  Think about it.  Did you ever hear someone laugh out loud in a natural food store?

Why should people who get a woody just because their L.L. Bean catalog arrived a week earlier than expected tell the rights of us how to live?  The so called danger of passive cigarette smoke is just a pretext for a major incursion by the dictatorial healthocracy.

In May, a congressional subcommittee blasted that U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for the lack of science in their scientific research, which claimed 3000 deaths a year from passive smoking.

In fact, as a nonsmoker, you only risk permanent health damage from cigarettes if you reside for over 20 years with a seven pack a day smoker who habitually mistakes your face for the ash tray.

The real reason the anti-tobacco militants are against smoking is they can’t bear watching someone openly enjoy an activity they consider a taboo.

After a long week of selling your very own soul just to achieve the kind of flat line satisfaction that comes with the purchase of non-cancer causing consumer goods, it is demoralizing to watch some no account, who doesn’t even know how ’80s his ski parka is, achieve pleasure on the cheap with a stick of tobacco.  It practically spoils the whole boring night out.

Difficult to impossible is the task of conveying the proper enthusiasm and import of some six percent raise you’ve been promised, when someone at the next table is laying waste to all that is true and pure and rational with every expended burst of smoke from their incorrigible lungs.

It’s not enough that the addled brain of the nonsmoker will probably outlive the smoker’s by a decade or more.  They can’t wait for that long uncertain time to pass for their reward.  They want to bring the heathen to heal NOW!

The healthocrats of the world should get in the habit of staying home with each other for a crude-fiber filled game of Twister.  It’s where they will wind up anyways if they succeed in ruining the country’s real night life with more restrictive smoking laws.