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Smoking gets me hot under the collar One night this weekend, at 1:30 in the morning, I awoke to something terrible in my bedroom. I sat up with a wheezing gasp and a cough. Its stench assaulted my nostrils, filled every nook and cranny of my room, moving like grassfire on the prairies. I heard the upstairs neighbors begin to stir and cough weakly, reeling from the horror that assailed us both.Somehow the fiend had gotten past my last defense: the towel stuffed into the crack under my door. I should have known; it comes with the snows every year, migrating inside when the first curls of frost glaze the tender grass outside. It may have won this time, but one day, one day I will live in a truly smoke free building. --------- It's the sheer lack of consideration that drives me to rage. Before they lit up did even one of my neighbors ask me if I wanted to die of lung cancer, or esophageal cancer, or emphysema? I'm asthmatic, allergic to smoke and I'm already fighting a sinus infection and an inner ear infection. Did they somehow think that the unholy stench of cigarettes would drive the illnesses out of my body? Did they maybe think that I smell a little too clean or that my walls needed a bit of yellowing before they looked just right? When I moved in, did I mistakenly sign on my lease that I wanted daily assaults with cigarette, cigar and pot smoke, not to mention the reek of garbage, every time I walked in the hallways? What RIGHT do they have to inflict the by-products of their habit on me? What right do they have to make me ill, smelly, unsightly and embarrassed to have guests in my apartment? The towels stuffed under my door only serve to slow the leak of smoke into my living space. Are my neighbors going to pay for the air-purifier that I require to be able to live in my own apartment? I don't think so. And yet somehow they claim the right to smoke cigarettes (don't think I'm exempting the cigar and pot smokers, I lump them all together). They think that paying their ten bucks a pack somehow means that they've paid their dues. What about the healthcare costs of smoker's diseases, and the diseases caused by second hand smoke, what about the loss of fresh air, what about the cost in lives? What about the cost of cleaning up the butts on the ground everywhere in the city, the environmental costs incurred by clearing land to grow tobacco, what about the cigarette-caused forest fires and house fires? Don't even get me started on how you can't go out dancing without smelling worse than if you'd crawled through the remains of a wood-burning stove. If I'm offending some people here, I really don't care. I'm not looking at all of the sides of the problem and I don't want to. I am ENRAGED that my right to clean air is so blatantly and casually violated, sometimes on a once-every-10-minutes basis. If I ran things, all smokers should have to wear a balloon around their heads to keep the smoke in, that they should have to live in the effects of their own foul habit. I have a very few friends that smoke, many relatives, some acquaintances and some co-workers. There are some marginally considerate smokers out there, and I do appreciate their attempts, but that does not excuse the overall problem. I realize that for a long time, the big cigarette companies repressed the knowledge of the health impacts of smoking, and I realize that there are many excuses that people give for starting. I have also noticed the flimsy excuses given for not quitting, "I don't want to gain weight." and "It's hard to quit." Well, I quit cheese for several months. I was my number one love, it too has been shown to contain addictive chemicals, and it too was detrimental to my health. I haven't bought havarti in over 9 months now (if you shrug this off, you just don't grasp the depth of my havarti addiction). It takes backbone and willpower, help and support, a will to live a better and healthier life. My grandfather, a smoker of who knows how many years, quit cold-turkey when the GST came into effect. To my knowledge he hasn't had a puff since. While I don't think that he ever should have started, I also don't know what events led him down that tar-coated path in the first place. But now that he's quit, I see in him a little bit of a hero: someone who stood up and faced his demon, stamped it out on the pavement, picked up the butt and put it in the trash where it belonged. Smokers of the world, you can all consider this fair warning: every time I see you light up, every time the stench infiltrates my apartment, every time I find a butt on the lawn, I am focusing my mental powers on you, and one day you just might wake up with your hair on fire. So there. 2004-12-14 || 10:55 p.m. |
