The Problem Is Right Under Your Nose

First of all, there have been requests by a couple of my readers for a pictoral representation of my nose after I made several unflattering references to it a couple posts ago.

Well, since I do whatever you whackjobs want, here it is:

Satisfied?

Good. Now we can all move on with our lives.

Sheesh.

Attention all black-lunged bastards (that may have been Mulder's greatest line ever, by the way) the Food & Drug Administration is soon going to be in charge of overseeing cigarette companies. I can just see Benson & Hedges quaking in their boots.

"Oh, no! Not the FDA! We're so scared to be regulated by the same people who lord over Centrum Cardio and Tucks Medicated Pads!"

Maybe, though, those mothafuckas should be scared.

The new regulations that are being set up aren't going to bode well for the tobacco industry, whose once-powerful lobby apparently needs a dose or two of Levitra these days. The colorful and large displays that right now grace the local CVS and Walgreens will soon be gone, replaced by black & white text-only advertising. The warning labels will now be even more ominous than before, and every single ingredient will have to be listed. (I wonder if the cigarette boxes will now have to contain calorie counts and sodium levels.) Warnings on cigarette boxes will now take up 3/4ths of the entire box, leaving no room for Joe Camel, the Marlboro Man or Betty White or whomever they've got advertising ciggysticky these days.

Also, stores that are located 1000 feet away from a school won't be able to advertise that they sell cigarettes. Bummer.

Here's the thing: this is all window-dressing, and I guess that's why Big Tobacco isn't sweating its leaves about this too much. All of these new regulations don't change the fact that an addictive product is being peddled to people who are already hooked. It wouldn't matter if cigarette packets just bore the word "DEATH" in 36-point font. It just doesn't matter. If you think people who smoke crack don't know it's going to kill them, um, then you probably haven't smoked crack lately.

I was at Rite-Aid this morning and the woman in front of me wanted a pack of Benson & Hedges Premium Filter. The hen-pecked, blue-vested clerk was having trouble locating that particular iteration of cigarette. There were Benson & Hedges Special Filters, Benson & Hedges Deluxe Ultra Lights, Benson & Hedges Golds, Benson & Hedges Gold 20s, Benson & Hedges Menthol Milds. But this crackhead wanted her Premium Filters, and her knuckles were turning white as she was gripping onto her car keys with enough force to cause herself an aneurysm or stigmata. I thought she was going to pop a gasket when, finally, the clerk found her goddamn cancer-twigs. Praise be.

At another drug store this morning (I was running errands for work-- hey, at least I wasn't wasting away in front of the Xerox machine at Staples) I stood behind a grammaw who had just purchased a carton of cigarettes. Like most addicts, she was a regular at her locale of choice. Had she been a heroin addict, this pharmacy would be her street corner. An alkie, her Cheers. The clerk addressed her by name and advised her to, "Watch out for that heat out there" and encouraged her to, "take care of yourself."

After selling her the equivalent of slow-release TNT-- watch out for the rain? Take care of yourself? Why bother with such niceties? I would have said, "Why don't you try the Guns & Ammo shop down the street and save yourself a lot of time?" But I don't work at a drug store, and there are no guns & ammo shops where I live. There are, however, gourmet pet food boutiques and high end automobile accessory shops.

I think people who smoke should be allowed to do whatever the hell they want to themselves, but I don't think we as a society should be tricking ourselves into thinking that anything we do is going to make a damn bit of difference. Trying to scare the bejesus out of smokers with warnings like, "Smoking Will Turn Your Unborn Baby into Adam Sandler" or "Smoking Cigarettes is About as Intelligent as Sucking on a Hog's Anus" or "Stop Smoking, All the Girls Think You're a Fucking D-Bag" just doesn't work. Seriously, FDA: scaring people doesn't work. If people scared easier, nobody would fly on airplanes, get in elevators, attend NASCAR races, pick their scabs, or fuck girls from Des Moines.

This just in: People Don't Scare Easily-- They're Too Dumb.

The only thing that motivates people is money so, until a pack of cigarettes costs $187.50, we're still going to have an assload of black-lunged bastards running around our college campuses and our sidewalks. I'd love a society where only people with Oprah-sized bankrolls could afford to smoke habitually. Frankly, we could do with a few less multibillionaires.

So let's just forget about trying to scare people, okay? Let's just insult them. I want to see legislation passed enabling the FDA to require cigarette manufacturers to emblazon cigarette their cigarette packs with

"YOU'RE A DUMB TWATLICK. GO SMOKE ON THAT."

See-gar

Because life in 2009 is kind of weird, many of you know that I have been ill recently.

Used to be, the only people who knew I was sick were my mother, my doctor, and the unfortunate gentleman whom I coughed and schnazzed on while waiting in line at the Post Office.

Speaking of coughing and schnazzing, I've been doing a lot of that lately. As I write this blog, actually. I hate to see our brand new flat screen monitor getting speckled with my piggie sickie sputum dots, but my boney little fingers can only cover so much of my fat fucking trap. I've been expectorating recently thick, gray/green gloopy objects that have the consistency of Polaner All-Fruit left out in the sun for six weeks.

This recent infectious episode has brought to mind an unfortunate time in my earlier days when I undertook the dubious habit of smoking cigars. Now, I don't drink alcohol, and I never have, and I don't do drugs, and I never have (though I was, up until today, on three different antibiotics, which some might argue would constitute pharmacological abuse) and I like to smugly contend that I have never bowed to peer-pressure but, really, I have.

Come on, gloat.

Back in high school, a good friend of mine and I had just been to see Saving Private Ryan, easily the least funny Tom Hanks movie since "The 'Burbs." Seeing the film filled my dear, blonde friend with an overwhelming sense of American pride. It filled me with an overwhelming desire to vomit profusely and/or never sleep again. As we sat on his parents' porch in the middle of the night, he must have noticed my anxious and diaphoretic state, keen observer that he was.

"I'll be right back."

"Where are you going?" I asked, semi-panicked that the Nazis would storm the porch and annihilate me if I were left alone.

"I'll just be a second. I'm going to bring you something that will relax you," he said, disappearing into the house.

I was uncomfortable. I knew whatever he was going to come back outside with was going to be weird. I was worried it was going to be pot. Everyone tried to get everyone to smoke pot in high school, and I was already a junior and nobody had tried to force it on me yet-- so this must be it, I thought. On the other hand, I had a latent suspicion that this friend of mine was gay... A lightning quick image flashed through my mind of him gliding back onto the porch wearing nothing but a grin and half-open silk kimono, holding a pastry bag filled with ricotta cheese.

Fortunately, he returned fully clothed holding a large zip-lock bag containing two cigars. The whole Monica Lewinsky thing hadn't happened yet, so I was no longer worried about sexual misadventures.

"These are really good," he claimed. "And nothing is more relaxing than a good cigar."

"Really?" I said with my budding skepticism. "Even more relaxing than a blowjob?"

I have no idea why I asked that. It would be years before I would know what one felt like. Besides, the goal was supposed to be decreasing sexual tension.

"Yeah, actually, they are."

Definitely gay, I decided.

"It's fine if you don't want to try, but I'm going to have one," he said, chopping off the tip like an overzealous rabbi at a briss.

I watched him in profile as he lit the thing and as his lips puffed away at it. He seemed to know what he was doing. Then again, in high school, lots of us seem to know what we're doing. Take driving, for instance. I don't think I actually knew what I was doing behind the wheel of a car until I was twenty-three. Maybe even later.

My friend settled into the porch chair, slid down an inch, and closed his eyes, the cigar resting lazily in his mouth. If he got any cozier, he would have undoubtedly caught fire.

"Awright, you sonofabitch. Cut me one," I said, craving a relaxed, semi-altered state that would get the images of young mens' limbs and necks being blown up all over Normandy Beach.

And so began and ended my first cigar. I walked home, fell into bed and slept deeply and lusciously-- for a long, long time. It was a blissful sleep, devoid of any of the nightmares, anxieties, borderline perversions or paranoid hallucinations that plagued my rest from age 7 on upwards. I slept, as they say, like the dead, only without the smell. It was, in a word, beautiful.

Then, I woke up, went to the bathroom, and rhythmically hacked up green mung globules for half a fucking hour.

I smoked maybe thirty cigars from age seventeen to age twenty-three. During that time, I was convinced on at least three different occasions that I was suffering from oral cancer. I wasn't, of course. I was biting my inner cheek in my sleep, leaving gross wounds in there. Another time, I had taken up the bagpipe chanter and developed a blister-like growth on my lower inner lip from pursing and blowing so hard. These were all diagnosed by physicians whom I visited, telling all of them I was "a smoker."

"Well, how often do you smoke?"

"Um... I don't know. I smoke a cigar maybe once every three or four months."

"That really doesn't qualify you as a smoker, sir," one of them said to me.

Great, I thought. What the hell do I have to do to get some recognition for my sins around here: put my mouth on the tailpipe of a 1970s Mercedes 300-D for a month straight?

My sophomore year of college, my girlfriend at the time brought me home to meet her thoroughly disturbed parents. The mother had purchased me, in honor of my birthday, a humidor filled with high-quality cigars and two butane Colibri lighters.

"Use them in good health," she snorted.

I stopped smoking cigars when I was twenty-two and was training to enter the police academy. Seemed like a logical time to quit-- even if I didn't really qualify as a smoker anyway.