Go ahead and suck on coffin nails

A justifiably bitter analysis

BEN POGGEMILLER STAFF

ILLUSTRATION TED BARKER

I feel like I haven’t properly done my job here at the Manitoban, which mainly consists of ranting on and on, and offending people. The two main principles of insulting a demographic are a) to pick an easy target and then viciously attack them personally, and b) accost them with real and/or made-up facts.

In that vein of thought, I’d like to give an objective, outsider’s view of smokers’ culture. Smokers tend to get a pretty bad rap — and deservedly so. Besides the enormous burden placed upon the health-care system and the obvious physical diseases associated with smoking, there are more important, underlying aspects of smoking — particularly the ones that affect me personally.

I don’t care if you inhale toxic fumes that slowly eat away at your body until you’re left pockmarked and breathing through a hole in your neck, just don’t cough in the movie theatre. Of course, you don’t care if you’re ruining the atmosphere for me. You’ll just drive home in your smelly, devalued car and go home to your smelly, devalued house and pet your smelly, devalued dog.

I am also disgusted by smokers who try to hide it in shame. You should be proud of your scary teeth and inability to jog. When I worked at Red River Co-op, I had a woman who made me sell her a pack of cigarettes in extreme haste so she could stuff them in her purse before her young daughter came inside the store. The daughter asked her mom what she had bought, and her mother flat-out lied and said, “Nothing.” The mother then looked away and the child glanced at me, which was my opportunity to point to the cigarette display and make the two-fingered smoking motion. As soon as they walked out of the store, I watched a brief exchange between them. When it was over, the mother gave me a look of reproach through the window, to which I responded with a spiteful smile. I guess it’s admirable that the mother didn’t want to influence her daughter with her actions, but was it really worth her child’s trust? The answer, of course, is yes — nobody cares about kids anyway.

Besides selling cigarettes, I had to deal with the other disgusting end-result of smoking — I had to clean them up. As the lowest-possible-level employee of a property management company, one of my morning duties was to sweep up all the cigarette butts around a building on Broadway.

Hundreds of cigarette butts littered the sidewalk each day even though there were two massive, easily accessible ash-bins right in front of the building. Of course when I was out there, everyone would wait until I looked in their direction so I could see them carefully place their cigarette butts in the sand in a vain attempt appear to be decent, sanitary people. It was all an act of course; eight hours later, the sidewalk would be covered again.

So thank you smokers for coughing during crucial scenes in movies, for forcing me as a young child to eat standing up in the mall because there were no tables available in the non-smoking section, for making me dizzy, for taking the Winnipeg Jets away from us (if only you had spent your money on hockey tickets instead), for causing me to raise my eyebrows in disgust when you walk by, for actually making it necessary for commercials to tell you not to kill your kids, for talking about me outside when you’re smoking (because I know you are), for sullying the good name of Sir Walter Raleigh, for making me go back inside Co-op when I brought you “extra light” instead of “ultra light,” for spitting where I walk, for that old guy from The X-Files who was smoking in every scene even though it was a fake cigarette, for alerting snipers to your presence in modern warfare, for rigging the Oscars, for terrorism in the 21st century, for ruining Lucille Ball’s voice and for instigating run-on sentences.

To sum up, smoking is an addictive, unhealthy habit that too many Canadians subscribe to. Now excuse me, I’m going to go have a coffee.