The Determined Ones

They are the most tenacious people on earth, is what they are.  These are the people who, despite public opinion, despite laws and rules, despite health concerns and despite weather still continue to do the particular activity that they seem to enjoy more than any other.  They do it flagrantly at times.  They seem to enjoy it.  Many are helpless to stop it.  Most of them couldn’t or can’t stop it if they wanted to.  Of course, I am speaking about smokers. 

Nearly every city in the
United States has passed some kind of law that outlaws smoking in public.  If you want to have just a tiny inkling of what segregation must have been like just hang out with smokers.  In
Chicago they are pretty much relegated to areas outside but in some places you can still find smoking sections in restaurants.  You know that one booth way in the corner that has yellowish stains all over the upholstery.  There are about sixty smoker all desperately crowded around this table puffing away as though their life depends on it. 

Smokers have to be the most resilient people in the world.  I have no idea what does this to them.  I know that continued long exposure to smoking causes the skin to get tough and leathery.  I had always thought this was primarily around the face and the fingers.  I am starting to think that this is something that is happening all over their bodies.  It is the only that explains smokers in winter. 

At one time, if you believe old movies and television shows, people smoked everywhere.  Apparently at one time in the delivery room of the hospital you could count on the doctors, nurses and even the mother to all be puffing away on Marlboros while the mother was pushing away.  Push, puff, push, puff.  The baby, of course, would be born, spanked, being crying and then have a cigarette placed in its mouth so it would then shut up.  I am pretty sure this was standard operating procedure from the early 1900s through the 1970s.  I know people who have photographs of their parents, including their very pregnant mothers, from those early days each person with a cigarette firmly clamped between their lips. 

Now of course, they are outlawed everywhere.  You can still find smoking cubicles in the airports but pretty much everywhere else the smokers have to go outside.  It’s almost endearing how they now get together in groups and head outside into the weather and stand in clusters around office buildings puffing away.  There could be a funnel cloud headed right for them and they would just grab on to some kind of pole and continue puffing as the wind caused their legs to fly up behind them and they became parallel to the ground.  It is freezing again here in
Chicago and they still stand outside, most of them without coats, shivering and smoking.  I would feel sorry for them if they weren’t, in fact, smoking. 

It seems to be mostly the
United States that has become obsessed with getting people to stop smoking.  I confess to spending way too much time online.  I even spend time on websites that involve the use of webcams.  Nearly every person online in the UK, Australia and various countries in
Asia are all smoking away like there isn’t a care in the world about what they are inhaling.  In college I roomed for part of a semester with an Asian guy and he smoked constantly.  Apparently those packs in other countries don’t have to have those Surgeon General warnings.  Of course, the Surgeon General is a
U.S. office so I guess those packs wouldn’t have to have his or her particular warning on them now that I think about it.
Still, you would think word would have spread to those other countries by now.  For some reason smoking has never appealed to me.  Maybe it was the fact my father smoked most of my life and has suffered through two heart attacks.  Maybe it’s the fact that smoke from cigarettes smells so horrible I could not imagine inhaling that stuff directly into my mouth and lungs.  Maybe it was all of the scary ads that I used to see that showed infected lungs.  I also remember seeing an ad in the 70s that showed a guy pointing a gun at his head with a cigarette in the barrel and his brains splattered all over the wall behind him.  The implication was that, of course, smoking was the equivalent of putting a gun in your mouth. 

I have never smoked.  I have never gotten drunk.  I have never gotten high.  I once smoked a cigar in a restaurant that promoted smoking cigars and I didn’t particularly enjoy it.  So to me the whole idea of smoking was just never appealing.  I don’t find women particularly sexy when they are smoking.  Nothing can be more of a turn off for me than seeing a gorgeous woman and then seeing her light up.  Mostly because I can see that woman in about twenty years looking all wrinkled and yellowed with nasty yellow teeth.  It isn’t sexy.  It isn’t cool.  Maybe I am a bore but I always just looked at it as a practical matter.  I have problems with food and I have struggled with my weight all of my life.  That’s bad enough on my heart and health so, I always figured, why add alcohol, drugs or smoking to the mix.  Whenever I see someone who is overweight adding smoking to the mix I just feel very sad for that person.  That is a person who really does not love themselves. 

Still, no matter the laws passed or the weather or how far away from civilization we make them go the smokers still remain.  If a corporation were to build a smoking cubicle on the 108^th floor of their building, just above the television and radio antennas, and hang it over the side of the building so that the only way to reach it were to crawl out on a thin beam, that cubicle would still be filled with smokers.  You would look up at this glass cube and see it  crammed with people of all shapes, sizes and sexes huddled in there smoking and puffing away as if it were the rest of us with the problem and not them. 

There is an incredible industry these days to get people to stop smoking.  There is so much of an industry that a cynical person might think that this is the industry that is actually supporting the tobacco lobby.  Think about it.  If there were no more smokers then the industry that makes all of those nicotine patches and gums and pills and hypno-therapy solutions would go out of business.  Make you wonder if that gum really just feeds the addiction instead of eliminating it.   

In the end only those who really want to stop are the ones who are going to stop.  It’s a clichéd saying but it’s true.  My dad finally did but it only took nearly killing him to get him to do it.  Plus, if freezing temperatures, laws, heat, rain and wind won’t stop these people or the incredible price for cigarettes then nothing will. 

Bryan W. Alaspa’s novel Dust is available in print and eBook format at his website www.bryanalaspa.com and www.amazon.com.