jennings rampage

I don’t want to save on dry cleaning.

I don’t smoke, for the record. Yeah, ok, when cigars were cool like ten years ago I puffed on maybe a dozen total, and I used to get drunk enough to bum a cigarette, but after five or six times waking up the next morning feeling like tiny cartoon mine workers were hacking at my alveoli, I cut that out. Smoking is abhorrent, it’s a total dealbreaker in the lady department, and gosh, how easy is it to hate the tobacco companies?

With that out of the way, this no smoking in the bars business you guys have going is total bullshit. I guess you’re used to it by now, but I promise, it’s wrong and it’s horrible and it’s wrong. And I imagine I’m going to get used to it, too, but I’m writing it down to remind myself later.

Maybe you’re expecting the libertarian argument against the smoking ban, and I sure can get right behind that, but this is what bothers me: I’m at a crowded bar with a couple of smokers, and we’re sitting at a table enjoying sports on television and beer and fellowship, and all of a sudden, the smokers decide that what would really put the icing on this experience is standing outside the bar to smoke a cigarette. And so I sit by myself for a few minutes, saving the table, alone with my thoughts and sports on television, while the rest of the bar almost certainly judges the poor loutish lonely guy sitting by himself in public. (Because that’s what people do.) And then the smokers return, smiling and laughing, satisfied by whatever it is about smoking that satisfies, leaving me to imagine all the excitement I missed on the sidewalk while I was saving the table. (So lonely.)

I’m on a quest to find my new favorite neighborhood bar to replace the irreplaceable OCSC, but I don’t think it’s going to be the same. That was the smokiest goddamn place I’d ever been to in my life, and I loved it. It was a bar. Every place I go, it’ll be the same story: this is ok, but it could really use a cloud of smoke.

My roommates should still quit smoking, though.