Smoke This

If you smoke in a crowded, indoor place, where smoking is specfically prohibited, then you are a careless, worthless, useless human being.

Did you catch all that?

Let me state it again.

Don't smoke where people say you aren't allowed to. People don't like it. More than that, people are sickened by it. Not just made uncomfortable, but literally made sick. Nausea. Headaches. Burning eyes.

I went to a Bob Dylan concert at UMass Amherst on Wednesday. Scores of people all over the building were lighting up. It wasn't bad enough that I was tired anyway and had to listen to an hour and a half of Natalie Merchant while waiting for Dylan to take the stage, but then I had to struggle to breathe through God-knows-what poisoning the air.

I asked people right around me to stop, and they did (maybe the fact that I am 6-3, 225, and kinda scary-looking has something to do with that), but people looked at me as if I were a freak. A freak, because I insist that they don't poison me.

My wife had to leave the concert hall twice because of the smoke. I paid the same as these geniuses -- probably more, since they were likely students -- and they break the rules, they try to rot the bodies of everyone else, and they stay and watch while dozens of people are choking outside, trying to hear the concert through the doors.

This is a family website, and I can't use language strong enough to describe how I am feeling. But I'll try.

These people should have the connection between their heads and lungs permanently severed. Solve their smoking problem, and mine.

Someone told me he thinks that when the young people of this nation get older, the nonsmoking laws will be repealed. Well, if that happens, I am going to be a very rich man, because I will sue each and every person who blows smoke in my face for assault and infringement of my civil rights.

Smoking around people like that is no different than spitting on them. I would feel fully justified in spitting on a smoker. It is self-defense. He hits me with his smoke, I hit him with my saliva. I would feel fully justfied in hitting him with an overhand right, too. And someday I might just do it. Someday my wife will be pregnant and we will be sitting at the FleetCenter, watching the Bruins, and someone will light up a cigarette, and I will light up his jaw, and when he hits the ground, I will smother the cigarette with the heel of my boot as it droops from his bloody bottom lip.

I choose not to smoke for a reason. It is my choice to make, not yours.