Cigarettes Are Cool

But long live the Ohio smoking ban

So I'm trying to bring back chest hair.

I, like many of you, am completely fed up with the male image of beauty revolving around some sleek, glistening, well-oiled, utterly hairless torso. Chest hair is the new sexy, and I will be treating it as such from now on by forgetting that top button of my shirt whenever I'm out on the town. Ladies, if you see me, feel free to twirl and play with those curly black wonders poking out from my shirt collar.

Speaking of trends that need to catch on, Ohio's state-wide indoor smoking ban that passed during the November elections recently took full effect on May 3rd. Ohio is just the most recent in a long list of cities and states to wake up and smell the emphysema, but I'm glad that it's my beloved Buckeye state that has finally turned from the Dark Side.

On a recent road trip to Chicago, my friends took me out for a night on the town. We were in Wrigleyville, and I was drunk, talking to some delectable young woman with green eyes (and more importantly, not reaching for her pepper spray) when she suddenly lit up a cigarette. I"m sure I looked at her like she had decided to spontaneously perform a hysterectomy on herself on the bar because she glared at me and said defensively, "What?"

I was so used to Ohio, where for months the bars had already been enforcing the smoking ban in anticipation of the upcoming summer deadline. I had grown accustomed to coming home without smelling like an ashtray. I had gotten used to sitting beside a person and having a conversation without smoke pumping excess blood into the veins of my eyes. I had become familiar with the various creams and gels one can apply topically to the genitals so as to last longer during intercourse, although I'm pretty sure this last example belongs in an entirely different column.

Even though I consider many of these people my good friends, smokers are for the most part gaping, cavernous assholes (although, if someone is my "good friend" this also does not say much about him or her). They are selfish, sick little pricks, who feel no shame in poisoning the people around them. Even worse, they're litterers, tossing their dirty little butts wherever and whenever the need strikes them.

That's why I say God bless the smoking ban, and may all the rest of you see the light soon. Naturally everyone has to pick a fight, though, and I often hear smokers whining that people are "supposed to smoke" in bars, and that it's a matter of personal preference and an individual's rights. This is when I like to look at this smoker and say, "You gaping, cavernous asshole. I, Steve Markley, consume more alcohol than the entire country of Luxembourg. When I turned 21, Anheuser-Busch bought stock in me. And I have never once in my entire life, smoked a cigarette."

I say this not to brag but to make it clear that there are plenty of upstanding bar-hoppers who view it as personal catastrophe when the cute girl they've been talking to all night takes that Virginia Camel Kool Slim Light out of the pack in her purse and ruins everything.

As for the view that it is an individual's right to defile his or her body, you're arguing with the wrong guy. I'm all for a person's right to destroy him or herself with every substance in the book, including paint thinner and carpet samples. However, the science is in, and no one can dispute that second-hand smoke is even more carcinogenic than what the smoker takes into his or her lungs. This means that the guy sitting beside the smoker is worse off than the actual moron spending $3.50 a pack to kill himself faster. What if every time you were in a bar and someone shot up heroin, a little of that heroin slipped into your bloodstream? Would you have a real beef with a law that made the heroin addict go outside to get his pathetic fix?

To be fair, however, the only people I like less than smokers are those preachy hacks running the anti-smoking campaigns. I can't think of a better way to get young people to smoke than some of the commercials these organizations put on TV, which even GLAAD, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, has called, "Sooo totally gay."

Everyone knows that smoking undoubtedly does make you cooler. You never see an action-movie hero fiddling with a match when he has to spark the pool of gasoline that leads into the warehouse while growling, "Say hello to Salazar for me." No, he tosses a cigarette because cigarettes are badass. If they weren't, there wouldn't be any point. Yet the anti-smoking crowd has to screw everything up by making not smoking even less cool than it already is. They do this by running commercials where adolescent boys and girls (the girls being just young enough to make you feel like a real sicko for finding them attractive) have loose, unrehearsed conversations about just how cool it is to not smoke.

Jim: You don't need cigarettes to fit in. All you need are good friends who know that you don't have to smoke to be cool. Right, Amy?

Amy: That's right! I don't need cigarettes because I have volleyball, a scholarship to Vanderbilt, and a twenty-six year-old boyfriend name JT, who makes me feel like he's ripping me in half every time I sneak him through my basement window, but in that really good way, you know?

Jim: No, I haven't lost my virginity yet.

Amy: So you don't count what Chuck did with that golf ball in the guy's locker room?

Jim: The counselor said I didn't have to talk about that.

Anyway, the real point here is that cigarettes have a stranglehold on our culture, and there's nothing to be done about it. However, for us Ohioans, we can finally enjoy a drink or two in a bar, maybe some light conversation, a quick run to vomit in the restroom sink and an attempt to wash it down, scraping the chunks off the basin with a paper towel only to stumble out and find our girlfriend talking to some other guy at the bar, so we loudly proclaim this guy to have genital warts to anyone will listen, puke on her dress, stumble into the corner where she weeps and tells you that you have to get a hold of yourself, that you're spiraling out of control while you sob and swear that you're going to change, that you'll get the drinking under control and you'll stop screwing her roommate even though her roommate's better in bed, and that it was you who stole the money from her purse because you emptied your bank account on pornography and not even the good stuff but the really sick, debasing crap that got you fired from your job because you kept watching the videos at work--without those filthy smokers ruining our good time.