"A View From a Broad"
as seen on
LiveBroward.com

I can't believe people still smoke.
The memo has been sent - the verdict is in - cigarette smoking will kill you. Or at best, make you look really unattractive what with the tubes coming out of your neck and such after the lung cancer has set in and you look like that lady in Beetlejuice from the Land of the Dead. But let me not get ahead of myself here.

I am a former smoker. My drug of choice was Marlboro Lights - Satan with a filter, as I lovingly called them. When I first started smoking in the 70's - everyone smoked. Of course people wore polyester leisure suits and listened to The Carpenters then too, but eventually most of us snapped out of it.

This is how I quit. In the late 80s - after many years of being in a smoke induced coma, I once again began using my gray matter. After seeing and reading evidence pour in about how smoking can damage your lungs and even second hand smoke could give you the creepin' cruds, because after all, you were ingesting noxious, high heat fumes and poisons into your breathing apparatus. Your breathing apparatus? You know, the thing that keeps you alive? A/K/A lungs. I thought, Hmm, maybe, just maybe, there might be something to this quit smoking thing. Of course my next thought was, does that include weed? But that's a whole other issue. I couldn't ignore the facts any longer. I cold turkey-ed it and just quit. An era for me had come to an end.

Since smoking is definitely not cool anymore, it's both humorous and sad watching smokers in today's society. Smokers are very close, if not at the finish line, of being social pariahs. You see them outside of office buildings, in parking lots and on street corners, sneaking out for a "puff". It's like you can almost hear that dink, dink, dink tiptoe music from cartoons following them around. Crouched over their cigarettes, they have the posture of boiled shrimp and the demeanor of petty criminals. They frequently have that look of deep contemplation on their face as they inhale. Ever notice that? The furrowed brow, the narrowed eyes, holding one arm across their chests while the other arm rests on it, forearm vertical and hand dramatically thrown back, middle and index finger cradling the cigarette as they stare off into space thinking about God knows what. Probably thinking that they should take that drive to the Indian reservation, because the cigarettes are sooo much cheaper there. That whole Indian-Cigarette thing is brilliant. Talk about getting back at the White Man. "You took our land - we take your lungs Chemo-sabe."

Or there's that blank, expressionless look they have- that "I was just lobotomized" expression as they stare into space like nicotine zombies. They're certainly not thinking about whether or not their Bally's membership needs renewing or if they should bike ride or roller blade Saturday morning.

Smokers never look happy or gleeful. There's always a certain drama around smoking a cigarette. Like everyone turns into Joan Crawford when they smoke.

Then there's the car smoker. How about that arm that hangs out of the car window in front of you, holding a cigarette? That's attractive. I never understood why anyone would want to hang their arm out a moving car window for any reason, let alone have a cigarette attached to the end of it. What kind of a statement are you making here? It's just not quite dangerous enough, me risking my arm being ripped off by a passing vehicle - let me try for a little emphysema while I'm at it.

Then there's the car smokers that drive with the windows rolled up - like a hermetically sealed ashtray. I was next to a guy like that in traffic today. He lit up, blew the smoke into the windshield and it promptly billowed back on him. He didn't care. He was in smoke-stink heaven.

But smoking will keep you slim. Ever see those heavy-duty smokers that look like a human beef jerky? Like all the fluid has been sucked from their bodies and they've been hanging in a Virginia smoke house for 20 years. As a bonus, they usually have that gravelly voice that sounds like they've been gargling with asphalt and glass shards. Then they tell you how smoking hasn't affected them at all as they go into a twenty-minute coughing jag because they exceeded their six word breath allowance. The Jerky People never use sunscreen either. You see them at the beach looking like tanned, sinewy hides with tooth pick legs. Alligators look at them and go, "Damn, that's some dryyyyyyy ass skin! Honey, my scales don't look that bad do they?"

Smoking is just so passé. Get with the times smokers. Joe Camel is not cool. He just looks like a giant scrotum face - and smoking just makes you another word for that obvious protrusion.

And that's the view from this broad.

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