Posted 5/05/2008 06:47:00 PM by Douglas

Tobacco: We all know it's now the scourge of all mankind, turning teeth yellow and children into orphans faster than you can say LS/MFT. But in a day not that long ago, smoking used to be fun. Sedaris goes through his own personal "rise and fall" of smoking, and it's pretty damned funny:

When I was in fourth grade, my class took a field trip to the American Tobacco plant in nearby Durham, North Carolina. There we witnessed the making of cigarettes and were given free packs to take home to our parents. I tell people this and they ask me how old I am, thinking, I guess, that I went to the world’s first elementary school, one where we wrote on cave walls and hunted our lunch with clubs.

The Horror!!! Sure, there are huge drawbacks to smoking, but what about the advantages? What about these days?

All rules had their exceptions, but the way I came to see things they generally went like this: Kools and Newports were for black people and lower-class whites. Camels were for procrastinators, those who wrote bad poetry, and those who put off writing bad poetry. Merits were for sex addicts, Salems for alcoholics, and Mores for people who considered themselves to be outrageous but really weren’t. One should never lend money to a Marlboro-menthol smoker, though you could usually count on a regular-Marlboro person to pay you back. The eventual subclasses of milds, lights, and ultra-lights not only threw a wrench in the works but made it nearly impossible for anyone to keep your brand straight. All that, however, came later, along with warning labels and American Spirits.

Ah, those were the days! I knew a guy in college that smoked Virginia Slims (or Vagina Slimes as we called them) ultra-light 120 menthols, just because he knew, without a doubt, that no one would ever bum a smoke off him. He was right.

When New York banned smoking in the workplace, I quit working. When it was banned in restaurants, I stopped eating out and when the price of cigarettes hit seven dollars a pack I gathered all my stuff together and went to France.

Gotta give it to him for his dedication!

I've said before that dammit if non-smokers are some of the most annoying people on the planet.