Not Exactly What I Had in Mind by Roy Blount Read Free Book Online Page A

embers, and dottle — dropped into my lap. And I said to myself at the time, “Well, if you do this sort of thing very often, people may begin to think you are not a serious person.”
    I have never understood why so many people object more strenuously to cigar and pipe smoke than they do to, say, Merit vapors. A nice fresh dollar panatela or a brier packed with Virginia-and-latakia mixture smells like something flavorful cooking; filter cigarettes just smell like something thin burning.
    So I do not enjoy sitting next to some heathen (by “heathen” I mean someone who pisses me off) who holds a fumy Winston in just such a way as to snake a carcinogenic tendril directly into my nose.
    On the other hand, since I have never been able to stop doing anything that does catch my fancy, I feel a certain solidarity with tobacco addicts — some of whom, indeed, are my companions in other health-threatening pursuits, like talking at great length loudly until long after we have run out of ice. If I like somebody, and the room isn’t too small, I don’t mind their smoke any more than I really mind the fact that my dogs fart. I mean it registers on me occasionally, but I don’t dwell on it. And philosophically, although nothing constricts my breathing like the proximity of a libertarian in full espousal, I take a generally antiprohibitionist stance.
    However. Only the Shadow knows how many cancer-encouraging, heart-discouraging influences lurk in even a clean-living modern American’s system. A person I met recently who was in chemical research told me that plastic — for instance, refrigerator-storage wraps and bags — exudes carcinogenic molecules. I don’t see how I could live without plastic. Strangers’ cigarette smoke, though, I don’t need.
    So it is good that movie sweethearts rarely light up anymore. (Instead, they simulate oral sex.) It is good that more people notice that smoke bothers them. (I must say it never struck me as a clear violation of my personal space until recent years, but then neither did Republicanism.) If there were a nicotine head in my household, I might well remind that loved one occasionally, with tact (“Do you think there’ll be ashtrays in Heaven?”), of studies that find a high cancer rate among nonsmokers living with smokers. I have one new measure to propose:
    Waiting areas — in airports, hospitals, bus stations, Limbo — should be. divided into smoking and nonsmoking sections. Waiting in designated areas is, if not carcinogenic in itself, so dismal that it stimulates the smoking urge and also the outrage reflex. Puffers and huffers should be kept apart.
    But banning all smoking on airplanes and in other places where nicotinists must fidget for long periods of time is too much like flogging. People who smoke writhe like salted caterpillars when they can’t. It is not excruciatingly difficult, most of the time, for nonsmokers to circulate through contemporary life without becoming trapped in the lesser distress that smoke-inhalation causes them.
    Far more obnoxious than smokers, to me, are people who seem to relish the opportunity to upbraid smokers for perceived foulness. I know lovely people who smoke; I once knew (not for long) a woman who found it refreshing to jog through the fumes of Central Park but would snarl “That’s a filthy habit” at people who smoked near her and, if they didn’t desist immediately, would actually snatch the smoking materials out of their mouths. It would not break my heart to hear that she had been run over by a truck full of Lucky Strikes.
    According to a cover story in Time, a revival of manners is under way. I would like to see manners flourish between smokers and nonsmokers.
    Let us go to one of those waiting areas I was talking about. In an airport. Any traveler knows that hell is other passengers. Especially when nothing is moving except passengers’ twitches.
    A man is sitting next to a woman with a small child who is running in tiny