Smoking and the City

Hey, why did they forget to give me any invite to the ceremony when the City was given the prestigious award of being number three on the list of most polluted cities in the world (after Mexico City and Bangkok)?

What?

No party-time? Not getting any closer to any clean air policy. No government bill to push on any cleaner content of the gas we are using everyday. No underway technical-detail on private vehicle emission and roadworthy checkpoints. Nothing adequate was done on those hazardous “oplosan” smokes coming out of the thousands of uncared-of public transports, especially the metro minis, angkots and bajajs, in which I think are some of the major contributors of our air problems. No new greenway and park are being built to help combat the carcinogens.

Of course those big issues to tackle were just indeed too big to handle eh? Instead of spending some time to think and do research on all of the above, the City commenced from somewhere easier to confront: It is us, the smokers.

Was it even true that two-thirds of lung patients are even the second-hand-smokers? Or was it just another conspiracy to kill us the smokers? I do care about the thousands of people who work for the industry. But I could care less about the overly flamboyant cigarette companies. Those who can afford a downtown lot of a very important historical landmark and its surroundings in the heart of the City. Those who had a line-up of Bentleys, Rolls, Hummers, and Mercs in their HQ’s garage. I don’t even give a damn.

Gone are the days when smoking was cool and enjoyable or even a social cult to perform in the City.

While Bangkok was already a health-freak LA to begin with (the smoking bans), the City was like New York or Paris where everybody smoked in joyful communions.

After two hours of riding in the usual macet street, you’d expect to rest, drink a cuppa coffee, enjoy your pastry and smoke a cig at a local coffee shop. Try that in Blok M Plaza. You’d be confined to a little “foggy” smoking-room, one on the third floor and and the other at the food court level. The chamber was so frustratingly clouded that I personally refused to enter in fear of getting any immediate “lung-cancer” by all those puffs.

After a really boring day, especially when you are single and “hunting”, you’d expect to browse those cutie-pies or beefcakes (depending on your taste) while sitting and chatting with good friends at the patios of the café promenades. Try that in Citos. Even cute high-school girls with their “Bawang Putih-Bawang Merah wanna-be look” squatted with mall employees, security guards, strange-looking men, and even their own chauffeurs on the floor inside a small little box called the smooking-room.

In what little dignity that we smokers have today, some of the powerful even dared to try to push a new bill to make all smoking crevices in the City to use a single brand of air-purifying system. Restaurateurs already spent a gazillion amount of money to create their own little smoking rooms, to glass-wall smoking sections, to install new exhausts and air-purifiers. And guess what guys? Anything installed previously must go in order to be replaced with that still hush-hush brand in the making.

Another money scheme to make.
Another very scary consequences.
Yet it is… the cost of living in the City.

Oh yes, it got even worse.

Again when you are single and hunting, by today’s standards it is considered non-attractive if you also smoke. (And here I thought only dick sizes that mattered before). New people that I met lately are mostly non-smokers. Those who don’t smoke but didn’t mind that I smoke. Those who don’t smoke and detested my smoking. Those who pretend to smoke socially while they were not a smoker to begin with.

Still the award went to those: Who don’t smoke and don’t care about my craving for midnite nicotine injection yet still dare to invoke with the phrase: “Well you can smoke my dick instead!”.

Ew, even the ugly phrase was so nineteen eighty-something. Hellooo…

But before we end this for today boys, do you know what I miss the most from everything?

The freedom to enjoy killing ourselves slowly. The sound of the smoldering mix of paper and tobacco when the amber hit. Those wonderful feelings after the insidious inhalation of nicotine and tar right through our lung and blood system. The buzz. The contentment. The satisfaction.

We had a choice, then we had none.
Death by smoking should be our own risk to take.

PS. A vehicle problem occured the other night and a non-smoker had to stay overnight in my own personal smoking rumpuss bedroom. Another guess what? You were so right when I had to "respect" the non-smoker la. Heheh...