My parents never smoked and so they have to bear periodic visits from their yammering grandchildren, buy them gifts, spend holidays with them, etc.
My husband’s mother died at 60 from lung cancer. She never had to spend a single cursed minute with her grandchildren. She never even knew them!
In one of Robert B. Parker’s Spenser novels, the titular detective laments that, having quit smoking 20 years earlier, he is unable to utery a challenge with appropriate contempt for his opponent: “A line like that,” he thinks, “needs smoke curling around it.” In another, he is thinking about his case while standing on teh edge of the Potomac and wishes he had a cigarette so he could take one last drag and flick the stub into the river as he left.
I’m not allowed to cut myself. Court order. Apparently every time a drop of my blood touches soil, nothing ever grows there again, and every if it falls onto water it spawns kraken.
Like that’s MY fault.
Well, yeah, it kind of is. They weren’t too keen on Typhoid Mary, either, if you recall.
Your soundtrack awaits you.
Smoking is amazingly cool. Like in that ad where the New York cabbie, holding a half-smoked cigarette in his nicotine-stained fingers, smiles at the camera revealing crooked yellow teeth, and in between hacking coughs says “By me, it’s Camels.”
The best reason to take up smoking is that with every puff, a couple pennies drop into Jackmannii’s retirement account. Pathologists would be considerably poorer without all the smoking-related cancers of the lung, head and neck, bladder, esophagus, cervix, pancreas and so on that there are to diagnose. And that doesn’t even take into account other chronic conditions and premalignant lesions caused by smoking that add up to additional dollars, with or without the odd autopsy to add a thrill to the day.
I think of all those smokers out there saying to themselves, “I’m doing this for Jackmannii.”
And I’m grateful. :dubious:
It’s not like I’m INFECTING people. I mean, yes, I did accidentally cause a famine in North Africa after a papercut, and, yes, a kraken spawned by my blood did destroy that Russian sub and eat the entire crew–but even so I don’t see why I should be inconvenienced.
And Attack from the 3rd Dimension
Neither did Typhoid Mary. And we’re not even getting any delicious home cookin’ out of the bargain.
Are you smoking, yet?
If not, maybe this will convince you: Bill’s POV.
As someone who is currently, as we speak, chewing nicotine gum, I’ll try to persuade you into smoking. The thing is, you’re gonna have to forget all about tobacco. Not only does it do great damage to you, but it has utterly no payoff in the first place. People who smoke cigarettes do so to fight off the withdrawl symptoms of not smoking.
So back to my persuasion. If you’re gonna smoke, smoke something with a payoff. Smoke weed. It gets you high.
Black and Milds smell really fucking good. If I smoked, I’d smoke those.
Hey, since they raised the taxes on cigs, think of how much more money you can waste now. Maybe you can spend enough on smokes that you have trouble buying food and paying your bills and end up homeless living in the street with lung cancer. How’s that for self destructive? hee hee hee.
Think of how much space you’ll have as people ostentatiously avoid you on the subway! It’s almost as good as malaria!
You can do both. First you flaunt the laws you got, then you flout the smoke out of 'em.
Either your audience is impressed, or it’s confused as hell. Either way, you win 
Let me say, with all the taxes placed on cigarettes, you’ll be helping to fund government services and keep America strong.
Only smokers really love their country.
The court order prohibiting me from cutting myself also prohibits me from smoking weed, even medicinally. Something about an ancient prophecy and a zombie holocaust and Amber Tamblyn being eaten alive as a result of something that happens when I’m snockered.
Well, if you start smoking you wont have to worry about contributing to that silly 401K plan because you wont be around to enjoy it.
Also, smoking kinda’ make you like a superhero. It gives you the power to repulse people with your god awful smell.
So just think about it Skald, now you don’t even have to be bothered to open your mouth to repulse people like you normally do. Now, all you gotta do is be there in the same room with them.
I hope you take this post with the good humor that it was intended for."
I fail to see the problem here.
Heretic!
I don’t know what it is about Amber. She’s not actually all that pretty, and yet I find her strangely appealing.
OMG! I never thought of it that way… smoking only to avoid the withdrawal. That’s… that’s epic!
And as for smoking, think of all the healthy things you might do with the money you’ll now be spending on butts! That’s reason enough right there…