CIGARETTE SMOKE ‘EM IF YOU GOT ‘EM? DON’T DO IT

 

 

Tobacco and cigarette smoke, the stuff of dreams and nightmares.

 

The dream part comes first.

Light a stick and enjoy. All you’ve got to do is breath in, breath out, and watch the cigarette smoke curl into shapes.

Later comes the nightmare part, the regret, the tubes, the hospital smell, the faces of loved ones crushed that you’re dying.

Look closer for hints of, “You did this to yourself, now to us.”

That’s the face of a loved one who finds a safe place to smoke in between hospital visits.

This stuff just doesn’t sink in fast enough.

I worked around a woman in an office who smoked Commanders.

Yes, once it was legal to smoke in offices, on air planes, everywhere.

She’d light her unfiltered, take s puff, then let it smoke itself in the ashtray.

Once the ash was halfway, she’d tip it, take a puff, and wait for the last drag.

The entire office had a smoke screen.

Dottie was near the end of a long civil service career and knew how to go out strong. It was her right back then.

Cigarette smoke has a new way of counting the damage done.

 

One pack-year, or two, this is how to measure your life?

More a measure of death. It felt like a pack-year every day in Dottie’s office.

A sixty year old smoking two packs a day since thirty equals sixty pack years.

It sounds like the old ex-smokers rhyme, “I’m a puff away from a pack a day.”

What’s the harm in one cigarette? Are two twice as dangerous?

Watch old movies for carefree smokers laughing and lighting each others cigarette.

“Oh, darling, allow me.”

Then find a throat cancer survivor and ask them about their treatment.

How was that stomach feeding tube? Did you enjoy the radiotherapy? Was the chemotherapy everything you dreamed of.

Or did you get The Deuce: chemoradiation at the same time?

And the big one, “Did you feel nauseous?”

Cigarette smoke is a giver, just not of anything you want.

Male smokers put things at risk they don’t know.

Young male smokers might tune in right about now. That’s you, millennials.

From sharecare.com:

Smoking is one of the worst things a man can do for his erection, since smoking directly impacts your body’s blood supply. In this video, urologist Harry Fisch, MD, explains how smoking cigarettes negatively impacts a man’s erection. 

If the video doesn’t work, why not take Doctor Harry’s learned advice?

Don’t warp your wood too early.

Laugh at the erectile dysfunction ads of middle aged men now.

Make fun of the warning, “Check with your doctor to make sure your heart is ready for sex.”

Point out the women in the ads who look like they want to give their man EVERYTHING, heart issue be damned.

Heart attack is more a figure of speech to them, like a millennial hears erectile dysfunction.

Clock a few pack-years and you’ll turn figure of speech into action. Health action, medical action, more action than you’d ever want, but need now.

The worst part of cigarette smoke?

If you don’t die fast, you die slow.

With everyone watching. No matter what they say, their faces tell.

It’s like a video billboard at the bedside saying, “You sick F#ck, why did you do this to yourself and make me a witness. I told you to stop. I punched your guts out when you said, “punch my guts out if you ever see me smoke again.”

Seeing former pro athletes hit the sticks isn’t helpful.

From Grantland:

When I think of cigarette smoking in the NBA, without a doubt, the first person who comes to mind is the gregarious, beloved Serb: Vlade Divac. Even your casual NBA fan most likely recalls hearing the tales: When he came into the league — not in the ’50s, when the harrowing health concerns were not yet known in full, but in the D.A.R.E.-era ’90s — Divac used to rip butts. At halftime. In the locker room.

Why do we care if this is true? Simply put, there’s a certain romantic insanity to the idea. Here’s a man tasked with consistent Herculean physical battles, surrounded by peak athletic forms, and yet he is louche enough to willingly ingest a product he knows can only debilitate his body and talented enough for that to not even matter.

Cigarette smoke lingers. Everywhere

I use boomerpdx to explain, educate, enlighten, but enough of my gains.

It’s also a bullhorn in the right hands. Your hands.

If you find ‘Cigarette Smoke ‘Em If You Got ‘Em? Don’t Do It’ a new take on an all too common enemy, please paste the link to your network.

Maybe someone looks to their future because of you.

If you find ‘Cigarette Smoke ‘Em If You Got ‘Em? Don’t Do It’ a tedious repeat of common knowledge, please paste the link to your network.

We all have that someone.