Butt out, baby.

Just had an interesting conversation with my roommate about smoking coming full circle - from cool to uncool (even disgusting) to kind of cool again.  I'm not sure how widespread that attitude is, but in our little city, it definitely seems to be happening.  I think that, here, it's because of a legislation that passed some time ago, banning smoking in any public building.

 Now that it's not in your face all of the time, literally, the acquired dislike that my contemporaries found concerning smoking has not been picked up by the new breed.  Such is my surmise.

Before the ban, when you went out for a night of drinking, to say nothing of being in a restaurant, you came back saturated, inundated, permeated, perforated with essence of smoke and sweat.  The clothes that you wore last night could not in any way be considered being worn again.  They were disgusting, they reeked.  There was a palpable aura of filth to them.  When you stepped into the shower, the moment the water hit your hair, you had to pray your stomach would handle the smell, because fuck. I mean, fuck.

When the ban was upcoming, people bitched.  People moaned, whined, cried, wailed and railed against the "injustice" of it all.  Even I thought it was needless establishment meddling.  Bar owners thought it would destroy their business.  Personally, I wondered how Bingo halls would survive, since, having worked several bingos in high school while raising money for our football team, I learned that a Bingo hall was secondhand smoke.  You went to a Bingo hall to sit, and smoke, and maybe, maybe win some money.  Mostly the first two.

 But that first night back from pubs, clubs and bars, no one complained.  Our hangovers were so less, and we smelled so much better, that the "inconvenience" of having to go outside to smoke paled by comparison.  All of my smoker friends agreed.  They also found that being limited to a small area outside while smoking made them a lot of new friends.

Bars lost no business.  In fact, business picked up.

The only thing I regretted about the smoking ban was the closure of a really cool little cigar bar some friends had introduced me to, only months before.  We'd made the decision to cultivate properly adult, properly refined vices.  Scotch, cigars, port, all that shit.  And so, they took me to this twenty-by-twenty, one room bar in one of the hotels here in town.  We dressed up a little, and enjoyed the hell out of ourselves.  But this was an enclosed room with amazing ventilation, built for the express purpose of enjoying a cigar.  And sadly, it had to close.  No loophole could be built into a legislation that banned smoking indoors, or everyone would take advantage of it.

I still think cigarettes are unappealing, though.  In fact, that's one of my personal dating rules - no smokers.  I don't like the smell, I don't like the taste in someone's mouth, and the money could be better wasted, if not better spent.