Smokers are evil and must be persecuted at all costs. Such is the zeitgeist in the non-flyover states of the USA today. All other minorities – apart from white, God Fearing Republican voters in the flyover states - must be protected at all costs but we smokers are evil. We are also nearly all black and poor and so perhaps used to getting a good kicking from the elites.
In the Starbucks in which I am working I am happy to accept that I must step outside for a fag. But there I am confronted with a notice saying that I cannot smoke within 25 feet of the building. The sidewalk is about 12 feet wide so I reckon that I have to stand about three quarters of the way into the street opposite. Smoking really is bad for your health when you have to risk getting killed by a car doing it.
So I shuffle a bit down the street and smoke outside a rather snooty wine store where there are no such signs. A woman walks by on the other side of the sidewalk so is at least ten feet away. Like most Americans she is overweight but I could not comment on that since that would be sizeist and Mayor Bloomberg would undoubtedly haul me in front of the courts for even thinking that she was a bit of a lard bucket.
The wind is strong today so my smoke is dissipated quickly. None the less the woman, who has about as much chance of catching my passive smoke as I do of shagging Cheryl Cole tonight, coughs in a very public way and waves her chubby little hands wildly across her face to ward off the smoke she cannot be inhaling. I am made to feel guilty again.
Bollocks to that. If anything keeps me smoking, other than the fact that I am a pathetic addict, it is the fascism of the smoke Nazis. And for that tribe New York is their Mecca.
