Ass tray

My gardener likes to smoke cigarettes when he comes to mow, blow and go every week. And once in a while I will find cigarette butts on the lawn or behind some bushes. I get the skivvies every time I have to pick them up. That's how averse I am to cigarettes.

The fact is, in my 40 plus years on this earth, I have never smoked a cigarette. At least, not of the tobacco variety.

In my 20's, I once dated a woman who smoked. I cringed every time she lit up. And spent many hours at the laundromat getting that awful stench off my clothes. I also went through gallon jugs of Listerine. Funny what a man will endure for the promise of regular sex.

Recently I read that smoking levels in America are at their all-time lowest levels. I can believe that. There are few, if any members of our family that smoke. And we don't socialize with anybody that smokes. It's not like that's a rule with us. If we met some smart, funny people who shared our interests and were pleasant to be around we wouldn't preclude them just because they smoked cigarettes. We just wouldn't let them use the silverware.

Which makes it all the more surprising that I find so many kids at work who are smoking (as evidenced by the photo above.) And because most of them are kids (early to mid-twenties) it means they must have started smoking within the last decade. And that's when it gets even weirder. Because in the last ten years smoking has been banned in restaurants, parks, planes, bars, almost anywhere people congregate.

That means these kids saw the social pariahs of the last generation, huddled under an awning, battling the bitter cold, anxiously feeding their nicotine habit between status meetings and the writing of TPS reports and said to themselves, "Oooh, pass me a Marlboro, I want to be one of those people."