I am the Smoking Jesus

You might as well tattoo a swastika on your forehead, because you’d no doubt garner the same contempt from little old ladies and mums-pushing-prams. You’re standing in the rain, while everybody else – all non-smokers – look out at you thinking, “Freeze, you bastard.”

But you put up with it because you’re a slave to nicotine. An addict. And the ten minute wait for the bus would seem like an age if you didn’t have your cancerous friend to suck down.

It is a universal law, though, that as soon as you light a ciggy the bus will round the corner. If you’re scabby enough you might nip it and put it back in the box – to hell with the stench – but most of us just grumble and stomp it underfoot.

Smokers, in England, are treated like lepers were a few hundred years ago. I’m sure if all the health freaks had their way we’d be chained and shipped off to a remote island where we could pollute the air away from their tender nostrils; killing only those like us with our secondary poison.

They now put pictures on the packs of all the horrible things it does to you - like a child sniffing it in; an open mouth with missing teeth and rotting tongue; and my personal favourite, a dead guy on a morgue table.

The thing is, if they did that when I was in school it wouldn’t have discouraged me. Rather, I would have collected the things like stickers for a Thundercats sticker book.

An ad I noticed put it into perspective for me. A yellow background with black silhouettes of a young lad handing a pack of cancer sticks to a younger lad (or a midget), and the writing: CHEAPER CIGARETTES MEAN IT’S EASIER FOR YOUR KIDS TO SMOKE!

Made sense, I thought. A lot more sense than the South African version telling you that cheap, illegal smokes fund terrorism(?). Yes, but the heavy ‘sin’ tax on legal ciggies funds Jacob Zuma’s third plane.

Like any addict gives a shit, anyway.

But it made sense to me, and I thought that it’s right to make smokers feel like evil outcasts if it means my future children will look at the habit with disgust.

It wasn’t like that in my day. Hell, James Bond was a smoker! But a decade or so ago they got Hollywood to only let Bad Guys tug on a fag. And no teenager wants to be a bad guy… well, unless you want to score with the girls your mother warned you about… and who didn’t?

It makes sense that Bad Guys would have bad habits, but so often the Bad Guy is more appealing than the Good Guy with his neat haircut and gentlemanly demeanour. The genius in making smokers smelly, yellow-teethed and rain-drenched is that it makes them us look like sad losers with no friends, obviously standing in the rain so that no one can see we’ve been crying over our pathetic lives.

I will happily stand out in the rain dancing with pneumonia if it means I will spare my children from future addiction. Stick a fag in my mouth and nail me to a crucifix if it helps.

Hopefully my sacrifice will save them.

Next Comes a Stetson & Some Six-Shooters

Growing up, I always looked upon Clint Eastwood as the measure of all that was manly.

Clint didn’t bother with moisturiser or hairstyles. He maybe bathed once a month and the only reason Dirty Harry didn’t sport a grizzly was because he had a job that required he shave.

As a cowboy he could wear a dress and if anyone took the piss he’d bust a bullet through their brains.

His eyes were squinty (in a way, I believe, women found sexy) and his voice was gruff and intimidating. The dangerous eyes and gravel-throat was in no small part due to the massive amounts of tobacco the Man With No Name imbibed, but the threat of lung cancer is meaningless when Lee Van Cleef is gunning for you.

I always aspired to be as masculine as Mr Eastwood, and this morning – for the first time in history – I managed to hand-roll a decent cigarette!

Yes, it’s a big thing. To paraphrase Pinocchio, “I’m a real cowboy now!”

As much as the Marlboro Man might disagree, a pack a smokes is for pussies. Real cowboys smoke rollies.

And until this morning my attempts had been mostly bad and downright ugly, but today Lucy remarked that I’d gotten “pretty good”.

The humble rollie lost some of its coolness due to the general retardedness of stoners – who mumbled and fumbled it away from the gunslinger – but now it’s back in the hands of… well… guys too broke to buy Dunhill from the pub’s cigarette machine.

But the image of the rollie-smoker is set to change from ‘a bit dodgy’ to ‘modern day vaquero’.

The other day while practicing in a pub – a hair’s breadth from perfecting my skill – a little lady leaned over and asked, “Ooh, could you roll me one of those?”

I obliged, and I’m sure the look of disappointment on her face was because when I handed it to her she clocked my wedding band and knew that a Real Cowboy was always faithful to his woman.

Now all that’s left is to buy a pair of shitkickers and learn to ride a horse.

Yeeha!

New Year's Resolutions

In not what you’d really call a representative sample, I surveyed a couple of people I know about what they thought was the most common New Year’s resolution.

Almost 100% said, “To quit smoking!” with authority – as though they’d gone to the trouble I had to actually ask the population.

These days smokers are right up there with paedophiles and Crocs-wearers on the unsavoury list. In movies when someone cracks up a cancer-stick you just know he’s the one who’s going to betray the hero at the end. And when asking for a light you so often get a smug “Oh no, I don’t smoke” response, as though these people donate hours of their time each week to slopping lobster bisque into bowls in a soup kitchen.

When confronted about their discrimination against puffers, these Nazis will sincerely tell you, “Some of my best friends are smokers.”

I kind of gave up on resolving to change something about myself at the beginning of each year; mainly because I was always so pissed when I made the commitment I forgot about it when I woke up on the 2nd of Jan.

I think instead of promising to stop something – like smoking or aiming for pigeons with your car – it’s a better idea pledging to start doing something that will be for the betterment of mankind, the environment, or at least your self-esteem.

It doesn’t even have to be that serious. Maybe something small that will make you a less boring person or expand your horizons – listening to new music, reading more expansively, trying on women’s clothing for a change.

Or you could adopt the Fight Club theory that “self-improvement is masturbation; now self-destruction… well, that might just be the answer we need” and vow to let yourself hit rock-bottom so you can build yourself up into the person you want to be.

Either way, we shouldn’t let society, the surgeon general, or our mothers tell us what we should change in 2011; we should choose something that we want to do and do that instead.