Smoking Kills? Then I Choose Death

January 6, 2013

0 Comment

I don’t generally go in for New Year’s resolutions, I’ve never really understood the point. If you want to lose weight, stop stuffing things into your cake hole; this you can decide to do at any time, not just on December 31st when your wedged into an armchair belching in time to Auld Lang Syne.

People always seem very keen to tell you about their resolutions, and this they will do by first asking if you have any. Not that they really care, all they want is for you to ask the same question back so that they can give you their scripted spiel about how they are going to lose three stone by going to the gym three times a week and by eating fewer battered sausages. “I’m definitely going to do it” they tell you. Yeah, whatever you say fatso.

This year is different though, because for the first time ever I have made a new year’s resolution – I am going to start smoking again.

Three years ago I had my last cigarette and to this day I’m not quite sure why. Yes, I feel better in the sense that I don’t cough up phlegm balls in the morning or get out breath walking to the fridge, but honestly, of what use is not coughing up phlegm balls in the morning? It takes moments, and is a small price to pay for that blissful nicotine hit.

I understand that it may kill me, but then so can a lot of things; drilling holes in your head, swimming with alligators, eating my wife’s cooking etc. Some people die eating peanuts, and they’re meant to be good for you.

You take your chances. Some people jump out of planes and entrust their continued existence to a large piece of silk attached with string, others take to the roads and reply on hydraulic fluid and a bag of inflated air. I choose to inhale smoke and keep my fingers crossed that I am one of 70% of smokers who dies from something else. They say on average it’ll take 10-12 years off your life expectancy – years often spent sitting in a chair with a bag of piss strapped to your leg. I think I’ll go for happiness instead, because smoking makes me happy, and the pursuit of happiness is something I take quite seriously.

Besides, smoking is cool, and as a balding thirty-something with three children who, in a recent epiphanous moment, finally understood the logic of those who attach a piece of string to their specs, I am clearly in need of something that helps me recapture my cool (not that I ever had much).

Smoking is cool precisely because so many people will tell you it is uncool. Every time I see somebody stood outside a pub or office sucking on a cigarette in a force 9 gale, I have nothing but admiration. These people are cool, because despite constant negative feedback from their friends, family, doctor, the media and the Government, they do it anyway. That’s the sort of anti-establishment shit I can really get behind.

It makes you smell, it’ll kill you, you’re harming children, your teeth are yellow, it’ll make you impotent and your sperm will dissolve. This is the sort of crap smokers put up with on a daily basis, and not only that they’re taxed more than any other group in society. But they do it anyway, fully aware of the fact that they’re not immortal, they have no issues getting an erection and that white teeth are of no use whatsoever.

And so it is that 2013 will be the year that I finally rediscover my love of nicotine, and with it a sense of contentment that only a smoker can truly understand.