Friday, October 8, 2010

"When There's Smoke, There's I"

"Like the hypnotic sight of molten lava, it breathes at every intake
its smoke billows freely, carelessly
its gray ashes remnants of comfort

When everyone has left your side, when not a single soul is there for you,
For a few moments, I feel cared for.  I am not alone."


More and more I feel displaced, discriminated in this oh-so politically correct society of non-smokers.  Gone are the days when one can get a full meal in a restaurant and immediately, in the comfort of your chair, grab a stick of cigarette and puff your heart out.  Aah...that completes the meal!  Perfect.  And with coffee in hand, that is just sublime!

Nowadays, you eat at a restaurant and when you're done, before you pick the remnants stuck between your teeth, before you can even think of how good that meal was, you stand up, weave through diners, go out of the restaurant, find a nice corner in the street in front, make sure there are no passersby who will twitch their noses at the smell of cigarette smoke and carefully light a stick beside a convenient trash can so as not to scatter your forbidden ashes in this oh-so clean environment.

If you look at this image from afar, it's no different than that little fragile bird seeking warmth under a shade on a cold, rainy day.  Oh, poosh!  Kawawz!

Worse if you're in a country like Singapore.  You find your corner but you're not really sure if it's the right one so instead of enjoying every single puff allowed for you, you end up looking over your shoulders, puff as discreetly as possible hoping you don't get fined for it.

I'd rather be a negro because I'll be called African-American.  I'd rather have AIDS because then I'll be called a victim.  I'd rather be gay because then my movies will make money.  But to be a smoker, you're a sinner.  You are a leper in the sea of Pharisees.  If you're not careful, it could even mean jail time.

I was lucky enough in 1995 or 1996 to have flown in International flights with a smoking section.  Not that it's a wonderful experience though.  Being stuck for 12 or 15 hours of smoke smelling, smoke filled economy section with drunken seamen ordering everything that's for free on the bar menu is not my idea of enjoying smoking privileges.  But then again, looking back, we were accorded proper recognition just like people in wheelchairs with their own set of ramps anywhere that there's a street corner.  Back then we were still, well, sort of "accepted".

And then, "Oprah" happened.  Then social responsibility was coined.  Then came organic food and all that eat-like-a-goat syndrome, eat-healthy-meaning-bland-green things.  25 years later and look at where we are now?  Crowding the sidewalks of buildings, sometimes herded by obnoxious security guards to make sure we stay in our invisible space that won't ruin the ambience of its building, standing around sharing a single trash can puffing away as fast as we could so that we could go back to our jobs 21 floors up.

I wish I was born in Japan or Italy where smokers are not aliens.  Every restaurant has a smoking section.  Ash trays complete the ambience of the table together with fresh flowers in a vase.  I feel so welcomed.  I feel like I am part of society.

Smokers are people too.  We vote just like every healthy constituent there is.  We pay taxes just like everyone else.  Certainly, we are much better customers in restaurants than the ones who order their steaks well-done.  There are far worse people that should be discriminated around us.

Why us, then?  Because we're easy targets.  Because a mile away, people can see us from the smoke coming out of our mouths.  If they see a dismembered finger beside a tiger, everyone is going to point at the tiger as this dumb carnivore responsible for that finger even if he was asleep all day long.  People don't have the guts to fight against the more difficult battles.  We have become a convenient slogan and sound byte to those politically correct, hypocritical "health buffs" and "environment junkies".  They've barred us but no one has yet barred all those smoke belching toxic factories all over the world.

Someone once said, "Rules are made by the weak to limit the strong."  That's the one line that I keep telling myself as a consolation to the isolation given us, smokers.

Give us our space.  We won't live long enough anyway to pester you forever.

Long live, Smokers!









Thursday, October 7, 2010

I can't understand why people spend so much time updating and constantly checking facebook and twitter.  Must be the fun of lurking on other people's lives.  Or probably this nat geo-ish kind of curiousity in finding out anything and everything that's happening with the people in their social network. Or, as a friend of mine mentioned, "it's good networking for business, keeps you in the loop."

I've never had the patience for web postings or whatever it's called.  I have a facebook account that's hardly active except for Scrabble and Poker.  I'm kinda old fashioned this way.  I find it uncool to be constantly talking about what's happening to you, wherever and whenever you are.  And being enslaved and dictated upon by technology and the web is not too James Dean. And as the power and its fashionability in our country becomes stronger over time, facebook has become a venue for people to attack other people.  They have used it as a weapon rather than as a way to just socialize.  A venue to wash dirty linens, to ruin other people's reputation and ironically, also as a venue to make it an exclusive club, where in jokes are used to exclude rather than to include and be sociable.

I am still all for a gathering over lunch to talk amongst friends about the latest on everything.  I'm still all for talk.  For an exchange of ideas and stories where I can see who I'm talking to and how that person reacts to the conversation.  "Up In The Air" practically sums up what I'm saying here.

So, why this?  Why blog all of a sudden?  One is, I'm getting old.  More and more I find myself not wanting to get out of the house unless I have work.  And the past few months, I've armed my house all the comforts that I could possibly think of to pass the time.  I have loads of dvds that can keep me glued to my tv set all day long.  I've never gotten used to PS3 games but lately I've stocked up some games which, after getting trapped in one stage and do not really know how to get out of it or getting stuck with the operation of the joystick due to complicated instructions, I've not touched again for the past few weeks.  I enjoy cooking and I'd sometimes, if I'm not tired of getting up from my bed and have my hands smell of garlic or onion, go to my kitchen and whip up something, anything.  I've recently been hooked up to Iphone game apps.  Bejeweled is my latest addiction.  I'm through with Plants Vs. Zombies, Flight Control, Ninjump, Hungry Shark and Angry Birds.  But for how long can I stay in my cave and be amused all day long?

I don't have the patience for surfing.  I find other people really at home with it.  Ask anything and they know where to find it in the web.  For me, the web is a jungle.  Except for porn sites where i don't have trouble finding, the web just leaves me confused, lost.  Too many headings or sidebars I suppose.

So, why this?!  Why blog all of a sudden nga?!

Well, I love to talk.  And except for my lady looohv who's getting tired of hearing all my talks day in day out, it's hard to bring friends together anymore.  Everyone is busy making money.  Everyone is busy living their own lives in this crazy world of ours.  I guess, I miss my friends.  I miss talking to them.  Through this I can keep on talking and talking and talking.  No lurking on other people's lives, no pretense of a lovely day or updates of me going to the toilet to crap.  Just plain and simple, talk.  Whether anyone is listening, I think I've passed the time pretty well with this.

So, friends, expect me to constantly(I hope) post my thoughts, my ruminations and angsts of anything that gets in the way of my day.