smoke you

smoke. smoking. smokers.

i don't like any of them.

smoking-related diseases kill 425,000 americans every year. that's a lot of damn americans. that's like filling up safeco field and killing everybody in the stands...ten times a year.

but you know what? smokers know what they're getting into. which must be why they're all such aggressively antisocial deathmongers.

smokers will strap a child into a carseat, then fill up the car with smoke. they'll sit in a nonsmoking section and light up. they'll blow smoke in the direction of me and my family (at which point i'll sometimes volunteer to help expedite their statistic-hood).

and every smoker who has ever driven a car will throw their cigarettes onto the road.

i really hate that.

so recently i spent a few days collecting roadside cigarette butts. i filled bag after bag with stinking, soggy filters. i loaded up my garage with the bags, and then waited for the right opportunity.

it came yesterday.

after a day of rain, followed by clearing skies, a guy driving a little convertible flicked his cig back over his shoulder, right in front of me. further up he pulled into a parking spot, and i pulled in behind him.

as reasonably and sweetly as you can imagine, i mentioned that he seemed to have lost something on the road. i held up a cigarette butt for his benefit (actually, it was one of the butts i'd collected earlier, but i didn't think he'd notice the difference).

he got a shocked look on his face, and said something rude. composed and pleasant, i told him about the tons of waste thrown by smokers onto our roadways each year, and couldn't he please be more careful in the future?

he got ruder still. in fact, no matter how i tried to reason with him, he just got more and more vile-tempered and ill-mannered. eventually he picked up yet another cigarette butt off the sidewalk and flicked it at me. triumphant, he turned and strode into a nearby building.

and i watched him go.

then i went back to my car and hauled a huge, butt-filled trash bag (one of those heavy-duty black bags) out onto the sidewalk. i dragged it over to the side of his nice little convertible and dead-lifted it up over the side.

gosh, it was heavy. and soggy.

that was my observation as i dumped the bag into his nice little car. just filled it up, over the seats and into every nook and cupholder. filled it up as a reminder to this particular smoker that his cigarette butts really add up over time.

i'm sure he'll understand and appreciate the message. if not, i have several more bags in my garage.