Ever play poker in one of those small, friendly rooms? The same players come every day to start the game. They’re a family. They all know each other and each other’s business. Most of them are senior citizens and wonderful folks. The ones that smoke started when they were young and didn’t know any better. It was cool then. But listening to them talk, intermingled with gasping, spitting, choking and wheezing as they try to breathe, takes your breath away. Especially if they’re blowing smoke at you. Appealing? Hell no!
Smoke rolling out of every orifice in your head after you get pocket Aces beat on the river is one thing, but putting paper rolled tobacco to your lips and sucking it as you torch it – NO WAY! It’s so uncool that it’s beyond STUPID. Some smokers even want to set their ashtray between you and them because they don’t want the smoke coming up in their face. Gee . . . that’s a tough one, dummy. Just put it out! If you turn a fan on them, they’re insulted. My, my, poor baby.
Some of the well thought out remarks a few smokers make is beyond ludicrous. “Go to a church if you don’t like it.” If we go to a church does that mean God will save us from cigarette smoke? Perhaps we can talk our local parish into hosting a poker game.
Or how about this one, “You’ve got to die of something!” Well let’s see now. If we get to pick, why would we want to die from smoking related problems? Why can’t we die after we won the World Series of Poker or Megabucks. Or after leading a long, healthy life we just go to bed one night and enter the Big Poker Game in the Sky without pain or anguish or being short of breath and coughing up phlegm the last 20 years or so of our lives?
The downside of smoking: It costs thousands of dollars to kill yourself a little bit at a time. It creates additional hardships on your friends and loved ones in matters of health care and helping you through your ‘golden years’ because you can’t manage for yourself. It creates the same health problems for your household pets and small children as it does for you. It increases the signs of aging through wrinkles, not to mention what it does to the rest of your body because of reduced oxygen levels in your blood and your POOR, POOR lungs trying to cope with all that tar.
There is no upside!
It isn’t possible for anyone with an intelligence level of zero to believe that inhaling smoke is beneficial, not even as a weight loss measure. If you need to lose weight get up off your butt and move it. Cut down on the amount of food you eat. Be sensible, be healthy.
A few years ago, this writer sat next to a healthy looking young male in his early twenties, at a poker machine. This young man was personable and talkative and we visited. He lit a cigarette and blew out a lung full of smoke that could have floated the Good Year Blimp. When he noticed my reaction he fanned it away and said, “I know I should quit, but if I get lung cancer someday, I’ll just get a new lung.”
Is that how it’s done? You find out you have given yourself cancer so you walk into your local hospital’s surgical ward and tell them you need a new lung. The technician on duty politely shows you a selection of lungs and you choose the one you want. Now you are led to an operating room where you calmly lay down and have your chest opened from your neckline down to your abdomen and into your back – hopefully by a Light Saber and Master Luke so there’s no bleeding. Then your sternum is cracked to lift your ribcage. Get the point?
This is not a joking matter. If it were, there wouldn’t be 50,000 plus on the waiting list for organ transplants. Come on people – take responsibility for you actions! While we’re on the subject, give a pint of blood once in awhile, donate platelets, sign a donor card and attach it to your driver’s license. Who knows – You may be the person that needs that pint of blood someday or your child or spouse may need a bone marrow or an organ transplant. Afraid you’ll get something (as in disease) if you donate? WRONG! Stop looking for an excuse to be a slacker.
Perhaps one day a smoker will have to carry an airtight, body sack with them and in order to smoke, step inside and punish only themselves until the smoke disappears. You definitely have the right to smoke. The rest of us . . . we have the right to breathe smoke free air and exercise our choice to be healthy. That includes the poker table and any place else on Earth.