Smoke Free, Take 2

You know those days when you hate your life? Your job stinks, you can’t for the life of you understand why you’re wasting your time spending all this time doing something you really couldn’t care less about with people you don’t – in most cases – care about either. And for what?
I don’t even wanna contemplate that particular question. Bleh.

In less than a month I’ll be 45 and I’m having the usual existential crisis. It’s not even original, just the ordinary mid-life “what am I doing with my life” crap. Even my existential angst is totally within the norm. Totally bland and uninteresting, like me, like my life… so enough about that, who gives a fuck anyway. I’m thankful that at least when I get like this I annoy the hell out of myself within an hour or so. Since the choice is to walk along and slap myself silly or get the fuck over myself, I go for the latter option; much less painful all around.

So, the smoke-free bar experiment was a resounding success. The place still reeked of cigarette smoke of course, but it was amazing to actually be able to breathe and not be obliged to leave after 15 minutes.

Newest trend in Montreal, or so SKOAL is hoping: Chewing tobacco. The day after it became illegal to smoke in bars and restaurants, they had taken out full page ads in several of the free alternative papers touting their product: “All the kick of tobacco without the smoke”. Somehow I can’t help but picture a bunch of old men sitting around a stove in the general store with a spittoon at their feet spitting out a stream of brown which hits the spittoon (or the floor beside it) with a resounding plop.

I don’t know where they’re going to spit the stuff in bars (unless they begin providing spittoons), but hey, have your poison as long as you’re not poisoning me at the same time (apparently a half hour of chewing is about equal to four cigarettes – less lung cancer but more mouth and throat cancer). With my luck, I’ll probably step in chewing tobacco spit and slip and break open my head, thus ending forever my foray into the new and wonderful world of smokeless bars.

There is also, of course, a coalition of smokers taking the government to court over this. Apparently there is no real proof that second hand smoke is bad for you, so they’re trying to get the ban reversed. Well, whatever.