NOT THE DEGENERATE YOU IMAGINE

A term of opprobrium carelessly flung in my direction gives me a warm retrospective glow. And it is my hope that the flinger of that sobriquet keeps the heck away from me, and avoids me like the plague.
If our paths ever cross again.


"Rancid old perv"


Well now. Given that the only exchange we've had was me telling you to stuff it, when you objected to the smell of my pipe on an open sidewalk, and that I looked daggers at you in wounded outrage at the time, that observation is remarkable.

Was it my glowering eyes? My trembling outrage? The angry expression on my face? My evident frustration at being faced with a sternly disapproving earthmother in the making?

Or, perhaps, my slow exhalation of a dense cloud of smoke in your general direction while contemplating whether to scream at you and jump up and down making a scene.


You know, sweetheart -- surely I may call you that, I feel that I know you so well -- this is a wide sidewalk, next to six busy lanes of traffic, and just beyond a church with a colony of homeless people in the portico. There's an overflowing garbage can over there, and smears of dog poo on the pavement in addition to refuse. Surely your sense of entitlement, sweetheart, and your ire, would have been better aimed at the rich panoply of reeks in the modern urban environment, and the evident slow crumbling of civilization evinced by that, than at a pipe smoker whom you could have passed silently in a twinkle on your way to your yoga class without a second thought.

I wonder at your first thought.

You may choke on it.

Sweetheart.



Nah, I'm not a rancid old perv. For one thing, I bathe regularly, and for another, I am still fairly young.



There was a time when smoking was largely taken for granted. Yes, most people huffed cigarettes, and quite a few of them got cancer because of it, but far many more simply enjoyed a civilized habit.
We cannot smoke indoors anymore, or in the needle-strewn public parks, and there are nasty signs all over the place telling us to shove off.
Little children are firmly instructed to fear and loathe us.
Which is fine, we don't like your kids anyway.
They're spoiled, and utterly unbearable.
But the pendulum has swung too far.

Kindly go piss up a rope.

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