KINDLY SHUT UP

If you were travelling, you rather looked forward to the easy camaraderie and hubbub of the cafe on the platform, where you'd settle down for half an hour with a corona and unfurl your newspaper. Or it might be a bolknak; which looks more like a typical warprofiteers cigar than a corona, and has zeppelin or elliptic contours. While gleefully reading about some dreadful colonialist shenanigans you'd listen in to the discussion of racehorses at the next table, passing the time before the train came in a pleasantly funky atmosphere.

Here in the States, where most travelling was by Greyhound bus -- the proximity of a four hundred pound wino with fleas and reeking of Thunderbird being the thing -- you would sit in that frightful waiting room south of Market Street chainsmoking Marlboros instead. Or so I've heard. Far less enjoyable. You weren't looking forward to endless hours rolling through the cornfields of Iowa, and those stops in the middle of the night in grim burgs on the edge of the wastelands, with mothers changing their squawling infants diapers and everybody fighting for the last rubbery hot dog from the kiosk for two hundred miles.
While counting out their remaining cigarettes.

Things have improved! No more smoking inside, and there is no longer the reek of cheap booze either. Instead there are people shooting up in the bathrooms, because America has gone over to the opioids. Maybe someone is tweaking on meth in a corner, but unless these people piss on themselves, everything is cleaner and brighter. Why, there might even be a snackbar with gluten-free vegan options! It's so much better than those bad old days!

And, at the end of the journey, there is a six star chainhotel with pastel decor, easy on the eyes, clean sheets, wifi and cable teevee, and a sumptuous breakfast buffet.
Please, no smoking near the door. We have standards!


So you head over to the local graveyard with your pipe and tobacco, because that is the one place in town where earthmothers and Karens won't bother you.

Of course in bigger cities the municipal cadaver stash might be a very long hike away, but skidrow is much closer. And, the good lord willing, there won't be any anti-smokers among the human wreckage and failed pyramid scheme yuppies with needles in their veins there, hollering shrilly about how the awful stench of Elizabethan Mixture is harshing their mellow.
You light up, passing the match in a circular motion over the surface of the tobacco, and relax. Ah, life is good! There are no puritans or wheat grass freaks in this alley.
Say, did that heap of refuse just move? Is that a filthy bare foot I see?
Oh, well, as long as it stays asleep, no biggie.


Life is considerably more 'educational" than it used to be.
Please understand why I have mixed feelings about that.




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