Month: February 2015

This may seem a little out of place in a blog about online sales. It probably IS a little out of place, although trust me, smoke odor is a major issue among some online buyers. They aren’t wrong, because buyers of anything are never wrong.

Please don’t judge or pontificate yet. You will be afforded time for that at the end, unlike the time that smokers are NOT afforded to defend themselves. People who don’t like smoke have made their preference abundantly clear everywhere, and in fact, they’ve won the war. Smoking is uncool and banished everywhere.

I like smoke of all kinds: tobacco smoke, cannabis smoke, wood smoke, incense smoke, smoked cheese, smoked meats, smoked “whatever”. Fresh smoke, that is. I can accept the fact that stale smoke is a little, well, stinky. We make hundreds, maybe thousands of products to address that little problem, some of them toxic themselves.

I like to watch smoke. It has a mystical quality.

A little background-for a couple of decades I was a tobacco wholesaler, third generation in my family. Tobacco wasn’t always from the Devil. It was one of the things that made the discovery of the New World cool, an original industry. When I took up tobacco smoking in the early 70s, it was a rite of passage and a peer pressure thing. Lots of people did it. It was acceptable, although I suppose you could make the argument that it was a manufactured acceptable. You can see that in advertising in old magazines.

I had a retail store (often called a headshop) which offered smoking paraphernalia and incense among other things. I insisted upon burning incense constantly in that store which was USUALLY well-received by the clientele, although once in a while somebody would fall down on the floor when they entered due to some reaction they had to that. When I began to ship sales from that store to remote customers, their reaction to the absorbed incense odor was USUALLY favorable except for one guy in Florida who apparently thought incense was from the Devil. Since he was the only customer among thousands who felt that way, I feel pretty safe dismissing his opinion.

Gradually, tobacco smoking fell out of favor (although millions still do it). There were health issues. Everyone developed allergies to tobacco smoke. It became ok to rudely wave your arms around in the air near smokers and insist that they move away, even outdoors (I speak from experience).

Cannabis smoke sort of went through an opposite evolution. When us future yuppies discovered that one in college and in the military and at parties in the early 70s, it was essential to hide the odor from the git-go, largely because it was illegal behavior. There were no contentions that it was a health issue although it has undergone a reverse evolution and become a PRO-health thing. The usual procedure was to stuff a towel under door between the room and the hallway and/or use some kind of air freshener and/or incense to mask or confuse the issue. While I’m not trying to advocate using the stuff here, its use has become much more open and I have to admit that when I’m at musical events and the lights go down and that “cloud” appears, I personally find it somewhat pleasant in an olfactory way. I can’t say I’ve ever experienced the “second-hand” high some people will refer to.

Wood smoke, like campfire smoke, as far as I know, is ok. I don’t see or hear many diatribes against it.

As tobacco smoking gradually became unacceptable (despite the millions who still do it), zealots (yeah, I know that’s an emotionally charged word) eventually got it banned from everywhere, with the exception of privately owned automobiles, houses, and (usually) outdoors, although I have been in outdoor places where the activity is also losing the battle. I have no question that “they” will not rest until it is ALSO banned in places where they can’t even detect it. It’s just an unforgivable sin. A certain kind of unrighteousness.

Now, if you’re called out for smoking, it seems to be license for the caller-outer (apologies for manufacturing words) to be rude. There’s the ubiquitous arm-waving, and the claims of allergies, and open contempt that isn’t usually tolerated among otherwise polite people.

We recently had a woman in our house shrieking so loudly about the smoke seconds after she walked in that she woke me up from a deep sleep in the room upstairs. That’s in OUR house where it’s begrudgingly ok until somebody can figure out how to stop us. And the offending smoker had only been at it for a few minutes.

Since it hasn’t been quite possible to ban smoking from all of outdoors, that’s where the smokers are. It IS possible to ban it even outdoors on certain properties, and I have been known to hike to the edge of somebody’s property to do it in order to avoid their interference. A couple of those hikes have been rather long, if the property was large. The thing is: as us smokers huddle in our designated area, or maybe better referred to as being outside of the controlled area, we socialize. A typical conversation, at least where I live, starts with “gee, it’s cold out here, isn’t it?” But the conversation usually evolves into whatever fits into the time it takes to “hot-box” a cigarette. That can be about twice as long if you smoke what I do, which are classified as little cigars, which evade the ridiculous taxes heaped upon the traditional brands because they don’t have the chemicals added to the tobacco or the papers which make “regular” cigarettes burn themselves even if no one is smoking them. Those chemicals, by the way, comprise a large part of the odor Nobody Likes. Those taxes are often called “sin tax”, something designed to make logical people stop doing something that someone else doesn’t like.

Those little conversations are usually quite cordial. Little civilities in a world that now doesn’t usually promote exchanging little civilities. That’s because we have an instant commonality-we’re perceived lepers, banished from regular society until we “put that damn thing out”.

We disapprove of all kinds of “sin”. But we usually provide a place for committing the sin (yeah, I’m talking about drinking, but I’m not willing to defend my stance on that here). Not for inhaling smoke. I THINK it’s ok to do it in private smoking clubs, but I’m not sure. We don’t have those where I live. It’s no longer ok to do it in bars, for example, even though a certain percentage of people in there are going to cause all kinds of societal havoc from doing what they’re doing.

Why is that?

Well, besides the argument that I usually encounter-everyone is now allergic or will be killed by the second-hand smoke, it’s the odor. I don’t particularly like many kinds of odors designed to be pleasurable to people (perfumes, colognes), or necessary (packing plants) or odor from lakes filled with run-off fertilizers or from garbage, but they’re not usually illegal. A few corporate farmers are subject to this, and they know what I’m talking about when I refer to illegal odors, but other than those guys, nobody specifies that some odors are not allowed ANYWHERE.

I don’t come into your house and shriek and wave my arms around if I don’t like your pet odor.

Why is it all right to be rude to tobacco smokers? Because they’re stupid and should know better, and all forms of manners are just waived when they’re detected? We shovel millions and millions of dollars into Federal and state treasuries. Why ISN’T there a designated public place for our behavior? We haven’t been eradicated-we’re just hiding. We’re not a small population even though the righteous would like us to be.

OK, I can actually anticipate the answers-I’ve heard them. There’s the burden of caring for us while we kill ourselves, the terrible nuisance of our litter, the fires we start (really?), cleaning up the stuff we discolor, and yada yada ad infinitum. But you don’t catch us trying to obliterate your fast food joints filled with people intent upon killing themselves, or trying to ban THAT litter (although some cities might be trying-I don’t happen to live in such an enlightened place), or objecting to the public expense of trying to put out the fires in the houses people burn down with their space heaters.

Maybe it’s not such a bad world though. Right after we get done agreeing with the other stranger that “yes, it IS cold out here”, a downright pleasurable social exchange generally ensues: “where are you from, what do you do, how about the news today?”: little conversations that used to spontaneously happen everywhere. It’s a social thing that just doesn’t happen anymore because strangers don’t generally stand in the same place longer than a few seconds and because strangers don’t generally even speak unless they bang their shopping carts into one another which will often result in “excuse me”, or at least it does in the rural midwest where I live. We can’t type into our telephones while we’re holding that “cancer stick” (well, I can, but the accomplished lip dangle is also frowned-upon and anyway, I don’t have one of those telephones).

So, come to think of it, I guess I’ll “settle”. I’ll go stand outside until THAT’S illegal and then I’ll stay inside until you put a camera in there and make me stop and I’ll talk to the other guys who are doing the same thing about the persecution which we endure in common.

You may now judge, I’m done. Be as rude as you like, but know that us smokers USUALLY don’t talk like that about you.