Secondhand Smoke
By David Snyder
In our current climate of vegan this, USDA-Organic that, it’s no wonder cheeseburgers, beer, and cigarettes aren’t exactly en vogue. I’d never advocate a red meat and Camels diet. I enjoy living on Earth, and I plan on keeping at it for a long while. I have my outrageously expensive organic cereals with unsweetened almond milk every morning, spinach in my cheese-less tacos every Monday night. The pains I suffer at the dinner table when all the others order cheese with a side of cheese on a bun of cheese, and I order the equivalent of a rabbit’s appetiser, are indeed real. God only knows we Americans could stand to drop a few pounds; we aren’t exactly the city upon a hill of health. However, despite the present obesity troubles and measurable bona fides of a Mediterranean diet, I’m not quite convinced the essence of cheeseburgers, beer, and cigarettes has found its rival quite yet.
Winter days walking down Broadway, the smells are altogether negligible. The mind, made narrower and angrier by false predictions of coming warmth and a morning’s shovelling, focuses not on the surroundings and the aromas, but on the upturned collars and cursed winds. Winter probably has a smell, but I don’t know it. I spend my winters weeping to myself about the lost greenness of the grass and the lessened tally of dogs that crowd the sidewalks. But spring, with its delusions of permanent youth and genuine renewal, forces the huddled masses out of their hibernating shelters anew, only with a newly acquired fifteen pounds and a ghostly hue, at least that’s been my experience. The warming weather and flood of people along the sidewalks fill the air with a smog of nicotine, tar, red meat, and newly made plans with long unseen pals. I walk from my house down the street to the library, not avoiding clouds of smoke but walking directly through them. I’m hardly a masochist, it’s just that nothing conjures up memories of past summers spent at the Track like a healthy dose of second-hand smoke. Plus, I’m a writer, I write things, and that means I’m supposed to appear a troubled soul now and then. The issue is that I’m not. So the only way I can keep up this ruse is to have just faintest scent of smoke upon my jacket. I’d hate to abandon my well-known reputation as a regular rebel without a cause.
I can hardly fathom the masturbatory state of a dog during these warm days, as they exit their homes now lined during the winter with fur, fur, and fur, and into the park with its ducks, disgustingly in love couples, old people with a smell only acquired by having seen things, oily teenagers elated at the tossing about of a plastic disk, and the cigars of big-bellied Italian men.
Still, I’ll order veggie burgers, sweet potatoes, and water. I’ll skip the pizza and the candy at the movies and the sugar in my coffee. I’ll do a crunch before bed and push up before I look in the mirror. (Though the season hardly matters; I am a plank of skin: void of muscle and fat.) I’ll certainly not be buying a pack of Marlboro’s next time I pump my gas. I can hardly afford the gas, let alone the cancer. But I offer my thanks to all those poisoning themselves with tar and glass and addictive chemicals, eating dubiously raised cows and piglets and hens, and setting a terrible example for our youth: you make the warm day’s scent all the fiendishly sweeter.
