Smoking is actually good

Going through the internet you’ll be ever so fortunate to find anybody saying anything with the slightest hint of positivism about smoking and smokers. Really, Google ‘smoking’ and click ‘search’, in about three seconds- depending on how fast your internet connection is, you’d be overwhelmed by results of web pages shouting out and propagating the dangers of smoking, the vileness of smokers, how smoking can kill you and your family, how smoking brings about cancer, how your unborn child we turn out disfigured, on and on. Not a single hint of virtue in smoking, which is all as far as I can tell, true. And I tend to agree with the masses.

It is at this point I recollected what was said by Dato’ Fadzillah Kamsah on Sinar Pagi a few months back. According to him, for every bad thing or negative comment you make against a person you should at least shower him with ten good praises. This is to help his self esteem. If this is even half true, than the self esteem of a smoker I reckon is about the height of an ant. So to be fair to smokers, I’ve made it a mission to find good things to say about smoking but my effort has been in vein thus far, until… this morning. I’ve not found ten but just one, but at least there’s progress. One will just have to do for the moment.

Like most people, I too have bowel issues right after breakfast and that makes the lavatory a popular dwelling site. Unlike other mornings however, this morning half the the men in my office and the office next door decided to go all at once.  Since the cleaning lady could not get herself to wash the lavatory until after lunch- for whatever god forsaken reason, you could imagine the foul reek racing through my nostrils the moment I got within a hundred yards of the toilet. And as expected, the cubicles are jam packed save for the last one right at the end to which I had raced to get in.

As expected also, I had to endear the ghastly scent of all things horrid coupled with the glorious pitches and sounds of indecency. A minute truly felt like an eternity, two minutes smells like death. I was on the verge of suffocating, as suffocated as I would watching Buletin Utama propagating the “heroism” of Ministers in the Kedah flood- the difference being that in the latter I could change to channel 613 even and the suffocation ended.

I was on to my last breath of air when suddenly a revelation. A joyous ambience, a change of air as fresh as daisies in the morning; it was like waking up on a bed of rose petals in Fraser’s Hill; even better, it was like waking up to breakfast in bed.  It was simply heavenly and it was the smell of cigarette smoke. God bless the smoker! The fact that I was more likely to die of cancerous death than the smoker himself did not bother me at all. I was liberated by the smell of cigarette smoke. May you have a long and prosperous life Mr. smoker!

So there you have it! And to sum things up, this is the one good thing I’d say about smoking and smokers, ‘smokers, your cigarette smoke smells better than shit’, and that is saying a lot.