etherfarm

voices from the bubble

Later

20:04 on Sunday, October 19, 2003 • 5 responses

Earlier

My father, a remarkably peaceful man, uttered the following to me this summer:

“When I walk past smokers on the sidewalk, I want to spit on them.”

My dad and I have differing opinions on many issues, but we’re apparently both riding the same vitriol-armed anti-smoking train.

The situation: I live in a duplex condo/townhouse, surrounded on both sides by smoking neighbors. Santa Cruz weather being what it is, I like to have the windows open, not only because it’s nice but also for reasons pertaining to ventilation and temperature regulation.

Since the beginning of the school year, however, I’ve had to keep my windows closed pretty much 24 hours a day. If I open them, my house smells like cigarette and marijuana smoke. It gets into my clothes, my bedsheets, the carpet in my office. It’s a miserable way to exist because I’m allergic to cigarette smoke and I have asthma. I have HEPA air filters in every room running 24/7/365. They help a lot under normal circumstances, but twice I’ve had to break out the nebulizer in the last month.

I’ve talked to one neighbor and he’s been kind enough to walk down to the curb and smoke there. The other neighbor seems to have smoking parties. I overheard much conversation about various illegal substances, not just the kind that are smoked, at his last such party. I have yet to find an opportune time to talk to this neighbor. Poog apparently said something to him, but he hasn’t complied with her requests.

I believe that people should be able to do what they want at their own abode, but I also think certain rights trump others. I think being able to open my windows without feeling like my chest is caving in trumps one’s right to sit on the porch next to mine and light up a cancer stick every thirty minutes. I think that the right of parents in the neighborhood to keep drugs away from their babies and children trumps the rights of one neighborhood resident to summon fifteen twenty-something year-olds with three-word vocabularies onto their porch to pump pot smoke into the air.

As far as I’m concerned, this isn’t a smoking/nonsmoking issue. This is a right to breathe in my own house issue. Want to smoke? Do it inside your house. Landlord doesn’t allow smoking? Find one that does? Can’t find a landlord stupid enough to allow smoking inside their rental property? Oh, I feel so bad for you. Here, have a puff of my inhaler.

There are times when I want to spit on smokers. I want to hear them say, “what the fuck?” and I want to respond, “oh, sorry, does that bother you?”

For the time being, though, I have to content myself with the knowledge that smokers will almost undoubtedly start coughing up nice pieces of their black lungs every morning. And I hate to admit it, especially since I’ve known a generous handful of people who have died of smoking-related complications and because some of my best friends smoke, but the knowledge that a really nasty, really uncomfortable death (a death which, by the way, feels an awful lot like a multiyear version of one of my asthma attacks) awaits most of those who smoke with any regularity really does make me feel better. It really does.