I wish everyone had the same level of solidarity that smokers do

I liked to imagine “Me and Michael” by MGMT playing over that last little panel in the bottom right.

Ah, smokers. What can you say about ‘em? On the one hand, they’ve been duped by one of the most vile and evil marketing campaigns in human history (through no fault of their own, of course) but on the other, I’ve never seen an addict so utterly generous with their choice of poison. I’ve never once seen someone told no after asking to bum a cig. The word ‘bum’ itself is indicative: in the smoker community, the act of asking for something for free— absolutely nothing expected in return— is so commonplace it has its own word! How many other subcultures can boast this? In what other situation is this sort of behavior totally normalized? Compare that to number of times people asking for money get casually turned down by people who for sure have cash on them— the difference is staggering.

Not to mention the social component— someone bums a cig off of you? That’s your new best friend for the next 15 minutes. The cigarette is like a portable little sociality machine, with the smoke break functioning as both an escape from a social situation (gotta step outta this party for a second…) and an escape to a social situation (ah, some fellow smokers out here. Don’t really know ‘em, but I got a cig, they got a cig— nothing else to do but chat!) Honestly, in a society as socially atomized as ours has become, it’s kind of feels like cheat code. ‘Course, there are always consequences for cheating…

Anywho, all this comes from my perspective as a lifelong nonsmoker. Just a quaint societal observation, I suppose; the kind of thing you might see, in a much less funny format, in a New Yorker Cartoon. I’m holding a mirror up to society’s face, except it’s one of those ornate little makeup mirrors. No biggie!

Lot of information coming at you on these pages, so I used color differential to make the important bits pop. Kinda makes it seem like things are happening at night, which wasn’t my intention. Ah well.