Smoking is a fairly unpleasant habit. For those who do not engage in it, anyway. Even for those of us who are addicted to the magical little coffin nails some of the less delightful aspects of the practice can become annoying. Even a consummate smoker doesn’t like second-hand smoke blown in his face. But that’s not what I wish to speak about today. No, I think the most disgusting part of smoking is the small circle of individuals who seem to believe they have to discharge saliva while exhaling blue smoke. “Chewing” is decidedly grosser than smoking in my opinion, but these wonderful zeros have apparently decided to combine the worst of both habits and squirt a huge dollop of spit out of their mouths after every drag. I can only assume it’s because smoking does dry out the mouth, and with a little working of the tongue you can encourage the salivary gland to aid the situation, so perhaps they have yet to hit the correct ratio and feel instead of swallowing the excess like, I dunno, a human fucking being, they should just share their bodily fluids for the rest of us to trod in. It’s not phlegm, mind you, just spit, but still…Smokers without even a modicum of smoking etiquette make my asshole twitch for the same reason normal black people wince whenever hearing a story on the news about some African American retard shooting up a movie screen; it gives the rest of us a bad name. My upstairs neighbor is such an oaf when it comes to smoking. He’s either on the third or forth floor (we reside on the bottom) and I suppose I could figure it out if I took the time to calculate the lag time between hearing him make a “P-thoo!” noise and when his expectorant care package makes a huge, wet splat on the concrete directly in front of my porch. Now I am not a squeamish fellow, but the worst part about this whole thing is that we have a sunken porch, and so the sidewalk is chest-high and I just know I’m getting foreign, microscopic neighbor-spit containing God-knows-what horrific diseases all over me whenever our trips to smoke happen to coincide. If his requirements for choosing a sexual partner are anything like his smoking habits Upstairs Spitter probably has enough STDs swimming in his human bacterial frappe to bring down an occupying army.
Worse still, he’s one of these adolescent morons who has yet to grasp the idea of an ashtray, and just casually pitches his cigarette butt off the balcony as if throwing fish to hungry seals. A wonderful shower of sparks ensues and I’m just waiting for the day when I have to show my landlord the ashtray I keep on my porch to prove I smoke white-filtered cancer sticks instead of his orange-filtered ones. Upstairs Spitter’s friends seem of a similar caliber, as a few weekends ago I came out one Sunday morning to find the area in front of my porch resembling the floor of a saloon shortly after closing time. There was even a half-smoked cigar down there, for shit’s sake! In the words of Jerry Seinfeld, “we’re trying to have a society, here…”Leaving aside how rude and just stupid this behavior, there’s the fact that somebody has to pick this crap up, but what the hell would Upstairs Spitter care about some lowly maintenance worker? Not to even mention the fact that some of these stray butts are probably making their way into the surrounding soil of the apartment complex, carefully not biodegrading for 10-12 years. Yet another incentive for smoking non-filters; they only take upwards of 3-5 months.
Could all of this be solved by a short trip up the stairs to face him man-to-man and ask, very politely, if he could please not treat the sidewalk like his personal garbage can? Perhaps. But more likely it would just cause some worse manner of passive-aggressive hell to be visited upon our doorstep. Plus, I don’t talk to people. Maybe I’ll just pee on his doorknob. That would make me feel a lot better.
Random Thought for the Day:It’s very difficult to be a mean drunk when sipping anything out of a coconut. Doubly so if it also has one of those little paper umbrellas and a pineapple slice.
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