MELLIPOP AND THE NON-SMOKER

Ok, so where do you fucking self-righteous non-smokers get off lecturing me about my lifestyle choices?

So we had after-work drinks at the pub yesterday. Mistaking the informal gathering for an anti-smoking seminar, one of my colleagues took it upon himself to lecture me about my smoking. Guess what I learned? And I want to share this secret cabal of non-smokers wisdom with my fellow puffing pariahs, in the hope that I can save you from certain death too.

SMOKING IS BAD FOR YOU.

SMOKING CAN KILL YOU.

SMOKING IS HARMFUL TO OTHERS.

Holy shit, it was all I could do to stop myself getting up and hurtling across the room to hurl my packet of cancer-sticks out the window and into the path of oncoming traffic. So I lit up another one instead.

My colleague then had the audacity to end his uninvited lecture by saying, "After all I've just said, how can you possibly light up another cigarette?".

Umm...let's see.

1. I think you're a pompous jerk and I have absolutely no respect for your otherwise enlightening tutorial
2. I quite enjoy smoking
3. I have a half-full glass of beer in my other hand
4. I am in a legally-sanctioned smoking area of the pub - these are as rare as non-lecturing non-smokers these days
5. I am hoping that if I ceaselessly chain-smoke in your presence, you might just drop dead on the spot from an acute case of saturation passive smoking
6. I feel that it is far more polite to utilise a cigarette to sublimate my otherwise impolite desire to spit in your self-righteous face

I then spent the rest of the evening deliberately segregated at the other end of the room, enaging in a mass-suicide pact with my fellow smokers. Which is otherwise known as having a couple of brews with a fag or two thrown into the mix. But without all the lectures. This is known as "Smoker's Apartheid". We simply don't want to mix with the likes of you, who get off on warning us about the certainty of our impending death. Like you fuckers are really gonna live forever.

I mean, I'm not here to defend smoking. Let me just inform my benevolently concerned non-smoking brothers and sisters that we do already know it's not the most healthy of lifestyle choices. What I am here to defend is the right to make that LEGAL lifestyle choice, without being constantly badgered by these self-appointed guardians of public health.

WHERE THE FUCK DO YOU PEOPLE GET OFF ANYWAY?

What the fuck does someone who has never smoked before, know about the reasons why people smoke? And the reasons why we find it difficult to quit smoking, if the notion ever enters our head to stop. Like their few words of smarmy, unsolicited advice - chosen carefully from the wide pool of anti-smoking propaganda - is going to make me stop all of a sudden and say,

"Hey, YOU'RE RIGHT you know! This IS a rather quite silly thing to do. Let's go jump in a dinghy and save the fucking whales or something. Oh, and please know that you have my undying gratitude for SAVING MY LIFE. You're a fucking HERO mate, that's what you are".

And reformed smokers are THE WORST. They are even more self-righteous than non-smokers. They masquerade their desperate desire to stick a bunger in their gob with this lofty air of moral superiority that pisses me the hell off. Go join your fellow non-smokers for a massive moral circle jerk and leave me to die with my ciggies in peace.

Fucking non-smokers. There should be a law against them.