No Fumar November 16, 2011

I am not a smoker.  Never have been.  Sure there was a very brief period when I was 13 that I would sneak cigarettes to the basement and try my best to smoke them.  I guess, in my mind, it would automatically turn me into a full-grown adult who fought crime and dated chicks from the late night programs on USA.  But it didn’t take.  The smell and the smoke gave me a headache and a general feeling of nausea.  My father smoked.  A lot.  Every house we lived in reeked of his Kents.  Most of my friends smoked.  But I was the holdout.  Now, I am not one of those dickhole non-smokers who complains about the state of my sweet, sweet lungs and coughs like I’m performing the worst death scene ever whenever people light up around me.  I don’t particularly like it.  I feel like I’m drowning in grossness whenever I walk through it.  But I’m not uppity about it.  Though I will admit, I’ve taken to casually pretending to scratch my nose in order to cover up my nose and mouth around smokers.  That’s kind of dickish, right?  Oh well.

Here is my recent dilemma.  I have a neighbor.  I have rarely had problems with him.  He’s a drunk and occasionally has many, many people over.  But he is mostly quiet.  And that is all I ask.  Quiet.  Most people who have entered my Blogland know by now that I have noise issues.  (Mental note: look into “entered my Blogland” as possible sexual euphemism.)  So, yeah, he’s a quiet.  But he’s a smoker.  A chimney.  He walks in the building with his funk, leaves a trail of it up the stairs, and finally stands outside our apartments where it settles into a gnarley patch of space right in front of my apartment.  Again, I don’t want to be an asshole about it, so here is the passive-aggressive thing I do.  I go in to my apartment.  Then I carefully open my door back up and spray Febreeze all around the area.  Dickish?  Probably.  But it works for me.  Well, I assumed, because he’s a drunk, that he’s an idiot.  He is not.  He figured out my little game real quick.  And he called me out on it.  He started ranting about how I don’t need to be “correcting his behavior.”  I told him I was simply trying to make the area I have to walk through smell better.  I guess it would be like if I saw a chalkboard that had 2 + 2 = 7 written on it and I erased the 7 and put 4.  This guys beef is that he has lived with 7 as the answer all his life and he doesn’t need some twitchy lung breather showing him different. 

So… that’s a thing I have to deal with now.