Fire and Smoke

Picture Credit.

At a stop light recently I watched as yet another smoker took a final drag and flicked her butt onto the pavement. Judging that there was enough time, I jumped out of the Town Car, picked up the butt and offered it to its owner.

I believe this is yours?

Not so long ago, of course, cars were equipped with ash-trays and cigarette lighters. People used these conveniences for their designed purpose. At an appropriate time and place, the accumulated detritus created by this foul habit most likely ended up in a trash container somewhere, maybe at a gas station. In other words, smokers didn't consider the world one vast ash heap.

Modern manners define the kind of behaviour we non-smokers always admired: Values like not smoking indoors, not smoking while we're eating and not smoking in the car. Unfortunately, even SMOKERS have adopted these precepts, meaning that they've gone rogue, or, in the case of the car, gone on the road.

They're everywhere when you begin to look. Their car window is an eighth of the way down. With each exhalation, the owner aims her breath at the gap, polluting the universe outside instead of the universe inside their car. Every so often the lit coffin nail is held out the window, the ash flicked everywhere, again, but inside the car. And then, at the end of the nicotine hit, the butt is deposited insouciantly everywhere OTHER than the puffer's immediate environs.

It's the same act as the dog owner who refuses to collect her pooch's rancid coils. THEIR world is pristine; OUR world is a toilet.

So I offered the butt-hole litterer her butt back without success. Such language from such a pretty girl. But I think I made my point, if only for this sorry tale.