Two ways in which cigarettes are wonderful

1. Without them, I would have no identity:

Outside these walls, in the open air, many of you may feel certain sense of exposure. The best answer to that is pipes, cigars, and cigarettes which leave a familiar mark upon the void. The wearing of a hat is also helpful: I do not have to remind you of the late Dr Black Planorbis's superb paper on the relation between modern hatlessness and loss of identity. Nigel Dennis, Cards of Identity

2. I Blame the Patriarchy and I finally have something to agree about:

[Here she describes a hellish day.—CSB]

. . . On the way home, with no internal regulating mechanism to prevent it, an imp of the perverse caused my car to turn in at the Bluebonnet quick shop, where I grabbed a roadie* from the handy ice bin and heard myself utter the most beautiful words in the English language: “pack of Marlboro reds, and make it snappy.”

Four-and-a-half packs later, it is Tuesday . . .

Later in the post, she and I agree again! Well, almost:

See, I was going to tie this all together with a big tirade on the bogus notion of health as a moral issue — how people are always yelling at you to quit smoking or quit eating or quit procrastinating when you should be packing or quit doing anything the doing of which is considered a moral failure, ostensibly out of their concern for your health, but in reality because “health,” in accordance with some convoluted Christian doctrine embedded in the cultural subconscious, has become a kind of yardstick by which conformity within the social order is measured, and how shaming people who are insufficiently obsessed with their cholesterol puts these concern trolls in a morally superior position and creates an underclass of “unhealthies” who have brought it on themselves through their blatant ingestion of Cheetos — but I’m too exhausted from all the delicious smoking.

I would put together an Amen corner for this paragraph if only IBTP struck the word "Christian." My impression, as I have said before, is that secular liberals are to blame for the cult of health. They're the ones who don't feel confident getting worked up about any moral conviction more controversial than not dying. (They'd reach for something more controversial than health, but that'd be hard and we might disagree with each other.) Otherwise I'm on board, esp. with the phrases (as deployed) "concern trolls," "morally superior," and "conformity within the social order." IBTP's smokes against conformity, I against modernity. Still, more that unites us...