Bemoaning the Big Bans

She stood outside the bar, talking with a friend. I sat in my car, counting down the minutes until I needed to head across the street for a certain freelance interview.

After a moment’s passing, she reached in her bag and withdrew a cigarette. My pulse quickened. I am a capnolagniac, as those who’ve suffered through my blogs know quite well. I love to see a woman enjoy a cigarette.

Suddenly, I didn’t care anymore what time it was. I put away my copy of Ovid, in which a thirty page introduction by some smarty professor was driving me crazy, since I speak about as much Latin as your average Sherpa and the dude sprinkled it joyfully and liberally amongst his already over-my-head prosery.

A click of her lighter and she had her cigarette a-burning. Then she exhaled a great stream of smoke so thick and creamy that I could see it all the way across the parking lot where I was.

In a heartbeat, the breeze battered and blew it away.

Such a sight is so rare these days, and viciously maligned when it does occur. An inhale that intense, to launch such a celestial stream of smoke, had to deliver a mighty jolt of pleasure. And it had to be summoned by a woman who did more than dabble in the fine art of fumery.

In the days before The Big Bans, she might have been allowed to smoke inside, not exiled to a seedy parking lot to satisfy her need. Thank heavens she had that burly-looking friend with her.

Some guys, seated beside her in that bar in those more relaxed days, would have moved away in an angry huff if those sweet lips had turned his way and bathed him in such a beautiful exhalation.

Needless profanity might have been uttered. Foolish hands would have waved it away.

Chances are, that woman might go a lifetime without ever meeting the sort of fellow who, greeted with such a misty salutation, would find his heart thumping; his respiration quickening in hopes of capturing said smoky greeting; his soul melting; and his voice, if he dared utter a word, squeaking like a scrawny teen suddenly French-kissed by the school Homecoming Queen as she passed him in the hallway.
But we do exist. Ladies, we do exist. And we’d hitchhike across the world in the hellstorm of Armageddon and ride to Kandahar in a dune buggy with three functioning wheels and a broken clutch, driven by a terrorist with a blood alcohol level five times the legal limit, and punch out Bin Laden himself if he had the world’s last cigarette hidden in his cave and you were craving it.