Smoking. I set my cut-off date to stop smoking cigarettes at June 26th, 2008, and so far I’ve kept to my goal. Despite my girlfriend, band mates and friends who still smoke, I’ve held strong, never taking one single drag since I quit. But damn me, I still really want a cigarette, especially after a bad gig, rehearsal or one too many adult beverages. I sympathize with Bill Hicks entirely when he said:

It is hard to quit smoking. Every one of them looks real good to me right about now. Every cigarette looks like it was made by God, rolled by Jesus and moistened shut with Claudia Schiffer’s pussy.

Schiffer’s pussy may be an outdated reference, but I understand what Hicks was getting at. This morning, after another night of successfully fighting the smoking urge, I looked up “stress” and “smoking” on Google News, and found two articles that  kinda lifted my spirits: Obama still smokes (which is old news, but still uplifting), and  an article about a pedophile killer who paused mid-beating to smoke a cigarette.

Obama Smoking in the Examiner:

“Barack really tried to quit,” said Assistant Press Secretary Simon Theodore. “But the pressure of the campaign has raised his stress levels to the point where he really needs to take a drag now and then. So we made the decision to come clean, and hope the voters will appreciate his honesty.”

Pedophile killer from Sunday Morning Herald:

Payne had convictions for sex offences and, on the night of the attack, Schaefer had gone to his house “fired up” by a discussion with some friends about pedophiles.

Justice Sulan said Schaefer first attacked his victim in his home and then again in park nearby. A post-mortem examination revealed a crushed skull, fractured bones in Payne’s face and multiple stab wounds.

There were also bruises and abrasions on his neck consistent with him being strangled.

“The deceased received a severe beating,” Justice Sulan said.

In sentencing submissions earlier this year prosecutor Jane Powell said Schaefer had never expressed any remorse about killing the man he described to police as “a sack of shit”.

She said Schaefer had paused to have a cigarette during his prolonged attack on Payne.

However, Justice Sulan said today he was satisfied there were special circumstances to allow him to set a shorter than usual minimum jail term, taking into account Schaefer’s troubled life and early guilty plea.

Imagine what Schaefer could have done to the pedophile if he had just recently quit smoking…

So there’s this bum hangout right around the corner from the Synthesis office. It’s like this shelter for young adults who want to sit around all day smoking cigarettes and hanging on the couch in the air conditioning with their pit bull mix instead of, well, anything else. Today on my way to get coffee, Dain and I walked by this young derelict who asks, almost as an afterthought, if he could bum a cigarette. It might have been a cold move, but this was my response:

I think singing one bar of the The Silhouettes’ “Get a Job” got my point across.

Being a dick is awesome.