"Where There's Smoke..."

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I have now seen it all. As I was flipping through the pages of this month's "Details" magazine, I saw the ad. Can we all agree that the "100% natural" trend has gone a little too far?...

You can now buy "natural" Kellogg's cereals and "natural" Ragu pasta sauce (I don't even want to know what's in it). There are now even "natural" potato chips. Where do they grow those, exactly? I don't recall ever driving through the country and staring in awe at the massive potato chip fields.

Anyway, there within the pages of the magazine is the ad. "Do you know what you're smoking?", it begins. Did you know that most cigarettes are full of artificial by-products? Well, now there is an answer. Yes, you too can smoke "Natural Spirit" cigarettes...the "all natural" cigarette. Are they serious??? The ad should just read,

"This cigarette will kill you MUCH more slowly."

We were watching a movie together last week and my two-year-old asked, "What's that in her mouth?"

It occurred to my wife and me that she had, fortunately, never SEEN someone smoke. We actually had difficulty explaining this. I mean, really, who was the first guy (or girl) that thought of this?

Who actually looked at some tobacco and said, "I know...let's roll it up in some paper, light it on fire, then stick it in our MOUTHS and INHALE it!"??

Thankfully, smoking has been banned in most indoor places...at least here in Maryland. Of course, this just means that most people congregate outside the entrances and exits and smoke there.

I really enjoy going to the mall and pushing Sophia up the stroller entrance only to have to walk through the mushroom cloud of cigarette smoke from the 14-year-old Britney Spears Wanna-Be's who have somehow managed to get their hands on a pack of smokes.

I've trained my daughter to hold her breath as we approach the door. I've even been known to say something to the smokers congregating by the stroller entrance from time to time. I mean, if you want to fill kids' lungs with smoke, do it to your own and not to mine.

I was watching the news a few weeks ago and there was a clip of this woman fleeing from a burning house. She was smoking a cigarette. I felt like saying, "What's your hurry?". The fire would have only accelerated the process a few years and saved her from years of suffering from lung cancer, emphysema, etc. If I had to choose between slow torture and a bullet to the head, I'd choose a bullet to the head any day.

Well, maybe she was smoking one of those "all natural" cigarettes. At least then she might make it another 20 or 30 years.