Sometimes a Cigar is Just a Cigar

I'm so hot that I'm smokin'!

I really abhor smoking. There's nothing worse to me than a poorly ventilated bar with a large group of assholes filling the place with billows of smoke. I always leave the place smelling like an ashtray. I've gone into many a bar freezing my ass off simply because I don't want to have to wash my coat every time I want a drink. Naturally, the recent Pennsylvania law that curtails smoking in most bars and restaurants helped quite a bit, but establishments that make more than 80% of their profits from alcohol sales are exempt from the state-wide smoking ban. This is a ridiculous law that hurts everyone. Now the bars that permit smoking attract all the most obsessive chain smokers, and the air in these places has become almost oppressive. If they'd simply make the ban universal, like they did in many other states, the smokers will eventually come back. Nobody wants to sit at home drinking alone... and if they do, they're probably not the most fun people to have in a bar.

Needless to say, I loathe cigarettes. There's no greater turn-off to me than if a woman smokes. It's a repulsive habit, and many many people agree with me. Nevertheless, there seems to be a bit more permissiveness and acceptance for cigars. There are people who would never touch a cigarette who jump at the chance to wrap their lips around a big brown stogie.

None of my friends in Kittanning smoke, but at Joe's wedding, we celebrated the new marriage by drinking beer and smoking cigars while our wedding party pictures were taken... at the cemetary. Apparently, someone really wanted to make sure that the whole "til death do us part" thing was thoroughly emphasized. I think the cigar has a certain history attached to it that gives it more nobility and class than it probably deserves. A few of my friends claim that they have a rich and delicious flavor, but I really don't get it. I've smoked precisely three cigars in my lifetime (all in the past year incidentally), and I really don't like them that much. They taste like shit, but I do like the way I look with one. I feel like Groucho Marx... if he were six and a half feet tall and got rid of his fake mustache and eyebrows.

Let me slip out of these wet things and into a dry martini.

Remarkably, these pictures of me with the cigar are some of the best pictures of me that I've ever seen. I guess there's something about holding a large brown phallus in my hand that just brings a genuine smile to my face. Though my reaction wasn't nearly as extraordinary my friend Kevin's declaration upon lighting up his first cigar at Joe's bachelor party, "This may be the greatest thing I've ever had!!! Where have these BEEN all my life?" He declared this with renewed vigor about once every fifteen minutes. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, but for some people, it may be something else entirely:

They may have misspelled Freud, but you get the idea.

So once again, it's proven that I can't participate in any traditionally masculine activity without inserting subtle homoerotic overtones into the scenario.

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9 out of 10 manly men only suck on the largest, plumpest, and firmest stogies that money can buy.