Warning: The American Jerk has determined that messing with smokers may be hazardous to your health, as many of us are armed. And drunk. Very, very drunk.

As the United States thunders into the twenty-first century, we are plagued with a schism between our citizens that has, over the decades, led to hatred, rioting and bloodshed. The 1990’s alone have brought us the Rodney King beating and subsequent rioting in Los Angeles, the O.J. Simpson murders and acquittal, KKK draggings and Gay Panic defenses. However, in the face of such overwhelming division between our citizens, I’m proud to report to the world that we have put aside our petty differences of race, creed and sexual preferences, and have come together as one to fuck with smokers.

I’m a reasonably outstanding citizen. I have a job and I pay my taxes. Granted, I like to sit in bars and drink until I become verbally abusive, but at least I’m contributing to the economy and tipping well. I’m a productive member of society, Goddammit. Yet total strangers feel justified coming up to me in the street bitching and screeching that my cigarette smoke is killing them. We smokers don’t walk up to you and complain that the eating you must do to maintain your ass density is contributing to starvation in Ethiopia, do we?

For the record: no one smokes to kill other people. We don’t want to hurt you, okay? But if you keep fucking with us, we’ll be on rooftops with rifles and telescopic sights punching the tickets of every self-righteous non-smoking bastard we see. We’d just beat the shit out of you, but we’re too winded.

I work in an office building in downtown Boston across the street from a homeless shelter. My building has a policy that you can’t smoke within fifty feet of the entrance. So while the smokers are huddled in front of the condemned garage across the street, the entrances of my building are blocked by scores of stumbling, muttering derelicts, who jabber to invisible friends and howl about how they would still be president of the World Bank if it weren’t for the Goddamned FBI radio waves. I don’t care how health-conscious you are, your priorities are seriously fucked up if you find cigarette smoke more offensive than insane shrieking and the smell of fresh piss.

I guarantee you that they’ll be making us wear yellow felt camels pinned to our chest next so we can be quickly identified, taken off the street and put onto freight cars.

Smokers lost the restaurants here in Boston this year. You can’t smoke a cigarette in a Boston restaurant except in the bar section, and even then the bar must be physically separated by walls from the main dining area. I guarantee you that they’ll be making us wear yellow felt camels pinned to our chest next so we can be quickly identified, taken off the street and put onto freight cars.

Restaurant patrons all across America have conveniently forgotten that they haven’t designed a restaurant yet that doesn’t have massive cockroach infestations despite the deadly insecticide they’ve forgotten to wash off the vegetables. The waitresses are spitting in the rude customers’ food and the cooks are jerking off in the rude waitresses’ food. I’m surprised these retards don’t take up smoking to kill the haunting aftertaste of vermin and sperm.

In Brookline, a wealthy suburb of Boston, you can’t smoke in bars. Apparently Brookline has more health-concerned alcoholics than the rest of the world. God knows, before I started smoking, there was nothing I hated more when I woke up the morning after, on the bathroom floor wedged between the toilet and the baseboard heater in a puddle of my own vomit, than having that cigarette smell in my clothes . If I didn’t smoke, I personally would be outraged if my lungs went tits-up before my liver and kidneys did, reducing the time in my life I could spend drunk.

Worst of all, 1999 was the year you non-smoking fuckers decided to teach the tobacco companies a lesson by suing them. A bunch of state governments hired a bunch of private lawyers and sued the cigarette companies, saying they were striking a blow for public health with the subsequent multi-billion dollar settlement. What no one mentioned is that those lawyers took about half of the settlement as attorneys’ fees, and the cigarette companies just made up for the loss by jacking their cigarette prices by about one hundred percent. So in short, a bunch of lawyers are getting paid billions of dollars by us, the smokers, who they fucked over. I would quit smoking tomorrow if I could get the government to make one of these shysters spend twenty minutes alone in a room with me, a Black and Decker cordless power drill and a bottle of Drano, and then pay me fifty grand for it.

So as we triumphantly enter the twenty-first century, I am proud to say that the nation is finally and for the first time united in their hatred of me. Hopefully this great nation will continue it’s important work eradicating the hated cigarette during the next century, so our great-grandchildren will all have clear, pink lungs with which to shout racial epithets at each other.