City Made of Smoke

Calgary has its problems. When you live there, it can be easy to point out the areas of improvement. But once you leave, chances are where you end up will make you forget all the things you once considered flaws. It will also make you appreciate what you did have.

Case in point: Nicotine addiction. People smoke cigarettes. They have for centuries and will continue to do so until the human race develops a universal common sense...or more likely renders itself extinct. Like taxes, it's inevitable. But I didn't realise that the frequency of indulgance and percentage of population that sucks at the teet of cancer itself would vary so dramatically.

You see, in Calgary, smoking is something of a vice of the past. Many people kicked the habit or never started in the first place. Smoker is a dirty word and we kept their kind restricted to small outdoor enclosures to be observed and tested. There is a culture of health in cowtown that supersedes the need to suck poison into your lungs, and so smokers have to engage in their life-shortening pastime in prohibition-level secret. There are a few rebels that will light up outside a mall door or in the washroom, but for the most part, smokers keep to themselves and in exchange we don't beat them to death with clubs constructed of cigar rings and stale filters. It. Is. Great!

But London. Oh my god. What foul, twisted hole this is! Gone were the neither seen nor heard minority of tar-chompping Neanderthals that kept to the shadows like mice during panther season. Instead, I stepped forth onto filthy streets only to be met by a slough of nightmarish, smouldering creatures, each with a curious white coloured extra digit on one hand that they flick and  watch as it disintegrates away to ashes.

They ALL smoke here! I'm sure there's a few people who don't touch cigarettes and are thus hidden away in fear of being cast out for differing views. But easily over half the population of this toilet of a town puffs back a pack a day.  Maybe I should be looking at the positives. Smoking brings people together. It's how coworkers connect. It's how shop workers and the homeless can get along after the shoplifting fiasco concludes. It's how babies wean around this dump! However, there isn't an actual good reason to smoke, so I digress. Instead, I literally have to hold my breath for long stretches of walking downtown because the building fronts are lined with puffing morons. In my ideal world, they'd be lined up for a firing squad, but in the real world they're simply protecting their "right" to inflict health problems on anyone who steps outside. 

I think this is one of the biggest reasons I loathe London Ontario and am homesick and missing Calgary. It is a picture-perfect depiction of how poor this city is compared to home. But fear not...this does not mark the end of my rants, for it is only one of MANY reasons that make London Ontario the armpit of Ontario. Stay tuned!