There’s just something that endlessly fascinates me about smokers. Given the knowledge and information everyone has these days about smoking and what it does to you, there are people who defiantly light up as if they still think it’s cool. Maybe at one time, during the 40s and 5 s, it was considered cool, but these days, in my opinion, it just makes you look like an idiot.

There is nothing more discouraging than seeing a truly beautiful woman standing on a corner and then noticing she has a cigarette clutched in her fingers. Does anyone actually think cigarettes are sexy? There must be, as there are porn websites that feature the various “actresses” smoking. For me, there is nothing less attractive than an ash-covered burning thing that smells hideous hanging from a set of beautiful lips.

I wrote once about how I had never smoked, never been drop-dead drunk and never gotten high. I received an e-mail from some woman who said I had never lived. She also then related how in her life she had lost people close to her and that they had died young. To her this meant that life was short, so if you wanted to get drunk you should get drunk and if you wanted to smoke you should smoke and if you wanted to do drugs you should.

To me, this was incorrect thinking. If you have family members who have died young, I think you are just burying your pain by getting lost in various substances. I, personally, would do everything extra cautiously so that I did NOT die young and thus bring that pain to the people who loved me.

I have never believed people who say things like, “well, at least he (or she) died doing what he (or she) loved to do.” Again, this seems silly. By all accounts James Dean loved driving cars really, really fast and, ultimately, this is what killed him. Still, I am willing to bet that there is not a member of his family or friend of his who wouldn’t trade all of the days since he died to have him alive and well and to be able to talk to the guy. I bet if offered very little comfort to anyone that he died doing what he loved.

To me, smoking is just one of the most ultimately selfish things you can do. I can sort of understand if you are from some other country. If you look, for example, at a number of Asian countries, it seems like everyone there is smoking. I had a roommate from college who was from Korea and I swear he smoked while he slept and while he was in the shower. But I don’t think the US Surgeon General makes his warnings across the pond in those various countries. In theory, they may not know exactly what happens from the excesses of smoking.

Yet, here they are, still smoking even in this country. Despite their teeth and fingers turning yellow and the extra wrinkles that it causes around heir mouth, they continue to light up again and again. And nothing stops these people, if you haven’t noticed. Not laws and not weather. If it is freezing to the point that birds are frozen in mid-air, there are still people out smoking.

In Chicago they have passed so many laws against smoking it’s a wonder it isn’t an outright crime. You can’t smoke in the bars anymore around here and it’s wonderful. There’s nothing better than coming home from an evening out without smelling like a cigarette. And now the smokers have to stand a certain distance away from the doorway and, yet, they still smoke.

I work near a Laundromat. I walk past that place on most mornings to stop at the 7-Eleven and buy an iced tea or a water. There is a woman there who has to be in her 70s, maybe late 60s, at least once a week and she sits outside, the prescribed distance away from the door and reads a book and smokes. At some point, I guess, you just reach a certain age where it doesn’t matter anymore.

I have never found the appeal in smoking. To me, it never looked cool. It never smelled good. Those burning embers never looked like something I envied. The stench on the clothing and the bad-breath was never sexy. The fact that my dad had heart-attacks and hacking coughs was never fun. I had other relatives who carried around oxygen tanks. Nothing about that ever looked cool or sexy or interesting to me. THAT was not living to the fullest. That was deliberately doing something to shorten your life.

These days, because of all of the laws being passed smokers try to portray themselves as some kind of minority or something. I have a hard time feeling sorry for them. Minorities are born the way they are and they really can’t do much to change themselves. No one comes out of the womb with a cigarette in their mouth.

Still, they are a hearty bunch. If the very last place they were allowed to smoke was the moon then they would be building their own rockets in the back yard and gathered in groups within the Sea of Tranquility. You’d be able to train your telescopes up there and see the giant mound of cigarette butts cluttering up the moonscape and the cigarette burns on the American flag still sitting up there.

Maybe it’s the smoke. Maybe it does something to harden them. It makes the skin tough and leathery, that’s for sure, so maybe it does something to them internally besides create brown spots on their lungs and tumors in their throat. At some point, the cost of the cigarettes and the demands that they stand on the other side of town to smoke would have to make people decide that quitting is easier. Yet, they never do.

There may never be any reason for tobacco people to stop making the cigarettes. There may never be a solution. The only real solution may be for every smoker to put down the butt and decide, enough is enough.

Bryan Alaspa is a featured writer for Xomba.com. Read the rest of his work here .