Backwash
Threads
Off the rack and on the town.
Club EightOneFive in Lawrence, 10:50 p.m. Thursday
Cigarette cherries blink like fireflies throughout the iron-gated beer garden. Since Lawrence banned smoking in bars, patrons have had to take their brands outside. In our continuing effort to understand why people do what they do, the Pitch‘s fashion expert, a straight guy named Bud, wonders whether the criminalization of a fashion accessory has made it cooler or less cool. It’s like the kid who can’t hang out after his mom calls him, Bud theorizes. “He’s gotta go home when the streetlights go on. The smoker’s gotta leave the table when his cig is lit.”
Bud spots three guys in a huddle. Each represents a smoking-related subgroup: the smoker, the nonsmoker and the smoker in denial. Matt chains a pack a night when he’s drinking. Ben doesn’t smoke. And Scott, who doesn’t usually smoke but bums from Matt, says he just finished a term paper, so he has his own pack. All are KU law students and proceed to demonstrate their rhetorical cleverness.
“Smoking is out only in the sense that you are outside,” one says.
Matt notes the samba music coming from nearby speakers. “I listen to Latin music just so I can smoke a cigarette,” he says.
“Smoking will finally come into its own couture when it’s offered in its own colors and patterns,” Scott adds. “When that happens, you can’t smoke [white cigarettes] after Labor Day.”
All agree that soft packs are cooler because you can just flick your wrist to shake a cigarette out of the pack. That trick has backfired for Matt, though: Once he shook his pack too hard in front of a woman, and his offering wound up on the ground. To demonstrate another trick, Matt tries to blow smoke through his nose, but nothing happens. Ben puts a lit cigarette backward in his mouth and blows smoke back through the filter.
The size and strength of a cigarette still matter. Both Matt and Scott self-consciously admit to smoking Marlboro Ultra Lights. It’s the practical decision if someone is smoking nonstop. Matt says that “classy” skinny chicks seem to smoke longer, pole-looking cigarettes, like 100s.
“I’m more concerned with their rack than if they are a smoker,” Ben says. “If I’m lucky enough to make out with someone, I don’t care if they are a smoker.”
“I don’t ask if they are a smoker, only if they are smoking,” Matt echoes.
They recount one friend’s rule of thumb for getting serious with a woman: “You want your lunchmeat smoking, not your women. You’ll eat smoking lunchmeat; you won’t eat a woman who smokes.”
Matt says that cigarettes now are an even greater social enabler: The ban just corrals potential targets. These guys came outside after hearing a woman at the bar say she was going to get her smoke on. “Big tits, hot body, and she smokes,” Matt says. “That’s the reason to be outside.”
Net Prophet
Notes from KC’s blogosphere.
Last night, what dreams! J and I thought I might be pregnant, and we went to Kmart — the old one that my mom worked at for a short spell in the ’70’s when it was new. We hunted around for the right test, trying to determine the difference between the $14.95 test and the $19.99 test. Finally we chose one and went to the middle of the store where the dressing rooms were. My parents were there waiting on the sitting bench outside the crappy little makeshift rooms. My dad was not very happy with J. My mom, not so happy with me. And my dad said something about “Better marry her,” and my mom sort of mumbled agreement as I tried to ignore them. So I pee in this thing, and it’s a big blue plastic box, shaped just like our scanner/printer in waking life. I call J over. We can’t figure out the results so we take it back to the pharmacy. The pharmacist is this creepy middle-aged guy who looks like Ron Silver with frizzy hair. He puts on his glasses, walks to the other end of the counter, and looking at the test says, “OK, 77 percent negative, you’re not pregnant.” Then he gave us some masturbation tips which were totally sickening, and actually wrote them out on a prescription pad. Dream over.
