Smoking Ban

This is what I dreamed I was writing last night: I've liked bars ever since my father first started taking me to them when I was about eight or nine. Certainly not as old as ten. I liked the smoke filled air and the bitter, clingy smell of spilled beer. These were working men's bars. They were noisy, sometimes raucus and most had either shuffleboards or pool tables. All of them had juke boxes. Five cents a tune or six plays for a quarter. We'd stay while Dad had a draft beer, sometimes two and I drank a coke and listened to the men talk. I really wanted to play Pool, it looked like it would be fun, but the tables were always being used. And then, because I was dreaming and dreams being what they are, I stopped writing and was morphed into some other dream adventure I can't recall this morning. Damn! I was hoping to get at least five hundred words from no work involved dream inspiration. Maybe tomorrow night.

There is though, this link: Denver, the place I consider my home town because I lived there longer than in any other place, put a no smoking ban into effect at 12:01 this morning. That's no smoking in public places including bars. Now, as I've noted in my dream writing above, I like bars. This new ban is going to radically change their character. It is my feeling, yeah I know this is weird, that drinking alcohol should only occur while you are doing one or both of two other things; those things being eating or smoking. Drinking alcohol alone without the social accompaniment of a good meal or a fine smoke means that, it seems to me, you are drinking just to get drunk. Drinking, eating and smoking, are by many accounts, all ways to poison yourself, so why should one be banned and not the other? Shouldn't bar owners have the choice of putting up a sign saying either "Smoking Permitted Here" or No Smoking Here"? I'm not really making a stand, just commenting, because, hey, I'm in Panama. I can eat slabs of bacon, mainline Marlboros, they're a dollar a pack, or swim in rum, but, you know, I like bars and when I go to Denver I'll miss the smoke. Luckily, there's still that swell dead beer smell.