Up in Smoke

For those of you that know me, my stance on cigarette smoking is fairly obvious. I hate it. It's quite apparent that it is the biggest scam on the face of the earth and a small percentage of old white men continue to make billions of dollars off of people that willingly pay to kill themselves. That part doesn't bother me because I can easily see the insanity of it and choose not to participate. BUT, I become enraged when others' second hand smoke ruins the air I breathe and puts me at risk for doing absolutely nothing. Even though I've been in California for over a week and the state has long since banned smoking in public places, the folks that work in the rock and roll biz do what they want in the privacy of their own dressing room. So, yesterday I became so enraged at the cloud of smoke in our little backstage area that I decided to take action (instead of my normal passive agressive snide commentary). When the room was empty, I removed all of the ash trays and posted signs around the room that said "No Smoking." To my surprise, nearly 12 hours later as the post-show festivities got underway, not one person smoked. Even our tour manager *who makes the rules* was leaving the room to smoke. I guess people assumed that the signs were posted by the venue or something. I was quite satisfied.

Well, that's about it for now. We're off to Vegas tonight where there will be plenty of smoke...I'm not sure if the casinos will be very tolerant of my little sign scam, but then again they have pretty fucking good ventilation in those joints.