The
same friend who had the criminally altered drivers license was not
finished with his run of delinquency and ne'er-do-well-ism. I was
hanging out with him one day after school and we found ourselves a
pack of cigarettes in parking lot, half-full; the pack not the lot.
We thought that it would be funny to drive around our small town with
the windows rolled down ostentatiously smoking some cancer phallus'
and see if anyone freaked out. If you think this sounds like a lame
way to spend an afternoon, know this, what we had planned was even
more lame so, yeah, it really comes down to perspective and
relativity. Look, I don't want to bog you down with a lot of real
high level developmental psychology mumbo-jumbo just know that it was
the least bad of our limited options. We rolled down the windows and
lit the cigarettes and held them out the windows, looking cool and
blowing minds. Well, we were actually having trouble blowing minds
because no one seemed to care. Seeing that we were having no effect
we called off the prank on account of lameness. I thought the whole
thing was gone and forgotten until several weeks later my dad came
storming in while I was eating breakfast and asked why there was a
cigarette burn on the back seat of my car. I didn't remember right
away because none of my passengers smoked, then I remembered. I told
my dad that my friend was pretending to smoke as a joke and an ember
must have blown back in the window. He missed that 'pretending' part
and started yelling at me about how smoking was no joke and that he
could get addicted and how most smokers want to quit but they can't.
All good points I said but he was not smoking he was just pretending.
My dad replied that his brain didn't know he was pretending and that
he was going to be addicted exactly like someone who
wasn't pretending. I tried a couple of times to tel him he had not actually
put the cigarette to his mouth but my dad had heard what he needed to
fuel his misinformed righteous indignation and he grounded me from
the car for the week. I waited for him to go to work and then
ungrounded myself. My friend never took up smoking.
