"Smoking kills. If you're killed, you've lost a very important part of your life."
-Brooke Shields

9:30 AM, Lotsa Luck

I've sat down in one of the cushy captain's chairs in the lovable dive known as the Lotsa Luck. I've got two packs of cigarettes in my car and one in my jacket pocket. I order a cup of coffee and light up. The first drag of my first cigarette of the day catches in my throat and I shudder a bit. It's not necessarily pleasant, but as I chase the second drag with a swig of joe everything coalesces and all is right with the world.

It's my plan today to tour the hazier dives in the downtown area and document the final day of the cities smoky dives. Consider it live blogging the smoking ban.

Here in the Lotsa Luck, a cast of regulars huddle at one end of the bar, laughing, drinking, smoking, and watching the Armed Forces Insurance Holiday Bowl (or whatever its called). I ask bartender Carol what she thinks of the impending ban. She grimaces.

"No one's looking forward to it," she says, "All of the bartenders here smoke." She tells me that the owners are worried about how it will affect the gambling business. Right now, there aren't any lottery machines in the Lotsa Luck, but they are coming back latter this month to line the walls. It's common to find all of the video crack machines full on any given night in the Lotsa Luck. Carol points out that most of the lottery players chain smoke, and wonders what will happen when that vice is disconnected from the other.

Carol used to live in Eugene and remembers when a city wide smoking ban went into affect there. She tells me that many small bars closed their doors because they lost business, or couldn't comply by building smoking sections.

More than that, though, Carol worries about policing her clientele. "No one's looking forward to being the enforcer for this," she says. But with every storm cloud there is a silver lining, "At least I wont have to clean out all these ashtrays," she says grudgingly. Cold comfort.

10 AM, Jolly Roger

Bridget, who has tended bar at the Jolly Roger for two years, has a different take. "It'll be nice," she says, "because when I get sick, I can't get better," on account of the smoke. She also notes that the Reggae nights on the weekends might just get a little more bearable. "It's full of hippies," she says,"With BO and smoke and the doors closed, it's hard."

She throws out a rhetorical question for all the whiny smokers, "How hard is it to walk your lazy ass outside to smoke a cigarette?"

Musician Jake Ray, who's sitting on a bar stool beside me enjoying a smoke with his breakfast, chimes in. "It's a slap in the face of basic freedom," he growls. He says it's all well and good to walk outside and smoke, but as a musician, when he's playing a set he doesn't get that luxury. He was considering a bit of rebellion. "I thought about seeing how many bars I could get kicked out of," for smoking.

Ray is hoping for smoke-easies. He remembers living in Cedarville California and patronizing its one bar, which was only open two days a week. "All of the regulars smoked there," he said, telling me that at least in one hard scrabble patch in California, the ban remained unenforced.

The view from Holman's and Beuhlahland, after the jump!

Continue reading »

Smoke and booze. Booze and smoke. To me, they are inextricably linked. But as we look across the country, the smoky bar is becoming a nicotine stained memory. Soon, all that will be left will be so many thousands of yards of browned wallpaper and grungy beer signs that will never be clean, no matter how vigorously they are scoured. That’s comforting somehow.

When I was a kid, I wrote every day. I wrote poems, plays, essays, you name it. I let my imagination run and what came out was the usual introspective, “why me,” crap common to the age.

When I was fifteen, I started drinking. I drank stolen booze from fruit jars on the cool midnight golf courses of the southwestern high desert. With a bevy of drunken friends, we howled through the night, waking with stupors that we couldn’t explain to our parents.

I smoked my first cigarette around that time. It was stolen from the convenience store owned by a friend’s parents. We’d gone camping and managed to boost a carton of Marlboro reds, Camel menthols (I’ll never smoke them again, ever), and maybe some Kools or something. We worked through those packs meticulously, our heads swimming by the fire; feeling cool and rebellious and grown up and nauseous. All bullshit, of course, except for the nausea.

It wasn’t until my early twenties that all of these things were finally joined together in a small dive bar in Ashland, Oregon, known as the Beau Club. My employment at the time allowed me four days off, and I made the Beau my living room. The place was quiet in the afternoon, and between pool games I’d drink and smoke and write; feeling artistic, bohemian, smart. All of it bullshit, of course.

Yeah, it was derivative. Yeah, I was ripping off dead drunken heroes. Yeah, it was more bilious than Bukowski-esque, but it was the way I lived for years. From that time on, bars, smoke, and writing were forever connected in my mind. Hell, as I write this, I’m sitting in one of my favorite dives with a Dewers on the rocks and a pack of American Spirits.

The poetry has gone to the wayside, so too has the hero-worship (for the most part), but that fucking feeling still lingers; that feeling that this is something special and nothing special at the same time.

Come Thursday, it will be over. And despite all my gushing, I’m not so sure I’m sad to see it go. Things change. Still, it won’t stop me from heading to someplace close and smoky tomorrow afternoon with a couple packs of cigarettes and notebook just to see it off. I plan to smoke all night in the dives around my hood, and stumble home reeking for the last time. The people have voted, who am I to raise a fuss?

All that aside, what I fear deep down is the impending smell of my locals. Say what you will about cigarette smoke, it cloaks the more offensive smells present in a bar. I worked as a bar tender for some time, and anyone who’s ever opened a bar will tell you that when you open the door in the morning, the first thing to hit you is the smell of stale beer and sweaty drunk ass.

This will be the smell we’ll have to contend with for years, people. I’m not looking forward to it.

So here’s to booze and smoke. Smoke and booze. May they never be able to scrub the walls clean.

So tell me, Blogtownies, what smoky dive do you intend to go to, and burn that last cigarette to its filter?

Here we go again. The 2008 Hot Men of Medical Research calendar has been taken down and the 2009 Vomitoriums of the Rich and Famous calendar is waiting in the wings (wow, look at Mario Batali's gold inlaid porcelain jobby). It all feels a little bit arbitrary if you ask me. I mean, if we were committed to this thing we'd mark the New Year on a solstice, but that's just my inner pagan talking.

Either way, there are certain rights and rituals that must be observed on New Years: sipping champagne, kissing your love at midnight, getting shit-faced, blowing horns, watching the ball drop, eating black eyed peas on New Years day.

But the most dreaded of all traditions is the New Year's resolution. I guess the new year is a good a time as any to turn over a new leaf. It's like a psychological blank slate. You are given permission to toss off the person you were and be the person you want to be. It's not as if you couldn't have done that at any point this year, but at least now everyone is doing it. In that way, the inevitable sting of a failed resolution is lessened by the fact that you're not the only one who will fail. Neat trick.

So this is your chance to make it public, Blogtownies. This is the time to have your resolution scorched indelibly into the soft pliant flesh of the Internet, to be revisited at some future date.

I, for one, have the usual resolutions. I intend to quit smoking, lose the food editor poundage I've packed on since last spring, work on my writing, start that novel, revisit one of the dozen unfinished scripts languishing in my laptop, blah blah blah.

How about you? What do you resolve? Tell us in the comments and encourage your friends to post a comment too. After all, will there be anything better than pulling up the evidence sometime at the end of next year and asking your pal, "So, you were going to read War and Peace and get washboard abs, huh? How'd that work for you?"