The wrinkled toxic stick had a slow creeping stench. Within moments its chemicals invaded everything we were, from a sickly yellow film over our skin to the air in our lungs. The cigarette smoke had this entitlement, to be closer to you than some subway creep breathing in your face, touching as if random yet calculated.
The cigarette was as those belching cars, feeling so entitled to pollute. It as if the purchase brought some strange notion of dominance - that they could then knowingly be objectionable, to bring chemicals into the environment, and the right of being a consumer trumped the rights of others to breathe clean air.
Could there be any more lame symbol of the era of addiction over true moral choice than the cigarette? Perhaps the coffee and cars... for the bizarre use of prime agricultural land and the gratuitous pollution. They are a hang-over of sorts, from an age where a person's right to get rich is placed more highly than the rights of the masses to health.