A Stub: It’s all that remains in the end!

Caution: You can continue to read provided you fulfill any of the following conditions:
1. You are sloshed/smoked/wasted (chances of you remembering reading this - very rare!)
2. Your sense of humour is still intact (not in any way connected to your ability to use smiley’s in your text, no way!)
3. You are a good judge (you keenly listen to both sides of the argument yet do not let ‘any’ of them affect your preordained decision)

Statutory Warning: The following content has been classified as Adult Material. Do not continue to read if you are below the age of 18!

Now, for just a moment, let’s assume that you were in fact on the wrong side of 18, would you actually have stopped reading? Nine out of ten cases would agree that they would have continued reading and the one case that professed self-restraint is bloody well lying! Period. That, my dear friends, is the new face of abstinence!
Coming to my main agenda, I truly find these warnings ironical to the very core. I am particularly talking about the most enigmatic of such existing riders... And no! It’s got nothing to do with Dan Brown’s disclaimer in the “Da Vinci Code” or the terms and conditions of your ‘new guaranteed insurance plan’. I am talking about one of the greatest cover-ups in human history, a masterstroke for the human vanity, the redeemer of the ‘politically-correct’, the statement that fashionably clothes every ‘ten/twenty pack’ – “Cigarette smoking is injurious to health!” And as if this much hypocrisy was not enough, there is an attached stamp size photograph of a set of ‘photo-shopped’ lungs, apparently to scare the hell out of a person! Phew, what a magnum-opus wastage of the human brain. For those of you still wondering about my identity, let me be very brief. I am the butt of a cigarette, yes, just the ‘butt’!
Some intellectual once defined a cigarette as “a pinch of tobacco rolled in paper with fire at one end and a fool at the other”. A quick check with your dear friend Google will overload you with the points of view from the fool’s end (voiced by supposed intellectuals). Unable to take this insult any longer, I have decided to fight this case from the other end. And as you know, from my vantage point, I see both the fire and the fool from close, real close.
First things first, why is it that people who actually smoke do not create the ruckus, rather it is the non-smokers who are more intent on making a fire out of the smoke? Doesn’t this sound eerily familiar to the “fox and the sour grapes” story from Aesop’s Fables? Next, you are well aware of banks and petrol pumps proudly advertising their presence in certain God forsaken places (usually peaks/valleys). Have you ever heard of cigarettes advertising their availability? Yet they are present everywhere, especially in places where God would be apprehensive about treading! Hope you get the drift, anyway...
Going by the numbers, if smoking were to be a religion, it would undoubtedly have the highest number of followers in the world! Numbers can lie but definitely not in this case. Some unscientific genius once declared in my presence that apparently most of the great thinkers of the world smoked. And I haven’t really wanted to disagree to that. For me though, the conflict really is whether people become smokers first or great thinkers first, much like our eternal ‘hen or egg’ dilemma.
In fact, I have personally witnessed some very ordinary people (bordering unremarkable) utter extremely profound and far reaching insights after communion with the mighty cigarette (its royal cousin ‘grass’ to be more specific). For the skeptics, here is an appetizer for you, an exchange between an Elevated Thinker (ET) and a Paralyzed Thinker (PT):
ET: Is it possible to enjoy a painful death?
PT: (acts as if she is thinking hard and raises her eyebrows in an arc)
ET: What I mean is that is it possible to enjoy the process of one’s death?
PT: (still acting focused)... I mean, could you be clearer?
ET: Can you think of any situation where a person would enjoy the process of death?
PT: (caught in a mixture of trying to act focused when she is sure that she is lost)... (starts to smile but withdraws it halfway, an act validating her state of mind)
ET: When a person starts enjoying pain, with mounting pain there is an increase in their joy. So a person would be happiest when the highest degree of pain was inflicted, at which point in time his/her physical body’s pain threshold would have been crossed. So the person would be the happiest during the rendezvous with death. Simple, right?
(Those of you who can gauge the depth in this, you can pat yourselves on the back as you seem to be an ET already. And to the rest I would say – just get wasted and then go figure!)
Well, coming back. If you haven’t heard this before, let me bring to your notice that you can party hard, binge, drink, smoke like crazy, go nuts – you will die someday… Else you can eat healthy, stay fit, study hard – you will still die someday! So what the heck!
Ask any smoker and they will be able to tell you that some of the most outstanding, noble, deep and for-the-benefit-of-entire-human-race thoughts would have occurred to them even as they were puffing out clouds of smoke in to the eternity in front of them. Do you even understand how self-gratifying this would be? In fact, I am such a ‘piece-of-ass’ that once you have laid your hands on, it’s just impossible to let go.... What say people?
Anyway, in the end, the smoke just dissolves into thin air. The breeze gently carries away the ash. The smoker walks forward in life. It’s just me that is left behind, the butt, just the butt of the cigarette. Everything else vanishes but me. And the memory of the smoker, the finger print on the stub! It’s all that remains in the end…
PS: The views expressed above are completely views of only the author – the ‘Cigarette Butt’ and no one else. Nobody else, either from this world or the other, has anything to do with these views. If you feel positively or negatively affected by all this, please return and re-read the opening lines:-)
Most Important Note: For a reality check, you might want to continue trusting the opinion of Google on this subject, till you find something better...