Judge Mary or Pastor Mary or Sharey-Mary?

I don't judge people. I don't preach. I am more open-minded the longer I live. My friends are Baptist, Mormon, Catholic, Baptist, Lutheran, etc...I love them all. My Mother says I am too nice to my ex. My friends say that I am too nice to my previous dysfunction.

No one is going to change because of anything I say or do, but I am still nice to them. If I can be nice to my ex after he broke my heart, then I can be nice to most anyone. When I am upset about something, I write or I stare out the window and compose prose in my head. Writing, at least, makes it seem as though I am working. While staring out the window, well, that would not look like it.

We all have our demon-issues. I never said bad habits make bad people. I had a lifelong friend who weighed around 800 pounds when he died. He had to crawl up the stairs, because he couldn't walk up them. He smoked, drank, and ate. His obsessions were upsetting, but I still miss his protective presence. I think briefly about him and his sadness almost every day. I didn't judge Rodney. I didn't preach to him. I did throw his hat on the roof once when he made me mad. It shocked the heck out of him and made him laugh, which made me madder. I surely shared with him what I thought about things though.

That's all...just sharing my thoughts @ anything or nothing.

the Smoking Gun...

To smokers: this might make you mad. Read at your own risk...

A Smoking Gun is usually a reference to something that shows conclusive evidence of a crime.

I think that cigarettes should be classified as gun...a smoking gun. Smoking kills people. That's the sum of the whole thing. Why is that so hard to understand?

It makes living difficult. My brother does not smoke, but his wife smokes. I love my sister-in-law, but if I could change one thing, it would be to stop her from smoking. I listen to my brother's constant cough, and I think about how young my Dad was when he died. I don't want my brother to die until he's 99. My brother says that the coughing is asthma; I think, I know, it's cigarettes.

It complicates things. When I was little, my dad smoked a pipe. (Before I remember, it was cigarettes and cigars. I've seen pictures.) He was a handsome young man. He looked like the movie stars with that ciggie hanging on his lip. I would get into his pretty yellow truck and see the tar and nicotine coating the roof completely brown. That truck was his body. It looked great, but the inside...his lungs...were ugly. He stopped smoking about 10 years before he had a quintuple heart bypass in 1986. After years and years of smoke-free lungs, he was still coughing and spitting up the remnants. Our bodies are our temples, not our smoke dens.

It's a trick. It doesn't give pleasure. It's a temporary feeling that is fake and makes you feel like crap in the long run. It's a fake orgasm. No meaning. True pleasure comes from smiling and laughing and connecting to another human. Yesterday, at church, we sat in the back. I so enjoyed the whole hour, not due to the homily or ritual, but because of the Gerber baby sitting next to me. Those rambunctious toddlers running around made me smile and laugh and gave me hope for the future of mankind. Dragging on the stick...makes you cough and die.

It's not glamorous. For a while, no one smoked in movies, but movies are again displaying how sexy it is. It's not sexy! Have you looked at an ashtray? That's your mouth. Gross. Smoking calms you or excites you? Really? Does it give true pleasure from a mental or emotional or spiritual cause? Or just the physical? What does that make you?

Smoking is a gun. You stick it in your mouth, and it's killing you. You wave it around, and you're killing the rest of us.