Stop smoking!

Why, oh why, would anyone smoke these days? The Complete and Total Loser can understand it if you're over 40, but surely anyone younger than that grew up in an age when smoking was so restricted and expensive that they didn't get thoroughly hooked on it.  
Or not. The Loser has a friend who is 36 and smokes heavily, even now, just under a year after his mother died of lung cancer at the age of 58. 

A woman smokes a cigarette outside Philadelphia's 30th Street Train Station.

A friend's mother

"It's a matter of hours now," a friend texted to The Complete and Total Loser about his mother's impending death. 
The Loser has genuine feeling for his friend and his mother, whom he has never met. His sympathy is a little tempered by the fact that she was a smoker and is dying of lung cancer. Also, on some level the Loser, whose own mother and father died in 2011, feels a little glad that what's happening to his friend isn't happening to him.

While awful things are happening elsewhere, happy tourists, in this case from Columbia, smile and pose under the Robert Indiana Love sculpture in Philadelphia.

The Fundraiser

The Complete and Total Loser has a coworker who's mother is dying of lung cancer. (If you smoke all your life, you will have a premature and unpleasant death. The coworker doesn't seem to get this and still smokes, even in the house with his mother.) Recently he and family held a fundraiser to help cover her medical costs. Until she left due to illness, she'd worked in a bank and had good health insurance. The copays got her. 
The fundraiser was well attended but it wasn't the Loser's kind of event. It was as if a hundred people entered a room that could accommodate fifty and decided to shout as loud as they could for no reason. The Loser was hungry and got there late so he ate a piece of aging beef. The plastic forks were bad ones even by plastic fork standards. The Loser had to use it more as a shovel. The piece he got in his mouth was the largest piece of anything he'd ever eaten. At one point, he wondered if someone present knew the Heimlich Maneuver. Somehow, he got it down and twenty minutes later he felt like he'd had a vitamin B-12 shot.

To many, noise equals fun.

Lung Cancer

A coworker of the Complete and Total Loser learned recently that his mother has lung cancer. About 75 percent of lung cancer victims are dead in two years. Is his coworker upset? Sure. Has he quit smoking? Nope. Has the Loser said, "You really should quit smoking"? 
No. He's proud of himself for not saying that.
But he should.

Eric Lawson died Jan. 10 at his California home. The cause was respiratory failure due to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or COPD. The ruggedly handsome Lawson portrayed the smoking cowboy in Marlboro print ads from 1978 to 1981. He also had bit parts in such TV shows as Baretta and Charlie's Angels before injuries sustained on the set of a Western film ended his acting career. A smoker since age 14, Lawson later appeared in an anti-smoking commercial that parodied the Marlboro Man and an Entertainment Tonight segment to discuss the negative effects of smoking. (People Magazine)