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Date Posted: 09:23:30 06/27/21 Sun
Author: Mark
Subject: Ten Years Since Things Were Good....Four Years Since Things Were Acceptable

Last night I was trudging through the Des Moines Arts Festival looking for sightings and getting very little worth mentioning, I was taking mental notes of the timeline of decline. When did things get this bad where I could walk around a crowded public event for two hours and see nearly nobody smoking?

There was no exact turning point (there never is) but looking back at my archives 2011 was the last time when I could go to a gathering like this and feel assured of getting smoking girl/women sightings that were memorable or worthwhile. It helped that I'd been expecting a wholesale collapse in smoking starting in 2007 when smoking bans began to be imposed in bars and on college campuses, and when cigarette taxes began to go up at the state and federal level just about everywhere around the country. Those years of 2008-2011 were the years where I no longer took sightings for granted and began to really cherish them. It even seemed as though smoking might persevere through the hardships because I could depend upon sightings of high school girls, upscale college girls, and young mothers with strong genes at every public gathering I attended for years after I expected the bottom to fall out.

It wasn't as though everything crumbled in 2012. Far from it. But the beginnings of the unraveling were visible and for the next five years I had to rein in expectations going into an event realizing that there was a real possibility I'd have a genuinely disappointing day.

But I wish I could return even to that five-year stretch which ended in 2017. Starting in 2018, replacement smokers ceased to exist because an entire generation of young people had transitioned entirely to vaping, the final wave of which were picked off with Juul. Now I go into some of my summer events (like last night's Arts Festival and a couple of my early fairs) feeling despondent before I even get there knowing the chances of seeing something great are low.

It just makes me sick seeing gorgeous young girls walking around with vaping devices in hand. It even makes me a little bit sick to see just about everyone walking around with beer or other alcoholic beverages since that has avoided entirely the social stigma that my beloved cigarettes have. And it will make me really sick when the time comes when more people are openly smoking marijuana than cigarettes at these public events. At least in Iowa and Minnesota, we're not there yet. Not smelling a single whiff of marijuana smoke last night is what passes for a victory these days.

But seeing the only vice that I care about being the one thing being phased out of society makes me resent the other vices that are being actively accepted and encouraged that much more. At some point, I may avoid these public gatherings entirely because of it. I'm not there yet, but when all I can latch onto walking around these gatherings is how comparatively wonderful things were in 2011 or even 2017, my head is clearly not in the right place to invest so much time and effort.

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