Craven's Smoking Ban

So, Craven Community College took down some art. It wasn't Jesus floating in piss or anything that anyone complained about. It was a race car's hood emblazoned with an airbrushed caricature of the Auto teacher (and vehicle owner) Bob Hall smoking a cigar (as he is wont to do). The offense here was purely at the bureaucratic level, as it was seen to be out of step with the far-reaching, barely legal campus-wide smoking ban. This outraged several people, namely myself and William Toler, who already wrote an article on IndieRegister that says everything I have to say about it.

Later in the article, he mentions information I was previously not privy to ( having blissfully been unaware of this backwards, Southern hellhole for the first 19 years of my life). Apparently, Mr. Toler & company had run the student newspaper and were directly involved when bureaucratic intervention forced the removal of a sex advice column "Between The Sheets." Bureaucratic oversight on student run publications is a major fucking no-no of epic fucking proportions. Here's the full story from March 24, 2005 in the ScumJournal, where you can read from first hand sources that Scott Ralls (president of the college at the time) was a misguided, powerhungry bullshitter of epic proportions that wanted nothing more than to stifle free speech.

So, they keep fucking with us. They forget who pays their god damn salaries with our tuition. Sure, they get grants and federal funding, but if they alienate all their god damn students, that'll all dry up, too. So, fuck 'em. Anyways, where was I going with this? Oh, how bad they've indirectly fucked me over on two non-consecutive occasions with this god damn smoking ban.

Occasion #1 - 1/26/10
After they banned smoking campus wide (including EVERYWHERE outside and even in one's own vehicle), people started smoking in the woods and in front of nearby businesses and doing all kinds of ill-advised things in order to get a cigarette in. Well, with the litigious society we live in and pressure from local businesses, Craven put in a smoking gazebo. Fine and dandy, we have a place to smoke. Problems exist, however with this plan. Here is the problem:

The Blue dot is the smoking gazebo, the red line is a series of interconnected drainage ditches. I have class nearly exclusively in the building labeled H, the "Business and Technology" or some stupid shit name building. You can obviously see how this is problematic for me. Seeing, however, that I grew up in the mighty hills of New York, I decide I can just jump this creek (as most of my childhood was spent with a friend who lived exactly a creek jump and 100 yards away.) The next map highlights (in neon green) this path.

I fall in. Only one foot, though. Still, it's up to my shin, smells terrible and looks even worse. I have two more classes to sit through with this stinking, nasty looking, wet-as-fuck foot-to-shin area. Meanwhile, I'm worried about trenchfoot because god only knows what kind of disgusting pigshit is pumped into those drainage ditches. My day was ruined. Moving ever onward.

Occasion #2 - 1/28/10
Deciding today that "jumping the creek" is a terrible idea, I walk all the way around those god damn ditches. The map of my route looks something akin to this:
Convoluted but doable. I grab my cigarette at the gazebo, then cross to building C to get a cup of coffee and continue on my merry way back to building H. However, an unexpected stick is thrown into my spokes:

At that obnoxious pink dot, I see a classmate. She's unattractive and in class has a habit of oversharing. I try to ignore her, as she is also heading along the green line to class. She notices me and stands still until I catch up to her. "Fuck," I think, "How am I going to get out of this?" As I complete this internal monologue, she launches into a story about how Jimmy is trying beat up Mikey for trying to have sex with her (this all happened down in Pamlico County ("the county," colloquially) which is only a few notches below Bumblescum and a few notches above Ozark Swamp.) This unfortunate fucking conversation which I have no interest in and no desire to participate further in continues for the remainder of the walk to class. So, while I'm debating on whether or not to fake a heart attack (because I'd rather go to a hospital than listen to anymore of this petty hillbilly drama), I realize something:

IF THEY JUST LET US SMOKE WHEREVER
THIS WOULD NOT BE HAPPENING TO ME

Why so, you ask? How is this related to your unencumbered smoking? Well, here's how:

This would be my path. I would walk from building H to building C, smoking a cig and probably checking my email or some shit. I may linger in front of building C while I finish my smoke, then proceed to go in, get my coffee and head back to building H. She'd be nowhere around. But, the delay caused my be having to walk around all kinds of moats and shit and then proceeding to the coffee dispensary gave her just enough time, through whatever unfortunate series of cosmic events, to cross my path and blather about whatever that trite nonsense was.

Fuck the smoking ban. Fuck their gazebo. Fuck fuck fuck.

Smoking Ban in Effect

So, with the ushering in of the New Year 2010, radical change came to North Carolina: a smoking ban in all restaurants and bars. For myself, a displaced New Yorker, this is no big deal. Even in this smoker's paradise, I found myself still going outside to smoke and actively avoiding the bars where smoking was permitted indoors.

There was an underwhelming amount of backlash. I figured for sure these rednecks would be picketing, waving their confederate flags all the way to Raleigh with teabags taped to their trucker hats. "Gubbament can't tell me where and when I can smoke, gawdamit!" I can hear them, now. But, the fact of the matter is, there was very little public upheaval.

What confuses and bewilders me, however, is a smoking ban that went into effect down here a few months back. The Craven Community College campus became smoke free. That's right, no smoking anywhere on campus. Let me see if I can find a campus map to throw up, here. There we go.

Study this map for a moment. Bear in mind, also, that the map is not to accurate scale. We're talking acres, here. Not many, mind you, but still acres. So... the white areas of the map are (by and large) grassy plains devoid of people. You can't smoke there. The parking lots, too, you can't smoke there. This is where the outrage, or at least my outrage comes in. We can't smoke OUTDOORS?! That's one step away from outright prohibition. When you can't smoke outside, where the air is clogged with various pollutants including the occasional waft of hot diaper that comes from the Weyerhauser factory that has our river choked with chemicals and unusable, something is amiss. Yes, the outdoors, where the parking lots on the top of the map (below the Davis maintenance building, which I never knew had a name besides "Maintenance") took a full semester to complete, with bull dozers, backhoes and all variety of polluting machinery ran for all hours for 4+ months to make a GOD DAMN PARKING LOT (flatten land, coat in pavement). That same outdoors was declared smoke free.

But, guess what? They're giving us smokers a gazebo. That's right, we all have to congregate like some sort of bible club for the damned in the 10-15mins between classes suck down a cigarette quick and continue on our ways. It won't be centrally located, mind you. I don't know, exactly, where they're planning to put it, but the way things are run down here, it will be the other side of the aforementioned parking lots, that's where I'm putting my money.