Smoky Bars

The world is being cleansed.
When I see people rubbing sanitizing gel on their precious little hands I want to slap them. It amuses me that we have to keep dispensers of this stuff at our registers. It amuses me that people use it.
I handle 60 trillion pieces of money every day. I wonder how long the lines would be if I stopped to caress sanitizing gel into my skin after every transaction.
A lot of the money I handle is wet, it is crumpled, it is suspect. What do these people do with their money? I don't really want to know.
Sometimes when I sneeze during a transaction, into my hand, and then continue the transaction, I can just sense the disapproving glare of some prissy little wine snob. A prissy little wine snob who will walk out of the store, slide into the textured leather seat of her Lincoln Navigator and drive home to her country club husband and say: 1) I have to take a shower IMMEDIATELY because I just got waited on by the grossest liquor store clerk in the world, and no you cannot join me and 2) Can I have my weekly $1,000 allowance honey?"
You can't massage purity into your life. You are being assaulted from every angle by things that will disturb your equilibrium. Suck it up.
But I digress.
When smoking was banned in bars I knew the world was close to Armageddon.
Smoking belongs in bars. Especially in blues and jazz clubs. Smoking and booze and music co-exist quite naturally. They are the perfect menage a trois.
I don't smoke. Never have. It is a foul, disgusting habit. Much more sensible to pour gallons of whiskey down your throat.
Tried smoking once as a teenager and immediately moved on to other vices. I especially despise smoke around food. In the old days when selfish idiots were allowed to smoke in restaurants I wanted to drag my steak knife slowly along the base of their throat.
In the old days when I walked into a smoky bar, my body and mind became one. I breathed in the smoke and enjoyed it.
I lived at The Rynborn, the greatest blues bar in the history of the world. Twenty minutes from my house. A blues bar whose death I still mourn many years after its demise.
It was my world. The music, the people, the vibe, the smoke. It felt right, it felt natural it was a balance of things and attitudes that worked perfectly. Aristotle said "The whole is greater than the sum of its parts."
Everything revolved around the music because it was  so exquisite and professional that you were never let down. High standards were set and high standards were met.
But when you factored in the crowd, the booze, the bartenders and waitresses, the physical appearance of the club and the smoke, the thing became gigantic. It took all of these things and became its own life force, a life force that blotted everything else out and made your soul smile.
The first night I walked in there after smoking was banned I felt off balance. Something was wrong. Something was missing.
Actually smoking wasn't banned, they just created a smoking room for the addicts.
If I remember correctly, I spent the first hour walking around in a daze. Bouncing off the walls, tripping over chairs. When a talented and hard working waitress asked what I wanted I requested a ginger ale.
That's when I knew my essence had been compromised.
It's possible I am misremembering that night. But you get the picture.
I still loved the place, worshipped it and worshipped in it, the music continued to invade my bloodstream and inform my heart and brain into ecstasy, but the smoke was gone and the do gooders had taken another piece of me away.
It's all in the perspective, though. I worked as a bartender in a smoky bar as recently as last year. Private clubs are exempt from no smoking laws.
I hated it. Hated the smoke drifting up from ashtrays and fingers into my face. Hated cleaning the goddamn ashtrays.
Some of these smokers were meticulous about having their ashtrays dumped every so often. This amused the hell out of me. They would suck smoke into their lungs non stop, but the goddamn ashtray had to be clean. As if they believed that when a lung failed it could be replaced with an ashtray.
Anyway, when my shift was over and my ass hit a bar stool, with a whiskey and a beer in front of me, the smoke didn't bother me at all.
Going to work every day is certainly not increasing my lifespan. Especially when you consider the weasels I work for. Lots of things are bad for you, technically, if you look closely enough.
As a blues lover and a consumer of a civilized whiskey from time to time, I miss smoky bars.
I'm willing to trade a few years of my life for the joy of experiencing a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.