This is the perfect year to invest in Nicorette gum if you are stock market savvy and live in Maryland.
Smokers have been “doubling up” and watching the Feb. 1 Maryland smoking ban creep closer and closer and now that it is just weeks away, smokers may be forced to try to actually live up to their new years resolution and quit smoking.
For the month of January, perhaps smokers should have smoke-ins in area establishments, (a “black lung coup-de-gras” if you will) and collectively exhale their legacy into the carpet fibers and air ducts of local establishments all while pissing off the people that are too good to mutter those three little words: “non-smoking please.”
My only hope is that the outdoor smoking lounges (businesses are going to provide those right?) for the scorned lung dart lovers will be much more sensible than a West Ocean City restaurant whose customers puff next to pump 9 of the neighboring Exxon station.
It’s going to be a bit foreign to walk into local bars and not fight through a cloud of smoke. It will be downright weird, like you are breathing new air, even if that new air is the old fisherman next to you that the Pall Mall’s used to hide.
Clean air in area bars. What’s next, valet parking at Pickles Pub or a dress code at the Cork Bar?
Discuss.
As far as resolutions go, it seems to me like a pretty ridiculous custom that we attempt to act out every Jan. 1, and it seems that every columnist that has ever been paid to write has done at least one “new years resolution” piece.
There’s just so much to write about. In fact, in a .02 second Google search, there were 10,700,000 articles on the subject, and they ranged from resolutions to making your marriage better to resolutions to change your life in eight days or less.
New Year’s celebrations began in Venice, Italy in 1522 and I’m sure that their idea of celebrating it had nothing to do with Prix Fixe dinners and several bottles of Asti Spumante poured into plastic goblets that they spilled onto their random snogging partners. There is no real record, however, for when people started to make resolutions to change their life because there is no way to gauge it. If you are a good enough liar, no one can really say that you broke your resolution because its success is only governed by you.
It is the one true entrepreneurial thing that we all do every year that we collectively go bankrupt on, even if no money really is ever made or lost. Our ambition for personal goals goes by the wayside within mere weeks because we get paid to focus our ambition on our employer’s goals.
So our asses get fat, our lungs get blacker, and our livers get hard like trigonometry, as we hopelessly try to enjoy our lives more and call our mothers more often.
So, instead of trying to go it alone, I would like to announce that instead of making my own new years resolution, I will be going into the business of helping people meet their goals.
For just a mere $39.95, I will put you through a mental cleansing (brainwashing) process where I tell you that you can reach all your goals by pure repetition. If you say it enough times, it will happen to you. There is no need to plaster your office with those inspirational framed pictures of salmon swimming upstream that tell you what “Determination” is, just let me tell you what it is, and you can start to sit back and count all the money, date all the girls that would never pay you mind before, and enjoy the power and success that you truly deserve.
Just look at Rudy Guiliani. With my “redundancy mind scrub”, he may just meet his goal of gaining the Republican nomination by just saying “9/11” over and over and over again.
As far as your physical shortcomings, my program can help too. My methods are new and improved, but they are old fashioned. We’ll get rid of that fat gut and I’ll try my best to get you from sad fat and bald to remotely happy, slightly slimmer and bald. How will I do it? Red Bull and Cardio. (Caution: your heart may explode.)
All for just $39.95 … it’ll change your life. It’ll find you a job. It will give you the knowledge that you need to pick the perfect fantasy football team. It will give you the courage to pick up a girl in a bar that is above a 5. It will make that girl that is not a 5 give you her own personal mobile number and not the number of a local auto mechanic. It will give you the self-confidence to grow creative hair and to attempt to pull off a fedora hat. It will give you the courage to try win the bar fight that you will inevitably get into for wearing such ridiculous piece of headgear, because my methods are based mainly on Jujitsu, common sense and English Literature.
Soon, you will be the Beowolf of the office armed with rock hard abs, and the will power of an old lady who refuses to learn how to use a debit card.
In just a few short days, I can help cure Ocean City’s problems. I can give the city council members the clarity (by shaking some common sense into them and knocking them off their high horses) to make decisions that will help the people that live in this area rather than just line the pockets of the rich and slowly transform this town into the new Atlantic City.
Sign up now, the crew that will be working on the 50 bridge just did, and I will whip them into shape to meet the deadline to finish the bridge so downtown businesses don’t have to have customers parachute into their dining rooms this spring.
My methods: we are going to have two guys working while six of them stand around and watch.
And if you sign up now, I’ll throw in some free Nicorette gum, I invested in a ton of it. I plan on selling it outside if this whole venture doesn’t work out.
If the usual pattern of new year’s resolutions holds true, I should be in business for about two weeks.
I guess I’ll see you all outside the unemployment office this winter. I’ll be the one with rock hard abs trying to bum a smoke.
Email me at [email protected].