I hate smoking. I don’t care if you smoke and my saying that offends you. It’s gross. I’m not 100% sure about many things, but I know I’m right about this one. It doesn’t mean that if you smoke I won’t like you as a person. I just won’t stand very close to you.

Especially when you have smoke billowing out of your mouth. Ick.

The only thing worse than smoking is chewing tobacco or dipping. Double gross. I don’t understand it. Chewing tobacco has the flavor of tree bark soaked in gasoline. (Tree bark soaked in gasoline would probably be healthier.) Watching someone chew tobacco makes me gag. Tobacco chewers spit all the time. Long, slimy, strings of brown spit that looks like something that comes out of the stupid dog after she has rifled through the bathroom trash.

The other day at a T-ball game I walked past a young guy right as he spat on the ground. It barely missed me or I’m sure I would have punched him. (After I stopped vomiting.) He realized the near miss and apologized to me. It would have been more meaningful if he hadn’t had nasty wads of brown tobacco in his teeth.

Until recently it was the grossest tobacco-related incident that I can recall. (I say recall because I’m sure there is a story from college I’ve forgotten – I’d like to keep it that way.)

There’s a thing that happens to some parents when they drop their kids off at school. They pretend they’re perfect. Some Mom’s and Dad’s actually get dressed, brush teeth, and comb hair before making the drop off. I’m not one of those Mom’s. Unless I have to be somewhere immediately after drop off, I’m in work out clothes. Not that I’m always going to the gym – they’re just easier to put on in the three minutes I have to get ready before we leave the house.

I understand it. Parents want to put their best foot forward with the teachers and other parents. I have four kids, so I’m well past caring about what the teachers or parents think, but I get it.

There is a line.

On the last day of preschool I watched a Dad walk out after drop off. He looked like a completely normal person. (Not-normal people usually do.) He walked to his truck – but not to the door. Instead he walked to his bumper and picked something up.

Odd.

Then he put it in his mouth, in his bottom lip to be exact.

(I’ll pause now so you can wipe that puke off your chin.)

If your addiction to tobacco is so strong that you’ll leave wet, chewed up, lumps of it on your truck bumper for 10 minutes, then put it back in your mouth – it’s time for an intervention.

Seriously, don’t be gross.