In a like revelatory situation, he apprised me of the following: He sometimes goes to coffee shops and sits with his friends in the smoking section. The other day he took his 17 year old girlfriend to a coffee shop And sat in said section. She (the girlfriend) was carded. When it was determined that she was 17 the waitress asked her to sit someplace else. Turns out a minor can only sit in the smoking section if they're with a parent. I wonder if the parent has to sign a liability waiver. I like to think I'm up on morality laws but this nicotinic interdiction was news to me. When did they pass this law? Was it when they taxed the price of cigarettes to nearly five dollars a pack? You old folks out there, can you believe that? Five dollars a pack. That's a half hour's work to minimum wage young people. And a half day's bumming to the bindlestiffs. Here's how old I am... I remember when the butane lighter cost more then the cigarettes. All I can say to smokers is thank you. Cause that's a buttload of taxes I don't have to pay.
Of course I also wonder whether in the legislature's burning passion for smoking morality they passed a similar law banning parents from smoking in their cars when their young kids were present, or at least made em roll down the windows....
**************************
We were going through my other son's school papers the other day, figuring which to pitch and which to save and we came across some of the pamphlets they had handed out in his health class. They were about sex. I was appalled. I expected sex education would have advanced somewhat since the late sixties when I was in high school. I mean after all, we changed a lot back then. We made it possible for girls to wear pants to school, (in my high school before 1968 no girls were allowed to appear in school in slacks, pedal pushers or capris, and god forbid they hug their legs with levis) the pill was openly discussed (and with it the subject of birth control generally) and womens' lib put sexual satisfaction back in the hands of women (and as a result back in the hands of men as well).
Which leads to the interesting thing I read in this one pamphlet, what I called: The Book of Abstinence. There is still apparently, even in this age of sex can kill AIDs awareness, a huge religious contingent that thinks that you can tell a teenager to ignore completely his or her raging, bubbling and overflowing caldron of hormones and "just say no." These are the people who are too squeamish to mention the word condom but feel comfortable casting the souls of young unwanted babies to everlasting burning hell because their parents never joined the church.
Anyhow. The booklet recommended, when all else fails, to engage in a practice called "secondary abstinence." They didn't completely clarify what that meant, but I think it has something to do with the boys youth group campouts they had even in my day. When all us jerks would sit around the fire and sing "Will the circle be unbroken..."
Ah the power of faith....
