Guest Blogger: Calvin Cohen

My friend and fellow Berkeley alum Calvin Cohen recently asked me to write a guest post about anything that I wanted for his blog, Calvin After Cal. In return, he did me the favor of echoing what I've been saying all along about smoking, but in his own words about his recent experience in Texas. Ladies and gentlemen, the one and only...Calvin Cohen:

Roughly a month ago, I was in Austin, Texas for the South by Southwest (SXSW) music, film, and interactive festival. Before the festival started, I stopped over in Lubbock to visit a close friend and then drive out together.

It wasn’t my first time in Texas. I’ve been to Houston, San Antonio, and Dallas a few times before. It was my first time in Lubbock and in Austin, but something stuck out for me in the former: smoke. All the bars were filled with smoke.

How rude of me, I should have prefaced. I am a Californian, born and currently living in Los Angeles with four years for college interspersed at Berkeley in Northern California. I’ve loved my upbringing in this state for any number of clichés: the beach, the weather, the laid-back culture, and the attractiveness of any and all people.

And on that trip a month ago, inside all those Lubbock bars and establishments, I realized another California cliché I’ve been thankful for my entire life. We’ve outlawed smoking in bars, restaurants, and a lot of public places. To paraphrase an Eddie Izzard-shtick, soon there’ll be no eating and no talking in California as well. Soon all we’ll have left are the libraries, where we’ll be heading to do our illegal substances.

Don’t think that Lubbock was my first experience with smoking -- it’s foolish to extend stereotypes that far. Smoking hasn’t been outlawed in California since the dawn of time, but my childhood memories are a bit hazy (pun intended) on that subject matter. I have lived with people that smoke cigarettes throughout my young years, and this past summer I traveled to Europe where many of the countries I spent time were full of cigarettes and smoking. The thing in common with all of my smoking experiences is that they occur in private residences or in foreign lands.

What was seemingly different about my time in Lubbock was that smoking is still a visible, pertinent issue in public spaces in the greater United States. When you’ve spent your entire life in a frame of mind such as the one I’ve grown up with, you expect it to be pretty commonplace elsewhere. Yet even though California is a state of 37 million, and many other states have banned smoking in certain places, there is still work to be done.

When we arrived at Austin, it was welcoming to see that many of the establishments in the city did not allow smoking. Austin outlawed smoking in 2005, but it’s not a blanket-ban as there are certain exceptions. And you could see these as we traversed 6th Street and other places in the city, where some bars have signs that basically scream “Hey! Come on in here because you can smoke here and that’s pretty cool because you can do that in a lot of other places, right? Right!”

Can I do anything to help push along the no-smoking bandwagon throughout the rest of the country? I think a frame of mind like the one I’ve got is a unique contribution in the first place -- that smoking and dinner don’t mix. Neither do smoking and movie theatres, sporting events, Disneyland, water parks, and basically anywhere else. Holding true to this mindset can only help compel others.

Because seriously, if you’ve ever come to Los Angeles, you’ll know that the air is bad enough as it is. A lift of the smoking ban would only make it worse.