It all started when I was a kid, and I realized I was allergic to cigarette smoke all thanks to my unbelievably heavy smoker of a father. Yeah, I know, daddy issues, blah blah, nothing I say matters, who gives a fuck, right?
Here's something I find kind of odd: Nobody likes to be on the receiving end of an advice anymore, unsolicited or otherwise, and yet as soon as someone achieves material success, they feel the uncontrollable need to mention book X from author Y being the reason for their success, acting like luck, connections, dogged persistence that miraculously paid off somehow; all those things had nothing to do with said success. However, book X from author Y was the magic scroll needed to get out of poverty. Hooray! Oh, give me a fucking break!
Here's the hypocritical part: Growing up, my dad always quoted this part of a verse from the Quran:
[…]and do not throw [yourselves] with your [own] hands into destruction [by refraining][…]
Yet he started smoking when he was 12, being convinced by his peers that the “mint flavor” was to die for, and he hasn't stopped since even though he now has cancer (no idea what stage because Moroccans refer to cancer as “that illness” like it's the bogeyman or something, so curiosity is out the fucking window. Heck, I'm not even sure if it's even prostate cancer like they claim or bone cancer or both. All I know is that the dude won't quit smoking no matter what even though he'd promised to do so many times ever since I was in elementary school; One time, on my way to school, I caught him trying to hide a lit cigarette behind his back the second he saw me, then tried to bribe me with some sour candy, and all was good in the world, note that calling him out would've just resulted in an unnecessarily harsh punishment later anyway.
Apparently, his mom had him when she was 13 — which was common at the time. She married like 4 men in the course of her lifetime — not so common due to “shame” and all that. My dad's biological father, i.e., my grandpa, changed his last name from L'Oukili to Anssaien due to some inheritance dispute. Here's another hypocritical part: If I try to change my name back to L'Oukili or to whatever the fuck I want, everyone I know will see it as something very taboo, yet my grandpa had no problem doing so at a time when Morocco was still crawling with camels and horse carriages. Here's the fun part: Nobody in Morocco knows the Anssaien family name yet everybody knows L'Oukili. I swear to God, man, if my grandpa hadn't changed our last name, I would have never had to say my last name a million fucking times to every fucking teacher every fucking year, and many of them still misheard it as “Ben Hussain” or some other dumbass last name. For Westerners out there, “L'Oukili” is like the Moroccan “Jackson” or “Smith” or whatever common family name associated with wealth. While one can have a common family name without the wealth part, I still think it would've been more convenient to be called Ahmed L'Oukili, which reminds me of Lucky Luke for some reason.
Anyway, so why is it that people stay addicted to a harmful substance even though it's literally and visibly killing them? My dad literally looks like the mummy of Ramesses II now at the age of 67. And why is it that the government would rather hoard the tax money that comes from these harmful substances than to actually help fund the right research for effective methods of drug rehabilitation, allowing tobacco companies to become richer than God in the process? Is the government that terrified of having healthy lucid citizens? What's more harmful: tobacco, alcohol, and other illicit drugs, or me writing a blog post like this that nobody's going to read? Is the pain of withdrawal so excruciating that it's less painful to keep killing oneself slowly until death do you part? Cig for thought.