Illinois Smoking Law Pays Off

As a former smoker, I am hypersensitive to cigarette smoke anywhere, at any time. I can't stand being within ten feet of anything even resembling a cigarette or a smoker. I have been told that many ex-smokers are like this, and that they annoy the heck out of their still-smoking friends.

Well, tough. It stinks. And I don't know how anyone can afford both cigarettes and gasoline right now, but that's a different story and a different post.

Anyway, back to the point. I appreciate the fact that smokers must exit the restaurant I am eating in when they wish to smoke. Even while I was a smoker I would be offended by smoke when I was eating. But in a bar? What the heck do you do while you drink if you can't smoke and you're too ugly to have a date?

Anyway, back to the point. Because of Illinois' gestapo-like smoking laws, bar patrons must step outside to smoke. That includes patrons like Nicholas Sheley, the subject of an intense manhunt a couple weeks ago in the Midwest. Sheley allegedly murdered as many as eight people in Illinois and Missouri. He was captured here in my sleepy little (31,000 is not little to me) burg of Granite City, IL, smoking a cigarette outside of a local bar called Bindy's, which is right next to our Kmart store in a rather large strip mall.

It's weird how stuff like this goes down. First of all, what this guy was doing in Granite City is beyond me. I know a lot of people must have been freaking out. On the other hand, many Granite Citians are paranoid to begin with, and assume that Johnny Psycho is right around the corner anyway. So when they spotted Sheley they probably felt vindicated more than anything. He was spotted first at a local Subway shop, then made his way across a large parking lot to the bar, where he had a glass of water and went to the john. Meanwhile, the bar employees -- who had just seen this guy's face on the five-o'clock news -- were scrambling to notify the authorities that were already swarming the area.

More creepiness: Sheley, who had dumped his stolen pickup truck in St. Louis after (allegedly) killing two people in Festus, MO, was hanging around Busch Stadium in downtown St. Louis asking people to borrow their cell phones after the Cardinals' ball game the previous night. Supposedly he called his wife/girlfriend and told her there was more killin' to come.

So what is really scary is that this guy was hanging around in my hometown, about 20 blocks from my house where my family was, thinking about who he could kill next that would get him farther down the road.

Even Granite's most famous son, Clint Van Zandt, was beside himself, carrying on the next day on the Today show about the make up of this nut job captured in his home town, where his mother still lives just a couple blocks from the crime scene, he said.

So if Sheley would not have had to step outside to smoke, what would the result of this have been? Would the bar employees have been his next victims? Would he have barricaded himself inside the bar? We'll never know. But Commandant Blagojevich should definitely take a bow.