I love walking around Green Lake. I don’t mind the crowds on nicer days. I don’t mind dodging wobbly kids on bikes or cocky, speeding rollerbladers. I’m not bothered when I have to speedwalk on the muddy shoulder to pass parents without a hint of spatial awareness who are pushing strollers two, sometimes three, abreast. It all comes with the territory of enjoying a space that others enjoy as much as I do. 

What I can’t understand, though, is the people who stroll around the lake while smoking or vaping. I want to smell the fresh air, too! Not your cigarette or cotton candy-flavored bullshit.

I don’t care if you smoke. I don’t even care if you smoke in public. But please, at least take a seat on a bench or stand off to the side while you suck on your various cancer contraptions so I can quickly move through your cloud of stink. Otherwise, you’re leaving all of us coming up behind you stuck in your stench.


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6 replies on “Stinky Trails”

  1. also

    Thank You!

    smokers who can

    Tell Which Fucking

    Way the Winda’s blowing

    and Refuse to STINK OUT

    patrons entering or exiting

    some Business, likely depriving

    some poor starving Capitalist of a

    meal because his Patrons’re pissed at

    the stench-Makers

    Sometimes, it

    Ain’t all re:

    YOU.

  2. As nasty as cigarette smoke is, are those vape clouds somehow actually worse? At least with the former it’s possible to interpret it as a quasi-“natural” aroma, inasmuch as the odor is primarily just harvested tobacco in some form. Those sickeningly sweet and nausea inducing vape clouds are just a different animal.

  3. @2 Agree with @3. The vape clouds are mostly water and don’t cling to you or travel hundreds of feet like smoke does. I hold my breath when walking past a smoker, for as long as I can, and almost always, when I finally breathe in 100 ft farther away, I still get a whiff of smoke.

    Also I live on Green Lake and run around it nearly every day. I thought this post would be complaining about the sewage/rot smell that emanates from the lake itself.. That’s worse than the occasional smoker.

  4. I thought this article was going to be about the dregs with BO you can smell from a block away. That shit’s far less desirable than any smoke or vape.

  5. And what about those people who are in an eternal cloud of meth/fentanyl smoke like Joe Btfsplk while they sit on the bus? Anything?

    [sound of crickets]

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