{"id":23123,"date":"2009-11-21T14:20:44","date_gmt":"2009-11-21T22:20:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/?p=23123"},"modified":"2019-12-24T13:54:57","modified_gmt":"2019-12-24T21:54:57","slug":"no-more-mercury-for-me","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/2009\/11\/21\/no-more-mercury-for-me\/","title":{"rendered":"No More Mercury for Me"},"content":{"rendered":"

WARNING:<\/strong> I\u2019m opening up a big ol\u2019 can o\u2019 worms here. It\u2019s entirely possible that some of you who see this may be annoyed, upset, or personally offended by what I have to say. This rant isn\u2019t specifically aimed at any of you personally \u2014 but I can\u2019t claim that it\u2019s not aimed at many of you in the aggregate. For that, you have my apologies in advance.<\/p>\n

The last two times I\u2019ve gone out clubbing, I\u2019ve split my time between Vogue Night and The Mercury, as I like both clubs and have friends at both places that I like to see when I make it out of the house. I\u2019ve bounced around on the dance floors, had fun seeing and flirting with friends, and generally had a good ol\u2019 time.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve then spent the next week or so feeling like crap, coughing up crap, and generally regretting immersing myself in secondhand smoke for two hours.<\/p>\n

At this point, I have to face the fact that I just can\u2019t do it anymore.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a number of people I know who are definitely Merc people that I\u2019m probably not going to see very often anymore (though, admittedly, I\u2019m not the social butterfly that I once was, so technically there\u2019s a lot<\/em> of people I don\u2019t see very often anymore\u2026but there\u2019s this subset that I\u2019ll be seeing even less). That\u2019s a bummer, \u2018cause I like a lot of you, and as my current school and personal life schedules don\u2019t leave me much time for socialization, my (roughly) monthly club nights are my best chance to see people.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s more frustrating, though, is that the Merc knows that there are people out there like me, who\u2019d like to come to the Merc more often (or at all), but can\u2019t handle the smoke. They\u2019ve tried to support us in the past, with special non-smoking event nights, and for a while they even tried monthly smoke-free Saturdays. The result? No support (or, at least, not enough support to make it fiscally feasible). Apparently, the smokers are so wedded to the concept of being able to smoke indoors that, when faced with a non-smoking night, they won\u2019t<\/em> go rather than take smoke breaks outside, as they do in virtually every other public situation they go to. So, the Merc does what it has to do, and sticks with the formula that brings in the most business, so that they can stay afloat.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s disappointing to me that enough of the Merc\u2019s supporters have made it clear that they will only support the Merc as long as they can smoke that the Merc cannot realistically hold smoke-free nights on a regular basis. I have to admit to a certain amount of curiosity about what that segment of the Merc\u2019s regulars do<\/em> on those non-smoking nights. Do they simply sit at home, puffing merrily away? Or are they so hypocritical as to go somewhere else entirely, at which point they have to do the same thing as they would be doing had they gone to the Merc that night: going outside for their smoke breaks? At that point, they\u2019re merely withholding their business from the Merc out of petty spite, and that\u2019s just sad, especially if they love and want to support the Merc as much as they might claim on any other night.<\/p>\n

(I have a vague belief that the Thursday(?) night Lucifer\u2019s Lounge is smoke-free until midnight, and from what I understand, it gets decent attendance. However, I\u2019m not in the small subset of people that have the ability to go out clubbing on a weeknight. So, while I thoroughly support this, it\u2019s not something that I can take advantage of.)<\/p>\n

Understand, I\u2019m not angry at or disappointed in the Merc in any way. They\u2019ve managed to find a very useful loophole and set of circumstances that allows them to cater to a segment of the population that no other club can do, and that\u2019s something I support. I enjoy the Merc, its clientele, its music, its employees, and even its figurative atmosphere \u2014 it\u2019s only the literal atmosphere that causes issues for me.<\/p>\n

As a former smoker, I never wanted to be one of \u201cthose\u201d self-righteous ex-smokers. However, sometimes, even the most high-minded of us can give into temptation\u2026and after having this rant bounce around in my head for the past week, it was time for me to give in.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As a former smoker, I never wanted to be one of \u201cthose\u201d self-righteous ex-smokers. However, sometimes, even the most high-minded of us can give into temptation\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2033,2043],"tags":[3498],"class_list":["post-23123","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-beyond-the-blog","category-personal","tag-from-facebook"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23123","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23123"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23123\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23123"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23123"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelhans.com\/eclecticism\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}