It’s that time of week when we answer the questions you’re to drunk or shy to ask…This question comes from Tim: I’m a smoker, not proud of it, but not ashamed. I understand the smoking ban in restaurants, but why bars? A bar is 21 and over. Shouldn’t bars be allowed to decide for themselves?I couldn’t agree more. They always use we employees as an excuse for the ban. Let me clarify that I wasn’t drafted into bartending, I chose to bartend. I understood when I became a bartender that I would have to deal with certain things: puke, assholes, and cigarette smoke. I freakishly never picked up the habit of smoking, but I figure over the course of my career and the amount of secondhand smoke I did inhale, I was a pseudo smoker for the equivalent of five years, half a pack a day. I can regret this choice if I want, and sometimes the paranoid in me does, but it was my choice and a hazard of the job. As a customer, if you don’t like smoke, go somewhere else. Just as I know if I go to a bar in Pioneer Square before a Mariners game, I will be confronted with belligerent idiots, but alas, douchebags aren’t illegal. I go somewhere else. Banning smoking in restaurants makes sense because you have a space that caters to adults and children, and just corralling smoking at the bar was the biggest joke in the world. Plus, when you don’t smoke, it really messes with your ability to enjoy your food and wine. I think that if the city left bars a choice, then each choice could become a selling point. (Though, most bars would choose to allow smoking.) A BAR IS FOR GROWN UPS, making grown up, bad choices: getting drunk, avoiding loved ones, drowning sorrows, picking up. I find the legislating of one bad behavior in a bar as ridiculous a thing as ruling that you can’t drink in front of naked women. In general I am not down with anything that could be construed as nannying by the powers that be, but our city and state are determined to be Mary freakin’ Poppins when it comes to alcohol, despite any liberal leanings in other areas. I don’t believe in legislating bad habits because where does it end? One day, they’ll come for you…and your cupcake. They will have to pry my Flaming Hot Cheetos from my cold, dead hands.If you have a question for the bartender, email me at msavarino@seattleweekly.com.