Our favorite chain-smoking former staffer, Sandeep Kaushik, sent this crazy, overwraught screed from high atop Phinney Ridge:

At midnight tonight all that was joyful in Washington state went up in a cloud of smoke. Tonight, the fragile butane flame of our freedom has been extinguished forever. I should be ranting as I bend over a double bourbon in the darkness of some anonymous dive bar, crying havoc between the last lung-biting, hot-boxed puffs of the last cigarette in the last crumpled softpack pack of Camel Lights. I should have not gone gentle into that good night. I should have laughed bitterly (and coughed loudly) in the face of my own doom.

But somehow, I couldn’t muster the will to leave the house. I feel no desire for the companionship of my fellow damned sinners, no anger, no need to mark this latter day middle passage into perpetual bondage. I feel only emptyness (which, admittedly, may just be an incipient nicotene craving). I feel too defeated, too world-weary, too trampled down by the the holocaust of selfish, do-gooding, health-conscious sanctimony that has been visited upon my people. Tonight, my soul is a cyst. Tonight, I am Primo Levi, consumed by my despair at the enormity of man’s capacity for mistreating his fellow smoker.
To those of you who perpetrated this crime by voting for I-901, I ask only one simple question: why? Goddamn you — for you know not what you do — and God forgive you, but why? why? why?

Thanks, Sandeep. Now you can go back to teaching your newborn how to blow smoke-rings.