Well, I didn't think I would keep a running tally like this, but what the heck? Tarnation, jethro! Am well into the third cig-less week, will start the fourth. I never thought this would be possible. My friends, I started smoking at the tender age of 15. My father, seeing that I would never stop stealing his cigarettes decided to just buy me a carton of L & M's when he bought his weekly cartons of Raleigh straights and Bel Airs at the Cliff Brice gas station where they were cheap. Cigs in them days, chilluns, was about 35 cents a pack. Hell, gasoline was 24 cents a gallon. That's GALLON, 4 plus litres. This is what happens, the world changes and you get older and you go on and on telling the young folks about stuff that bores 'em silly. Memories of a vanished world.

Way back when, my darlings, in High School in 1970 and on, we were allowed to smoke in the courtyard in the middle of our school. Somehow, then, as now, the more interesting people were smokers so I took up the habit with a vengeance.

And I have been lucky, my wee bairns, I have been to a doctor for a chest x-ray and all, and I don't have cancer, and I don't have emphysema or smoker's leg or bladder cancer AND NOW IT LOOKS LIKE I WON'T HAVE TO GET THEM EITHER!

And the main thing is, the thing I despise about addiction, is not the poor suckers who have been exposed to toxic habit-forming chemicals and have been encouraged by the siren songs of omnipresent advertising to continue to consume those chemicals. Those on nicotine, heroin, cocaine, are so many hosts to the parasitical hell spawn men who seek to prolong their own lives at the expense of their fellows. And what does the man who continues to pursue material wealth long after his own needs are met for the next two million years want from his wealth but more time on earth? More life, suckers, and we'll suck your souls from you like crawdad brains to get it.

Yes, testify, I'm talking about all the pushers in town, from tobacco to smack, to burgers, to missiles, western economics seems to have taken for its model not free or fair trade, no no, drug dealing seems to be the way forward for the capitalist dream machine, gang.

Well, I'm just happy that now, I don't have to have a tracheotomy hole in my neck, I don't have to walk around with an oxygen tank, I have been spared the gallows, my friends. That's something to be a wee bit pleased with, no?