FORGIVE ME, but this will be a column about smoking. Anybody bored with this subject, please spare yourself the agony of reading this. It is a confession about junkiehood. I’m trying to write, you see, without a cigarette. Talk about de- ja vu! Pull hard, she comes easy, somebody once told me, whatever that means. Try yoga breathing. Imagine yourself as a comic book superhero who can drag down cosmic lightning to drive away evil forces. Real fun. l actually quit smoking ciga- rettes over 10 years ago. I went nearly a decade without a butt in my face. During all those years, I don’t think I wrote about the sub- ject of nicotine more than a couple of times. At least I hope to God I didn’t. Those two were bad enough. I looked down my nose at smokers. I rumbled about will power. I sug- gested that even though some of my best friends were smokers, smokers should be all driven un- derground, But the main reason ! didn’t write much about smoking was because, deep down, I !..:ew I was probably a doomed, In:: soul. Unredeemable, Nevertheless, I did stop smoking for a long time. Cigarettes, that is. In New Zealand, maybe five years ago, somebody who was pay- ing my expenses turned me on to costly Dutch cigars. In Cuba,] just had to try a genu- ine Havana, again on an expense account. Just one. Oh boy! What ecstasy. What a sense of being on top of the uni- verse. There’s manhood stuff in- volved. So what if it’s just because of the advertising! Whatever works, is. I rationalized it as being fairly risk-free, because these cigars were so exotic and normaily hard to find, and because you couldn’t just chain-smoke them. I figured there was no way I would get readdicted to cigarettes by having the occasional Pantela or Havana... About two years ago, at a party, while drinking and being excited, I took the teeny-weeny step from cigars to cigazillos. And then, a year ago, I decided it would be okay, ‘‘since I had it under contro!,”’ to have just one ordinary old cigarette. A Camel Light, as fate would have it. I don’t think they had invented these when I quit smoking. It was unbelievably, staggeringly good. It was great. It was pro- Come See Us at the Capilano Salmon Hatchery OPEN 7 DAYS A WEEK 9 A.M. -7 PM. GIFT SHOP 4502 CAPILANO PARK RD. 980-FISH PROFITS FROM YOUR PURCHASES OF GIFTS & SOUVENIRS WILL GO TO. THE ENHANCEMENT AND PRESERVATION OF SALMON & THEIR HABITAT. foundly satisfying. | NEEDED that! Since then, the deterioration of my will power has been an awesome thing to behold. By the end of last month, I was up to a pack a day and could see two _SOB HUNTER ° strictly perso nal e scious, of course. If such a dark impulse was to reveat itself at all, it would have to be at the level of in- explicable public behavior — displays of irrationality, Of course people take risks every day. It is our right. Driving or ski- Nicotine is not just filthy, it’s low- level. When I’m not smoking, I do resent the presence of cigarette smoke. When I’m me at all.’’ smoking, it dcesn’t bether packs a day on the horizon, never mind that the prices had gone up astronomically since I last tried getting cigarette packages out of a machine. The price isn’t a factor in drug addiction, ttiough. It’s the buzz. The wiring. The little extra zap you think you are bringing to the situation. A death wish wouldn’t be con- ing, operating the toaster, going out to sea. But you have as good a chance to survive this trip as you do the one before or the one com- ing up. In Nicotine Roulette, the odds accumulate against you. What does one do about an ad- diction like this? 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A kind of smoking frenzy Sets in, and we all smoke faster, and crush more butts in the ashtray, and suck smoke in through our noses as well as our mouths, T suppose if we could find a way to inhale through our ears, we’d do it. 1i’d look kind of funny at first, people tilting their heads sideways over their smokes, like they were barbecuing their brains instead of their lungs. They say that smell is one of the keys to recall, to memory stimula- tion, so what quicker way could there be to rekindle your hunger for a smoke than the smell of a cigarette? With some brands, this would be more so the case, obviously, than others, depending on whatever it was you used to smoke. My resolve to try to save my life by quitting smoking is weakened automatically by the sight of somebody else enjoying their smoke, apparently net worried about a hideous death by asphyx- jation or lingering cancer. Well, it scares me, I'll tell you. On the bright side, I got through this column. 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