If you smoke these days, you are relegated to front porches when visiting friends and stepping outside restaurants a certain distance. Pariahs. Now I personally think this is a good idea – if smoking is made more difficult, then some people will say ‘to hell with it, I’m sick of standing in the rain or a sleet storm."

I smoked since I was thirteen. My mother got sick of me sneaking behind the garage for a smoke and having the neighbours see me, so let me smoke in the house. I smoked a pack a day by the time I was 15. God it was good. The smoke wafting down one’s lungs, the wonderful relaxation it provided after stressful or tiring activity. Sit down. Have a smoke and a coffee, or a beer. The joy of it. Any alcohol was decidedly the kicker and I would smoke like a fiend. I went to work back in the days when you could smoke constantly at your desk, in fact you could smoke in college, smoke at the office, smoke on the airplane – literally anywhere. I smoked like a fiend.

Then all this (what I called ‘PC shit' at the time) came in. No more smoking in restaurants (who wanted to eat and not have a cigarette after?). Then no more smoking in bars (people huddled outside and I was one of them, in sub zero weather, enclosed in a haze of smoke) after every drink. (It was amazing what you missed when you went out of the bars on smoke breaks). It was the non-smoking in bars that amazed me the most. I never thought they'd get away with it. But they did. Some places attempted to provide ‘smoking rooms’ separate from the rest of a restaurant or bar. You couldn’t see through the windows of these little alcoves as the smoke was so thick. You couldn’t even find a friend in there, but blindly had to grope around until someone felt familiar. But that didn’t last long. The smoke police nailed them too.

Smoking is an addiction, and has been described as being as addictive as cocaine. I agree with that. I have tried to stop many times in my life. Once for two years I quit... until a bar owner I was having a disagreement with over the fee for one of my bands threatened to throw me down the stairs. “I throw your ass downstairs now!” (No that's not a typo, english was not his first language). Not an easy man to deal with and although I carried a sawed off pool cue in those days, I really never used it other than to bang on the bar if something or someone pissed me off (usually bar owners – this time it didn’t work). I was a tad shaken up and someone offered me a cigarette. I took it. That was the end of the non-smoker me.

I tried one of those beeping gizmos that slowly weans you off cigarettes, by telling you when you can smoke. Both a friend and I tried it and she has been off cigs for years now. Not me. Couldn’t do without the nicotine and as soon as the ‘program’ was over and I was supposedly off the cigarettes. I went right back on. So much for a $90 gizmo.

So I tried the patch, I tried the inhalers, I tried nicorettes. None took. I was…a smoker. I still stood in snow and rainstorms to get my hit.

Then recently I married, and no one but an alcoholic in-law smoked. This meant that I had to go out into ‘the weather’ with her to have my puff. After many incidents of long droning misery (not a happy drunk), I decided I had to quit. This was a family that got together a lot, and hearing about dying relatives she hadn’t seen in 20 years, how rotten her husband was (whom I adored) was more than I could bear. Enough. That was it, all it took was an unpleasant relative. Back to the nicorettes. And they worked. Of course I became totally addicted to the nicorettes, but my doc said, after years of tar etc. in my lungs, better to chew away.

Ah, but then there was Cuba. The land of the great cigars. I tried a couple of those honking ones, but as an ex-cigarette smoker, didn’t realize you just kind of rolled it around in your mouth, and didn’t inhale deeply. I nearly coughed up a lung a couple of times, then went for the mini cigars. Monte Cristos, Romeo et Juliettas – cheap as dirt and looked like an unfiltered cigarette. Heaven. Now to be honest, if you stuffed a cigarette up my nose, I wouldn’t have had any desire to smoke it (not just because it had been stuffed up my nose). But these cigars were heaven, and in the idyllic setting of Veradero beach, with all the free booze you could handle before you horked, they were perfecto.

So I returned home, not thinking much of it, but passed a cigar store on one of my errands. I went in and the smell of cigar tobacco was overwhelmingly erotic. Ah, I thought, what’s the big deal? A little reminder of Cuba. I bought a pack, and honestly only smoked about 4 a day. Just a little relaxer. Well, now the cigar store sends me ten packs to my door (special delivery).

In my own defense, I will say these are smaller than cigarettes, you have to light them several times to keep them going, and without a filter you’d need a roach clip to get through more than ¾ of them. So it’s STILL smoking, but better than cigs. I try to keep it down. No pack a day anymore. A pack will last me three or four days. And if I go out to someone’s house, I don’t seem to feel the need to smoke them. So I could probably quit quite easily, (probably with a few Nicorettes thrown in). But I don’t want to. I know you all out there are appalled, especially since my grandfather and uncle died of emphysema. Stupid, stupid, stupid. But at this point I refuse to give up my minis. I will eventually – they’re expensive, and I know they are bad for me. I don’t expect much trouble, as I have said in getting rid of them. But I am so perfect, and have so few vices, can’t I have this one? I know. Have at me.

Damn you Fidel.