Quote Originally Posted by Emperor Zurg View Post
Many years ago I wrote a little piece about how I gave up smoking and why I took it up again. It started like this:

"I gave up smoking the summer between first and second grades. One of the neighbor kids pilfered a pack of cigarettes and a book of matches from her parents' stash and several of us gave them a try. It took a few attempts to overcome the challenge of lighting a paper match. None of us had ever actually done it, but we had all seen our parents and other adults applying the head of the match to the scratchy part of the cover. So, eventually we got the hang of it, and went to work applying our newly-created flames to the ends of a few cigarettes. Naturally it took a few matches to actually get the little white cylinders burning.

I drew a tentative breath through my specimen. It tasted awful. Thinking maybe quality and quantity were directly proportionate, I inhaled for all I was worth. If I had known the names of my internal organs, I would have tried to identify each of them as I coughed them past my lips. I decided on the spot that the only thing worse than secondhand cigarette smoke was firsthand cigarette smoke."