Smoking CAN be Hazardous to Your Health

So I have the day off, and I'm starting it the way most normal Americans do, brewing up a triple espresso of Celebes Kalossi and sitting on the covered back porch, sighing at my snow-buried garden while smoking a briar packed with Rich's Cigar's Midnight Express...while listening to Jimi Hendrix play "Machine Gun" (a live cut off the Band of Gypsies album). Foot gently tapping. Watching huge, fluffy snowflakes fall in psychedleic swirls. Another morning at the fun factory, just like at your house.

When I get this...impulse. A nagging instinct. "Look up," it says. Look up? Hendrix is wailing out, doing call and response machine gun blasts between his guitar and the drummer. But the feeling's growing and impossible to ignore. So I look up.

And directly--directly--over my skull hangs an inch-thick, three-foot icicle with a wicked sharp point, that has dripped down through a small bend in the patio rool metal.

So, uh...casually, I put the pipe down, turn off the music, rise, and grab the nearest metal implement at hand--in this case a sprinkler head--and give the icicle a gentle tap. Instantly, it drops, shattering. Right where I was sitting.

This gives one pause, surely: mostly, given that we're into our sixth or seventh day of snow and ice, how long had it been hanging there? But I sweep away the shards, sit down again, relight the pipe, and find a weird smile smile crawling up my face.

No one interrupts the Jimi.

S