You can call your momma long distance/tell her they sent your body home

Ever since the state started enforcing its draconian tax collection for online cigarette purchases last month, I have become wary of purchasing from out-of-state purveyors. I know of two people who've already received tax bills. I'm waiting for mine.

Because of this prohibition, I've chosen the only path more humbling than actually quitting smoking: Rolling my own.

Take it from someone who hadn't done this since her skint freshman year in college: It's just like riding a bike. You never forget. (I observed this the other night on the occasion of my first foray into handrolling in 11 years, and N replied: This was back when you didn't shave your legs, wasn't it?)

I bought Drum, because although there are a couple other brands, I vaguely remembered a dislike for American Spirits brand--too dry--and couldn't recall the name of the other blue-and-red packaged brand. And although I really like the design of the Bugler package, I remember my friend Julie in high school showing me the remnants of her Bugler tin: there, nestled in the scraps of leftover tobacco, were a number of beetles. "Cool, huh?" she said. I concurred, but then again, I also thought clove cigarettes were cool, and everyone knows that those are made from rolled-up dog turds and rat hair and put holes in your lungs.

Julie was the one who gave me my first cigarette. We had just taken the math Regents exam and she and I drove back to her aunt's house blaring Ministry from the enormous boom box she kept in the back seat of her 1976 Dodge Aspen (which was also, I might add, the first car I ever drove). We'd had a bit of a close call with a cherry picker barreling down one of the myriad backroads of our town and were in the throes of a heady adrenaline-and-Ministry-induced high. Back at her house, feeling my first trickle of teenage nihilism, I bummed one of her cigarettes and sat on a log in her backyard. After I inhaled, the headrush kicked in, and the moment seemed crystalline and perfect, and in retrospect, not unlike my first line of coke, a few years later.

Sweet, sweet addiction.