Not more than 5 days ago my dear brother decided to give up the vile carcinogens that we affectionately know as cigarettes. In doing so he turned into a vile carcinogen himself.
As a smoker he was a mildly amusing, go lucky young man, full of life and aplomb, talkative and amicable to all and sundry – even to those he didn’t much care for.
After his hasty and obscurely caused decision to quit and the resulting cessation of the habit he has turned into a malevolent, and dare I say it, violent apparition. A presence that precedes itself by the putrid stench of hormones and vitriol, in one of its more lucid moments it remarked that “this is what PMS must feel like”. After severely admonishing the thing on its insensitive insult to the more formidable sex, I promptly agreed with it, claiming that my borderline paranoid schizophrenic girlfriend, on her worst day, was easier to deal with than the highly volatile “composite personality” he had become.
My suspicions were only confirmed when on a weekend outing, an innocent and oblivious Saturday night reveller accidentally bumped into the organism I had previously thought of as my brother. He held his peace as long as it took the offender to reach the bar and exceed the outer limit of our conversational bubble, and then leaned over to me and whispered (the horror! That whisper will haunt me, forever educating me on the innate evil in all humanity) – “that bastard was lucky I didn’t cut of his feet at the ankles and make him dance on the bloodied stumps with the aid of an automatic weapon, Oklahoma Style”
I have been pondering the notion of giving up cigarettes myself. I will take my brothers horrific experience and travels into the twilight realms of his humanity as fair warning to think twice about taking up that other filthy habit – quitting.