To culminate the treatment, the actual doctor took a few moments out from his busy schedule of renewing his subscription to National Geographic and renting additional space for people to wait in and came right into the room with me and actually looked at my tongue. He was in the room with me for 2 minutes and 30 seconds by my watch, at the end of which he told me that my problem was two Latin words, which I later figured out meant swollen tongue. He said I should come back in a week. I considered suggesting that, seeing how I had already been there for almost two hours, maybe I should just spend the week in the examination room, but I was afraid this would anger him and he would send me to the hospital for tests. I didn’t want to go to the hospital, because at the hospital as soon as they find out what your Blue Cross number is they pounce on you with needles the size of turkey basters. Those are the two most popular doctor options: to tell you to come back in a week, or to send you to the hospital for tests. Another option would be to say, “it sure beats the heck out of me why your tongue is swollen,” but that could be a violation of the Hippocratic Oath.

What I finally did was talk to a woman I know who used to be a nurse but had to quit because she kept wanting to punch doctors in the mouth, and she suggested that I gargle with salt water. I did, and the swelling went right away. Although of course this could also have been because of the paper-covered table.

I really envy my dog. When she gets sick or broken, we take her to the veterinarian, and he fixes her right up. No Latin words, no big deal. It’s a very satisfying experience, except of course for my dog, who routinely tries to launch herself out of the examining room through closed windows. I find myself thinking: why can’t I get medical care like this? How much more complicated can people be than dogs? I’m kind of hoping my dog’s tongue will swell up, because I’m dying to see how the veterinarian treats her. If he has her gargle with salt water, I’m going to start taking my problems to him.

As you are aware, each year the U.S. Surgeon General emerges from relative obscurity into the limelight of public attention and if he sees his shadow, we have six more weeks of winter. No, all kidding aside, what he does is issue his annual report, where he tells you that smoking is bad for you. In fact, for a while, previous surgeons general got so lazy that they were turning in the same report, over and over, until finally one year Richard Nixon got ketchup stains on it.

Anyway, the result of all this reporting is that the general public at large has gotten very strict about smoking. Hardly a day goes by when you don’t read a newspaper story like this:

“SAN FRANCIsco-The city commissioners here yesterday approved a tough new anti-smoking ordinance under which if you see a person light a cigarette in a public place, you can spit in this person’s face.”

I agree with this new strictness. And I’m not one of those holier-than-thou types who go around condemning smoking, drinking and senseless murder without ever having even tried them. I used to smoke cigarettes, plenty of them, sometimes two and three at a time when I had Creative Block and was hoping to accidentally set my office on fire so I could write a column about it.

And then one morning, four years ago, something happened that I will never forget. I woke up, and I looked at myself in the mirror, because I happened to wake up in the bathroom, and I said to myself: “Dave, you have a wonderful wife, you have a newborn son, you have a good job, you have friends who care about you, you have a lawnmower that starts on the second or third pull—you have everything a man could possibly want, and a whole lifetime ahead of you to enjoy it in. Why not smoke a cigarette right now?” And so I did. I didn’t quit until two years later, at Hannah Gardner’s annual extravaganza eggnog party, when I was overcome by a giant weepy guilt attack while under the influence of Hannah’s annual eggnog, the recipe for which we should all hope to God never falls into the hands of the Russians.

Not that it was easy to quit. Not at all. A few months back, I read a newspaper article that said the government, after much research, had decided that nicotine is an addictive drug, even worse than heroin, and I just had to laugh the bitter kind of laugh that Clark Gable laughs in Gone With the Wind when he realizes that the South has been reduced to a lump of carbon. I mean, surely the government has better things to spend its money on. Surely the government could have used these research funds to buy a military toilet seat, and just asked us former smokers about nicotine vs. heroin addiction. We could have simply pointed out that, when a commercial airliner takes off, the instant the wheels leave the ground, the pilot, who you would think would be busy steering or something, tells the smokers that they may light up. He does not tell the heroin addicts that they may stick their needles into themselves, does he? No, he doesn’t, because heroin addicts have enough self-control to survive a couple of heroin-free hours. But the pilot knows that if he doesn’t let the cigarette smokers get some nicotine into themselves immediately, they will sneak off to smoke in the bathroom, possibly setting it on fire, or, if already occupied by other smokers, they will try to get out on the wing.

So we are talking about a powerful addiction here, and I frankly feel the government’s efforts to combat it are pathetic. The big tactic so far has been warnings on cigarette packages. The government seems to feel that smokers—these are people who, if they run out of cigarettes late at night in a hotel and have no change for the machine, will smoke used cigarettes from the sand-filled ashtrays next to the elevators, cigarettes whose previous owners could easily have diseases such as we associate with public toilet seats—the government believes that these same smokers will read their cigarette packages, as if they needed instructions on how to operate a cigarette, and then they’ll remark, with great surprise: “Look here! It says that cigarette smoking is Hazardous to Your Health!! How very fortunate that I read this package and obtained this consumer information! I shall throw these away right now!”

No, we need something stronger than warnings. We need cigarette loads. For those of you who were never obnoxious 12-year-old boys, I should explain that a “load” is an old reliable practical joke device, a small, chemically treated sliver of wood that you secretly insert into a cigarette, and when the cigarette burns down far enough, the load explodes, and everybody laughs like a fiend except, of course, the smoker, who is busy wondering if his or her heart is going to start beating again. I think Congress ought to require the cigarette manufacturers to put loads in, say, one out of every 250 cigarettes. This would be a real deterrent to smokers thinking about lighting up, especially after intimate moments:

MAN: Was it good for you? (inhales) WOMAN: It was wonderful. (inhales) Was it good for you? MAN: Yes. (inhales) I have an idea: Why don’t we BLAM!!

What do you think? I think it would be very effective, and if it doesn’t work, we could have the Air Force spray something toxic on North and South Carolina.