The Mysterious Smokeless Cigarette

DOB: What is this?

TCG: It’s a cinnamon smokeless tobacco cigarette substitute. Don’t light it.

DOB: (Sucking and puffing) It doesn’t taste like cinnamon. Wait, it looks like it went out.

TCG: It’s smokeless – you don’t light it.

DOB: (Continuing to suck in and puff out on the smokeless cinnamon-flavored cigarette.)

UCC: Don’t inhale. It’s bad for you. Perhaps if you dipped the end in your plum wine, the cigarette would have a taste.

DOB: (Sticking the end of the smokeless cigarette in her glass of plum wine, and nodding slowly to indicate either deep understanding or complete cluelessness.) Oh. Ok.

TCG: How is the plum wine?

DOB: Good... (Noticing, with genuine surprise, the cigarette in her left hand) What is this?

UCC: It’s a cinnamon smokeless tobacco cigarette substitute.

WISIMH: This, my dear, is one of the circles of hell that Dante left out. The one where I’m stuck in an endless conversational loop where one party repeats a virtually content-less phrase in lieu of actual cogent conversation. The circle where hope is not only abandoned, it’s left beaten and bloody on the side of the road, registering such minimal brain activity that, if measurable at all, would be at the end of the scale where legally dead could be conclusively established by a four-year-old with a toy stethoscope.